Polls are open for our 2026 Best of the Bay! Vote here now, and enjoy our Editors’ Picks of our favorite Bay Area things, which we’ll be posting throughout the month and beyond.
Oligarchs have done so much irreparable damage that seeing their heads placed on pikes in the near future may well seem like a fun concept. In July 2025, Gay Shame did just that at underground experimental arts and media space Artists’ Television Access.
If you’d been walking down Valencia around Independence Day 2025, you may have noticed a window display featuring three (rubber) severed heads on sticks. To dispel any ambiguity as to their likenesses, each floated above a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of each one’s corporation: Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook.
There was also a backdrop featuring a quote from transgender activist Leslie Feinberg: “Surrendering is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.” The work was provocative, funny, radical, and done with materials so cheap that any schoolchild—with a radically leftist sensibility—could have made it.
In other words, it’s exactly what one would expect walking past the ATA headquarters.
As the name suggests, the organization does more than make its storefront windows available for attention-grabbing protest art. Indeed, the non-profit started as a way for SF-based creatives to share their unique works with a wide, cable-access audience, beginning with the collective’s show Artists Access.
ATA once had its own venue in SoMa from which it broadcasted and held screenings of low-res video art, community-made documentaries, and the early works of first-time filmmakers. When a fire took the SoMa venue on Halloween 1986, the collective packed up what equipment was left, and set up shop in the location at Valencia and 21st Streets.
All these decades later, (some of) the technology has advanced, but ATA’s mission of showing off the most experimental, the most personal, and the weirdest film and video work one can find remains intact. The next time you walk past a window display, take a calendar flyer from the door. Things only get wonderfully weirder inside.
For more on the upcoming subversions at Artists’ Television Access, go here.
