The Black Gold: Stories Untold exhibit at Fort Point National Historic Site in San Francisco is haunted. Really. But that’s not an excuse to avoid the place—it’s all the more reason to go and get up close to history. “Black Californians have been central, not marginal, to our collective narrative,” says Cheryl Haines, the curator behind the exhibit, which features 17 contemporary artists and groups and runs through November 2. Presented by arts nonprofit FOR-SITE, the show focuses on the experiences of Black Americans who lived in the state from 1849 to 1877. “There’s a whole new generation that really doesn’t understand how important their legacy is here.”
Walking through the exhibition is electrifying—like each piece on display is a breath in the stone lungs of this 164-year-old fort. Inside, the casemate is dark, the only light peeking through a half-filled embrasure. Beyond, there is merely the bay and the sound of water breaking on the fort—another kind of breathing. Each piece feels like a portal to a past that is pushing its way through the brick.
The exhibit’s home is not an accident. “It’s a location that [makes it] very easy to imagine oneself in a different moment in time,” Haines says. This act of imagination is compulsive; you have no choice but to lose your place in the stream of California’s history.
“It’s very punishing there, so it makes you really kind of bundle up and go inside a bit and think about the lives of these people and all the challenges,” Haines adds. “The weather is a symbolic part of thinking about the challenges that they had in their lives.”
It seems like Fort Point, too, bundles up, tucking itself under the Golden Gate Bridge and gathering the fog to itself like a shawl, shivering in the wind. It crouches at the helm of the Presidio, where Buffalo Soldiers of the 24th Infantry and 9th Cavalry Regiment were garrisoned—regiments made up of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Almost 100 years later, another Buffalo Soldier Cavalry would patrol on horseback from Calexico to Otay Lakes in Chula Vista.
A still from Trina Michelle Robinson’s 2025 short film Transposing Landscapes: A Requiem for Charles Young.
Trina Michelle Robinson’s short film, Transposing Landscapes: A Requiem for Charles Young, is in conversation with this history of the Buffalo Soldiers. Brigadier General Charles Young was not only the first Black man to achieve the rank of colonel in the US Army and the first Black superintendent of a US national park—he was also a musician and composer. One of his original compositions, “There’s a Service-Flag in the Window,” is the soundtrack to the film, and, perhaps, the exhibition as a whole.
The music adds a unifying tie to the show’s tight braid of interwoven histories: the Gold Rush and the Civil War, the patchwork of the Bay Area and the vibrancy of San Diego. The history of Black Californians is inextricable from that braid—it’s impossible to unpick one strand without undoing the whole.
The three tents of Umar Rashid’s By Land. By Sea. By Star. (2025).
Black Gold’s exhibits, too, are enmeshed with the educational elements of Fort Point. A greyscale cutout of a Buffalo Soldier stands next to a plain tent, its lacquered supplies suggesting how the members of the regiment might have lived during the 19th century. Just on the other side of the wall, the three lush tents of Umar Rashid’s installation By Land. By Sea. By Star. represent “figures who navigated the complexities of race, power, and survival.” The third tent is dedicated to a figure that does not yet exist, one of the “unknown future.” It’s a reminder that the story of Californians does not only go backwards—it is a work in progress, the joy not in its ending but in its creation.
To create Soldiers (2025), artist Cosmo Whyte painted a beaded steel curtain.
In the next room, Akea Brionne’s seven-foot-tall tapestry of Mary Ellen Pleasant stands vibrant and shimmering in the empty, whitewashed space. A staunch civil rights activist and abolitionist, Pleasant used her Gold Rush wealth to support her community, including opening laundries and boarding houses (staffed mostly by Black individuals) and helping enslaved people flee to California.
Demetri Broxton’s Eyes That Have Seen the Ocean Will Not Tremble at the Sight of the Lagoon (2025).
These pieces do not merely hang on a wall, corded off in a museum or removed behind glass. They live around corners and perch near windows and sprawl in the hallways of the barracks. Each installation shares space with the viewer, inviting curiosity about a history and community in California that is often overlooked. “This exhibition is a powerful way to ensure more people see their history, contributions, and perseverance reflected in these iconic spaces,” says Chris Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
Black Gold is about California. Or, a better way of putting it—without Black gold, there is no California.
Daniel Green’s 2025 Loving Lady (Pauline Burns) honors the first Black artist to exhibit paintings in California.
Back in the casemate with the film, near the crack in the stone that was probably (maybe) once a window, the wind appears to have knocked down some sheet music from a stand. Is this part of the exhibit? Are visitors meant to step over it without touching it, carefully keeping their distance?
Encased in clear plastic, it is sheet music for Young’s “There’s a Service-Flag in the Window.” One line reads, “There’s a service-flag in the window placed there by loving hands.” For the space of a breath, one can imagine that he is the one playing the song reverberating in the walls.
Truly—haunted.
