UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

The twentieth century saw both a series of ambitious efforts to reimagine the city of San Francisco and the explosive growth of the Bay Area as a metropolitan region. In Unbuilt San Francisco: The View from Futures Past, the California Historical Society and SPUR present some of the most revealing episodes in these distinct but related streams of civic discourse through projects that were proposed but never realized. Concern with a particular site, problem, or opportunity often spans a period of decades and presents a window into a city's changing attitudes, politics, and values. Every bit as much as the cities we build, the cities we imagine and reject reveal the collective creativity of the urban project and the imperfect civics of place-making.

This bilingual exhibition puts into broader context the life of Juana Briones de Miranda (1802–1889)—business woman, healer, land owner—spanning the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. eras in California's early history. Briones's story is an inspirational one: a frontier woman who navigated the turbulent social, economic, and political waters of nineteenth-century Alta California; who used her skills and knowledge as a curandera to cure the sick; who filed for an ecclesiastical separation from her abusive husband at a time when this was a rarity; who took Native American orphans into her home; who fought successfully over years to protect her land claims in U.S. courts after the Mexican War.

The Trip to Glacier Point - The Excursion Party, 1874 by William Hahn, California Historical Society Collection, Gift of the Cinco Hermanos Fund.