The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project

Established in 2007 to take over responsibility for an ever expanding slate of cultural programming at the bookshop (est. 1999), the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (BBCLP) helps sustain and nurture the diverse and interconnected artist communities that make up the San Francisco Bay Area’s shared culture, by presenting, documenting, archiving, and disseminating the creative work of significant musicians, writers, and other artists. Understanding working artists to be simultaneously creative visionaries, highly trained professionals, and blue collar laborers rooted in local and global communities and economies, the BBCLP encourages intergenerational and intercultural artistic exchange and mutual support through its programming and organizing efforts. The BBCLP collaborates with and supports the efforts of artists unions and other solidarity organizations to organize as a labor force and achieve a greater degree of economic stability, while also expanding access to the arts for audiences with financial hardships through sliding-scale admissions to its programs. Presented in the uniquely accessible and intimate space of a community bookshop, these programs emphasize contemporary local artists of color, seniors, youth, and under-the-radar performers, and celebrate these artists’ connections to larger networks and longer histories in the Bay Area and beyond.