The Bigger Picture: Guaranteed Income for the Future of San Diego

March 18th - April 8th

Open to the public for gallery viewing: Tuesday–Saturday  |  2:00–8:00 pm

Come visit our new exhibition at our Oceanside Art and Cultural District hub location designated by the California Art Council.

In 2022, Jewish Family Service of San Diego rolled out San Diego for Every Child, a Guaranteed Income Project which provided direct cash assistance to families in need. To share the moving stories of those impacted by this pilot program, JFS has created “The Bigger Picture: Guaranteed Income for the Future of San Diego” – a traveling photo exhibit featuring vibrant oversized photos that give a poignant glimpse into the everyday lives of the families assisted.

The families pictured here are 4 of the 150 households who received $500 dollars a month for 2 years to spend on whatever they need with no restrictions, no work requirements, no strings attached. These parents and children opened their homes to fine-art photographer Michele Zousmer who has captured moments of connection and intimacy that become more and more possible when the burden of financial stress is eased.

“Social justice starts with economic equity,” says Khea Pollard, director of San Diego for Every Child. “Our guaranteed income project is designed to support families who were not only hit hardest by COVID-19, but who were struggling to make ends meet before. Similar programs throughout the state have proven that direct, unconditional cash programs lead to greater success for participants, alleviating cumbersome processes and in turn, enriching their personal and professional lives.” 

This project was funded in part by a 1.4 Million dollar allocation from the California state senate, 

supported  by senators Ben Hueso (District 40) and Toni Atkins (District 39). In a press release at the project’s launch, Hueso said, “It's time to end the narrative that people experiencing poverty simply need to work harder or make better choices. Income inequality is at its highest rate since right before the Great Depression and is, at least in part, a result of policies and laws in this country that perpetuate poverty and racial inequity.”

Special thanks to Lashawnda, Wendy, Kelvin, Abdul and their families for sharing their stories with us. 

Fine Art photographer Michele Zousmer employs her camera as a powerful instrument to amplify the voices of individuals and communities often marginalized by society. With an unwavering commitment, her photographic journey encapsulates the essence of human existence and emotion, capturing moments that resonate with life's profound experiences – love, loss, vulnerability, and strength.

About San Diego for Every Child 
San Diego for Every Child is a nonprofit initiative housed under the 501(c)3 of
Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of San Diego’s oldest and most impactful nonprofit agencies. The SDEC coalition is dedicated to cutting the experience of childhood poverty by 50% by 2030. Their mission is to create a San Diego County where every child has their basic needs met by ensuring all children in our region have nutritious food to eat, live in stable housing, receive adequate healthcare, and have access to quality childcare and education. 

Editor : Akiko Surai

"THE BIGGER PICTURE" COMMUNITY RECEPTION

Date: Saturday, March 30, 2024

Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Location: The Hillstreet Country Club | 530 S Coast Hwy Oceanside, CA 92054

RSVP Here

Learn more about why guaranteed income works and Jewish Family Service’s Economic Mobility and Opportunity programs by visiting the Jewish Family Service’s Economic Mobility & Opportunity page.

Mark Chamness | OUTSIDE THE MALL March 22, 2024

Image: New 4’x 5” needlepoint details by Mark Chamness during our April 2023 studio visit.

mark Chamness | SEPTEMBEr 2nd

OPEN RECEPTION : September 2nd at 5:00PM to 8:00PM

EXHIBITION DATES : SEPTEMBER 2nd to DECEMBER 9th

Exhibition programming begins in October.

The Hill Street Country Club presents OUTSIDE THE MALL, recent works by Mark Chamness.

Mark Chamness, a Californian artist based in Oceanside, is exhibiting new works in fibers and what the artist calls “discarded urban plastic” at the Hill Street Country Club from September 2nd to December 9th, 2023. Mark’s work draws from legacies of abstraction, his training as a painter and carpenter, and his daily experiences of the last several years with the ongoing Covid pandemic. 

The last three years have been a time of significant personal and cultural change. Many people have been reexamining the domestic space and reconnecting to labor-intensive hand work. Though Mark’s practice stretches back much farther than that, these new works have evolved to include new materials from 2020 onwards. While supply chain issues and shipping made some materials harder to come by, there has been no shortage of single-use plastic. Mark collects bags caught in bushes or left on the beach, cuts them into strips, and tufts the strips into his needlepoint. Each piece becomes a record of its time, incorporating the stories embedded in the environment around him.

“I deal in fragments. I love things that are stuffed in between the cracks, that are unimportant, things that are tossed aside.” - Mark Chamness

Mark lives as a carpenter by day. He started working with wood in high school and transitioned into art making as funding for woodshop started waning. He eventually entered Cal Arts as a painter in 1992. Blending these traditions is at the core of his practice and allows the work to bounce back and forth between art and craft, structural and decorative, sensual and conceptual. 

Join us for the opening reception on Sept 2nd from 5 pm to 8 pm at the Hill Street Country Club 530 South Coast Highway. Oceanside, CA, 92054.

Our gallery is wheelchair accessible with street parking.

Contact: dinah@thehillstreetcountryclub.org

Editor : Akiko Surai

Artist In Practice | July 2023

OPEN RECEPTION : July 8th at 7pm to 9pm

Exhibition Dates : July 8th to July 30th

The Hill Street Country Club welcomes artists Tarrah Aroonsakool and Marcos Rodriguez-Mallard for an experimental collaborative installation.

From July 8th to July 30th the gallery at the Hill Street Country Club will be taken over by two local artists interested in how capitalism and consumer culture impact the natural world and direct interactions with our environment, each other, and ourselves. Bringing forth themes of mental health in relation to the natural world around us, and the broad scope of human experience, and trauma. The final installation will evolve and change with opportunities for the public to visit while in process, please note: this exhibition includes graphic depictions of animals.

Marcos Rodriguez-Mallard (they/them) (on the right) is an undocumented Mexican artist based in San Diego, working in mixed media, photography, and video. Their projected video, Tarrehe in Miquiliztli (Escucha la Muerte, Listen to Death), shows animals that have been killed on local roads. Marcos sees these paved streets as interventions in the landscape driven by religion, necessity and industry. In allowing people to move to and from work and home, streets and cars have disrupted the natural patterns of animals with a certain degree of collateral damage. The artist can be heard speaking a text written by Maurillo Sànchez Flores in Nahuatl and Spanish meditating on death, the visceral reality of it, and the philosophical question of what happens when an animal, person, or culture dies. The piece invites the viewer to consider how they situate themselves in or against the landscape and how willing Western colonialism and capitalism is to sacrifice lives and whole cultures in the name of convenience and profit. Marcos will also exhibit several mixed-media pieces along this same theme.

Tarrah Aroonsakool (she/her) ( on the left) is a San Diego-based artist interested in materials and people deemed “less than” by Western capitalist structures. Her previous works have included depictions of human and animal bodies as consumer objects represented in a range of repurposed materials. Using discarded materials and waste to make art is central to Tarrah’s creative impulse and helps her to look at the world around her differently. She has recently moved deeper into abstract sculptural works and will be experimenting with slowing down and reconnecting to material and craft. 

Visitors are invited to schedule viewings as the installation progresses and attend an opening Satuday July 8th 7pm to 9pm. This paired installation is part of Hill Street Country Club’s Artist in Practice which invites artists to use the gallery as an extension of their own studio and experiment within an exhibition opportunity.

Editor: Akiko Surai

Andrès Hernandez | Crying on The Blue Line Trolley

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Crying on the Blue Line Trolley features Andrés Hernández’s first departure from illustration. It consists of analogue photography that takes from and recontextualizes the visual makeup of San Diego and Tijuana into a series of hybrid landscapes. 

They portray structures of limitation juxtaposed to structures of liberation, furthering the notion of architectural possibility as a response to architectural violence, and inviting us to consider how places existing in separate environments could somehow be unified.  

Seamlessly reframing the border wall and its adjacent fields and estuary alongside the interweaving California highway bridges, Hernández’s first U.S solo exhibition is a daring personal declaration of her commitment to vulnerability and a poetic “fuck you” to the funding and militarization of the Mexcian border.

If Crying on the Blue Line Trolley is a purely audiovisual exercise in the process of encapsulating the melancholic tenderness that lies within the zeitgeist of the border region, My Mother on the Other Side of the Pool, Calling Me Back to Her Wet Arms is her sister, a literary expansion that becomes an explicitly personal autobiography.

This nine-poem collection thrives on its honesty. Hernández narrative is not concerned with the grandiose or the particularly memorable, but rather with the unnoticed and the small. It has no other purpose than to be a diaristic retelling of the poet’s tumultuous relationship with Catholicism, emotional manipulation, sexual assault and a desire to trangress her oppressive surroundings.   

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HUMANITY SHOWERS PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION

HUMANITY SHOWERS PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION

The Hill Street Country Club presents recent works

by Jordan Elijah Verdin

About Humanity Showers

Humanity Showers provides FREE accessible water to the houseless community in San Diego County for hygiene care. They are located in a moving trailer creating a mobile and accessible community resource for any individuals and families use.