Now on view at Fort Point, FOR-SITE’s highly anticipated exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold invites 17 contemporary artists and collectives to reflect on the resilience, struggles, and triumphs of African Americans who lived in California from the Gold Rush to the Reconstruction period following the Civil War (c. 1849–1877). Through newly commissioned and recent artworks, the exhibition highlights important but lesser-known figures and narratives from California’s history, exploring the presence of slavery and the struggle for legal rights within this “free” state, the successes of Black entrepreneurs, and the experiences of African American Army regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers. More broadly, Black Gold illuminates the role that Black communities played in the state’s cultural, social, and political environs of the time.

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