Before the Polo Fields, before Hippie Hill and before becoming a staple of the festival circuit, SF\u2019s Golden Gate Park was literally a pile of sand.<\/p>\n
It was late-19th-century designers, not nature, that created the thousand-acre green space with imported flora and fauna. Even the squirrels were shipped in from the East Coast.<\/p>\n
At the park\u2019s de Young Museum, artist-in-residence Jane Kim\u2019s Ink Dwell<\/a> show ‘(non)Native<\/a>‘ explored the tension between old and new that built, shaped and is reshaping San Francisco. This show, like a lot of her art, crosses over easily into mainstream conversations in pubs like National Geographic and Fast Company.<\/span><\/p>\n Take a look at her piece \u2018Turf Wars\u2019. A fox and coyote fight over a Facebook lanyard. Both the fox and the coyote are natives of Northern CA, but there have been calls for the coyotes to be removed from the land out of fear of attack while the foxes have largely gotten a pass. Both animals are in fact necessary to local ecology and potentially dangerous to humans. Foxes benefit from their public perception as cute and non-threatening while coyotes get a rap as bloodthirsty.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n