This year’s ArtAuction24 (AA24), Transforming Art into Action, is celebrating 35 years of our amazing Street Sheet. This illustrious paper started in a classically organic, only at the Coalition way. Phil Collins had just released a fan favorite, “Another Day in Paradise,” and invited us to table at Shoreline Amphitheatre. The year was 1989. We created a newsletter to give out and made thousands of copies. Concertgoers were not particularly interested in reading literature during a show so we came home with a lot of those newsletters and couldn’t think what to do with them. One of the folks at the office had the idea to try selling them and Street Sheet was born.
Street Sheet is not just the longest continuously running street paper in the country. It is one of the rare ones that is free of commercial advertising. It is devoted to covering homelessness and poverty issues directly unfiltered from the street as most of our writers, artists, poets who contribute either are and have experienced homelessness. It also creates an income for people in our vendor program, who distribute the paper at no cost to them while keeping all the proceeds. It is a beautiful paper with lots of art and perspectives you just won’t see in the mainstream media. We are committed to truthful reporting, backing up our claims with plenty of evidence.
This has been a very tough year for unhoused people still stuck on the streets—but we still have a lot to celebrate as we come together in loving community. We will feature over 150 pieces of art at a range of prices, and our admission is sliding scale. We will have live T-shirt printing by the T-shirt conspiracy, food, live music by local band Celestial Hotties, along with DJ Prince Saves spinning your favorite throwback hits. This is a year you will not want to miss. Come together and break bread with others who are swimming upstream against the billionaire takeover of San Francisco, standing up for human rights and fighting like hell for the city we dream of where everyone thrives and has a dignified place to call home.
