Hey y’all —

As you probably don’t yet know, we’ll be going dark for the month of August, so that we can tend to various behind-the-scenes needs.

But don’t panic (you were totally panicking, weren’t you), our full archive, including the newly minted Issue 3, will be at your disposal in the interim.

And! We have an assignment for you. This fall, in conjunction with Issue 4, which will examine a few Bay Area microhistories, we’ll debut a new Project Space (our platform for free, downloadable art). Our previous Project Space offerings have been solo efforts, but this time we’re going the collective route, commissioning a design team to make protest signs based on your words.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Send us a word, phrase, or sentence for a poster that can be used by anyone, be it for a march, to tape to a window, stick in a cubicle, or hand out on the streets. You can also choose to send us images, or more text than one sentence, but keep in mind these will be designed for 8.5×11 paper (and apologies in advance if we aren’t able to publish all of your ideas).

We decided on this as one small way for Open Space to both acknowledge and be in constructive conversation with the often violent turmoil roiling all of us these days; there are so many urgent causes and battles to address, and the Bay Area has such a strong and deep history of activism. We’d like for your words to focus on a pressing local problem or concern (though of course it needn’t be specific to the Bay), or honor a group or movement working to solve one of these problems.

Please send your proposal to openspace@sfmoma.org by September 6 — which is, incidentally, the day we resume publishing…

Happy (Almost) August,

Clr