About Skywatchers

ABD’s principal program, Skywatchers, reflects an enduring commitment to creating performance that centers the urgent concerns of formerly unhoused residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working with professional artists in a collaboration rooted in the ethos that large-scale social change begins with intimate, interpersonal relationships.

With art as a catalyst and common language, the multi-disciplinary, mixed-ability ensemble creates work that amplifies neighborhood stories and illuminates narratives too often invisible in our collective cultural production.

Since the inception of the project ABD/Skywatchers has created or collaborated on a repertoire of twenty multidisciplinary works and over forty events that range from formal- and site-specific performance, to intervention, ritual, visual art, and multi-media work as part of a long-term community-embedded social practice. Under Bluethenthal’s artistic direction, the Skywatchers Ensemble has created several projects over the past few years, including: I GOT A TRUTH TO TELL (2017), At the Table: VOICES and VISIONS (2018 and 2019 respectively), Queer As A Tuesday Night and Queer as a Tuesday Night: Ms. Carol (2018), Inside Hotel Iroquois (2019), A Love Extreme (2019), and Came Here to Live: Resilience and Resistance in the Containment Zone (2019).

ABD initiated the Skywatchers program in collaboration with Community Housing Partnership (CHP) and the Luggage Store Gallery.

For more information contact info@abdproductions.org.

Skywatchers is…

Collaborative
Resident-Centered
Change-Making
Community Building
Connective
Humanizing