{"id":129353,"date":"2025-01-26T09:55:39","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T17:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=129353"},"modified":"2026-03-03T15:50:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T23:50:34","slug":"joesam-spelled-his-name-with-a-period","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=129353","title":{"rendered":"JoeSam. Spelled his Name with a Period"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In 1988, Fielding McGehee and I commissioned San Francisco artist JoeSam. to create a series of drawings for The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown<\/em><\/a>. At the time, he was best known for his Black West series, which focused on the contributions of African American cowboys and other significant figures from that era. He had also completed a Black Bible series, which interpreted fifty-three scenes from the Bible, in which all of the figures were Black.<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t give JoeSam. any instructions other than to provide seventeen images, one for each chapter and one facing the title page. The results were amazing\u2014they told the story of Peoples Temple and Jonestown from beginning to end from a distinctly African American perspective. The line drawings are both representational and yet non-representational, depicting the tyranny of ghetto life, the escape into the promise of Peoples Temple, the immigration to Guyana, and the tyranny of Jim Jones in Jonestown. Race is a clear element of all the drawings, with, for example, Jones surrounded by White individuals while Black congregants flee back to the United States.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It wasn\u2019t until his death in 2024 that we learned that race in America was the dominant theme of JoeSam.\u2019s career as an artist, which spanned more than three decades. Or what an important presence in the San Francisco art scene he had been, ultimately leading to the first museum exhibition in the city of his work at the Museum of the African Diaspora<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

JoeSam. had been an educator, with a B.A. degree from Howard University, an M.S. degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. He directed the San Francisco Head Start program in the 1970s. The Black West series led to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985, which launched his full-time art career. The obituary from one art gallery<\/a> described him as \u201ca contemporary mixed media painter and installation artist [whose] colorful compositions contain found materials from the streets of California.\u201d Neither mixed media nor colorful<\/a> begin to capture the amazing juxtapositions of found items assembled in provocative ways to communicate African American history, suffering, and empowerment\u2014from the 2015 shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina to the organizing of Black Lives Matter. His remarkable work led to numerous commissions, awards, and recognition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A few years before he died, JoeSam. contacted us to see if we might be interested in acquiring his 6.5 by 20.5-foot mural depicting Peoples Temple and Jonestown. We were, and persuaded the Special Collections at San Diego State University to accept the donation, since it had the space to publicly display it. The biggest hitches were its size (enormous) and transportation (New Jersey to California). But thanks to the work of Anna Culbertson and Sarah Conner at Special Collections, arrangements were made, the mural was shipped to San Diego in 2021, and professionally restored by the Balboa Art Conservation Center in 2023.<\/p>\n

Special Collections librarians are used to working with Jonestown materials and those seeking information, given the repository of items held there<\/a> and in the library\u2019s Digital Collections, which includes the Jones Family Memorabilia Collection<\/a> and the Peoples Temple Collection<\/a> of photographs. But displaying the four-panel mural created its own complications.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A few librarians felt that the violence being depicted towards African Americans on the mural might upset some researchers. In the spirit of care-based and trauma-informed archival practices, Anna Culbertson and Amanda Lanthorne commissioned a custom-made curtain that enables Special Collections to temporarily conceal the mural at the request of visitors. The mural is slated to be installed in the Spring 2025 semester at SDSU.<\/p>\n

We had hoped to locate the original drawings JoeSam. created to add to Special Collections, but he died before that happened. In retrospect, we know that we lucked out finding JoeSam. and persuading him to create some images for a book all those years ago. It was a bit like asking a stranger to make a few drawings and then finding out you\u2019d been talking to Jacob Lawrence<\/a>. In fact, that\u2019s exactly what it was like.<\/p>\n

JoeSam. August 17, 1938\u2013June 1, 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1988, Fielding McGehee and I commissioned San Francisco artist JoeSam. to create a series of drawings for The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown. At the time, he was best known for his Black West series, which focused on the contributions of African American cowboys and other significant figures from that era. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":132095,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-129353","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129353"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135369,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129353\/revisions\/135369"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/132095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}