BART accused of censoring artist’s work on gentrification in S.F.

BART rejected a commissioned piece by artist Victor De La Rosa as profane and demeaning, De La Rosa said on Dec. 7, 2015. De La Rosa submitted four pieces, BART rejected one that said "Bitch you're not from here." less BART rejected a commissioned piece by artist Victor De La Rosa as profane and demeaning, De La Rosa said on Dec. 7, 2015. De La Rosa submitted four pieces, BART rejected one that said "Bitch you're not from ... more Photo: Courtesy, Victor De La Rosa Photo: Courtesy, Victor De La Rosa Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close BART accused of censoring artist’s work on gentrification in S.F. 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

The battle over gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District flared as the American Civil Liberties Union backed an artist’s efforts to display his work on the emotional subject outside BART’s 16th Street Mission Station.

The ACLU contends BART engaged in political censorship. BART officials, though, said they didn’t object to the topic of gentrification, but found one of the pieces too profane and mean.

Victor De La Rosa, a San Francisco State University art professor, was one of five artists commissioned by the city to depict life in the Mission. His piece, titled “La Gente De Tu Barrio/The People of Your Neighborhood [The Mission Suite],” features four poster-style textile images with residents sounding off on gentrification.

Stripped along the sides are clashes of words, like “taggers vs. artists,” “art vs. commerce,” “pour-over vs. Nescafe” and “school kids vs. Google buses.”

The panel that offended BART features Mickey “Tiny Loca” Martinez saying in bold letters, “Bitch you’re not from here!” Martinez is surrounded by words and phrases echoing her feelings about the changing Mission: “start up, forced out, moved on, fed up, cleaned up, bussed in, bought off and taken over.”

The transit agency said this week that it approved the other three panels but that this one violated its standards.

De La Rosa, the National Coalition Against Censorship and, now, the ACLU of Northern California, contend censorship is at play.

Free speech?

“It appears that BART officials are engaging in viewpoint discrimination by refusing an exhibition permit because they disapprove of the work’s message, thus raising serious First Amendment concerns,” said a letter the ACLU sent Friday to BART General Manager Grace Crunican.

“Art can express thoughts and ideas that might not always be to the taste of every single member of a community, but that are nonetheless fully protected by the First Amendment,” the letter stated. “Victor De La Rosa’s work addresses the important issues of gentrification and inequality through imagery that enjoys full constitutional protection.”

The panels were supposed to go up in the plaza outside the 16th Street Station in September — until BART officials objected.

BART spokesman Jim Allison said the agency is still in the process of creating a public art policy but applied its advertising policy to the Mission display. It rejected the panel because it considered “bitch” profane and because of the confrontational tone.

BART’s standards

“The standards prohibit language that ‘demeans or disparages an individual or group of individuals,’”Allison said in a statement.

BART talked to De La Rosa and the San Francisco Planning Department, which organized the public art, to see if they could come up with an acceptable compromise. They couldn’t.

“I explained the history of the word ‘bitch,’ how it’s used in my work and what it means in culture today,” De La Rosa said. “Then they said it was about not making any of their riders uncomfortable.”

Allison said BART decided that blurring out the word “would not address the overall demeaning tone of the message in that panel.” De La Rosa said he declined to participate in an editing of the piece.

Instead, he and friends staged a guerrilla exhibition of the work in late October, taping paper copies to the outside of the display cases and guarding them for a couple of hours.

Sparked dialogue

“We had a lot of good conversations,” he said. “And that was the whole point.”

Matt Cagle, the policy attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, said the organization got involved because it doesn’t think BART should be able to choose the points of view its patrons see.

“Thousands of riders pass through BART every day, and we were concerned that BART may have rejected the artwork because of its viewpoint,” he said. “Government actors should not be in the business of choosing certain viewpoints over others.”

BART offered to let De La Rosa display the three panels it deems less offensive. But he said the panel is integral to the work, which represents an arc of some of the opinions Mission residents have about gentrification.

“It’s just one piece,” he said. “Without that one, it changes my message as an artist. It leaves out the more negative side of the conversation.”

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan