Dave Schubert Life Memorial Celebration Art Exhibit
July 29 - August 18, 2023
2831 Mission St.

Reception Saturday, July 29 from 5-8pm
Open hours Friday and Saturday, 12-5pm and by appointment

Here we will assemble a brief synopsis of Dave's prolific output and some personal momentos in honor of EVADE. We want to provide a show and space for Dave’s friends, fans, and newcomers to celebrate the life of one of the best documentarians of our generation. Please join us. The exhibition is free and open to the public. 

Dave produced a phenomenal body of photographs and collaged notebooks chronicling street art, the skateboard scene, tagging, The Mission School and his friends hanging and partying with a joy and panache only a sweet soul like Dave could capture with that beaming smile and twinkle in his eyes that could charm the most hardened street ruffian. 

History we know is told by those that write the books, who take the pictures, who was there. Dave was that type of artist. Always observing, ready at an instance to capture the most magic of moments… But being a great photographer takes more than shooting. It's nurturing and caring for those images, interpreting them, reconfiguring them, making prints, zines, books, shows, and creating art from them. This is a lifelong journey. Sadly his journey was cut short.

We will keep Dave's work and spirit alive by preserving his lifelong quest to document the weird, beautiful subcultures from Washington D.C. to NYC to S.F. Wherever he landed with that camera around his neck and that smile on his face. We hope for future generations to marvel at all of these beautiful brilliant souls Dave knew and so lovingly photographed. Thank you Dave for being you and brightening our lives.

From a recent New York Times article:
"Schubert’s work was locating beauty where it would otherwise go unnoticed. Beginning in the 1990s he documented the skaters in and around Washington, D.C., where he grew up, and later, while living in San Francisco, the grimy hedonism of that city’s Mission District and Tenderloin neighborhoods. He shot graffiti writers and artists, people living on the street and the Beat poets left behind by their waning acid-soaked bohemia, capturing them with the glittering naturalism of a Weegee shot or the grainy humanism of a Robert Frank. His pictures evince a mutual respect between subject and archivist because he was one of them. (For the most part. Others took exception to the presence of his camera, which he memorialized too, in a recurring series of bloodied self-portraits.)

Schubert died at 49 this year. We have an exhibit of collages of freight train burners, black-and-white near-abstractions, peeled-off snapshots of friends and associates hanging out, tagging box trucks, or ingesting drugs. Not everything is artful, but neither is everything in life, and Schubert didn’t elide reality to create something prettier. As in his portrait of a small boy, his right eye swollen shut, cradling a kitten, Schubert’s ability was to present the gruesome and the tender, often within the same frame."
-MAX LAKIN

For information on supporting his archive and legacy, please visit:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/dave-schuberts-photographic-legacy