POH exhibit features everyday heroes who confronted the crisis in San Francisco
For over twenty years, from Ruth Brinker's first meals to seven friends dying of AIDS to today's production of over 2,000 meals a day,
Project Open Hand has been serving meals with love to people in San Francisco and Alameda County, who are ill and need nutritional support.
To honor this remarkable history, Project Open Hand has put together a display of photographic portraits titled Open Hand at 20 Years:
A Community Responds to Crisis.
The exhibit features 20 people who participated in Project Open Hand's 20-year anniversary oral history project, and underscores the everyday heroism of local residents, who faced the grim realities of AIDS when the disease devastated San Francisco. In the spotlight in Open Hand at 20 Years are early clients, staff, volunteers and community supporters of Project Open Hand, as well as a portrait of Ruth Brinker herself.
The large-format photographic portraits were created by Claudia Goetzelmann, an award-winning San Francisco photographer, and each photograph
is accompanied by a quote that captures that person's relationship to Project Open Hand. The portraits also powerfully evoke San Francisco s
early grassroots efforts to care for people with AIDS, which led to lasting changes in the way community services are provided.
Open Hand at 20 Years: A Community Responds to Crisis has been on display in San Francisco at the Hormel Center of the San Francisco Public Library, at Kaiser Permanente's Geary Street medical facility, and in the atrium at One Market Pavilion. It will make additional public appearances, which will be announced in future issues of Meal Times and other POH communications.
For more on Project Open Hand's history of service, click here
to see our 20-year timeline.
To see a larger version of any of the above portraits, please click on the picture.
