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In Gardens, Garages and Garbage Cans, award-winning artist Kathy Sloane’s photographs investigate the ways she and residents in her low-income, Oakland immigrant neighborhood humanize the severity of their concrete environment. Using found materials, garbage cans, plastic boxes, tin cans, they plant a bit of nature into the humblest of containers and claim the sidewalk commons, outdoor staircases, and the interiors of the ubiquitous car repair shops of their community to celebrate their presence and sense of beauty.
Sloane began her professional life as a self taught photographer in San Francisco’s Keystone Korner Jazz Club in 1976, drawn to the music of improvisation, beauty and resistance that was a metaphor for her of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's. While continuing to document the music, she committed herself to photographing the life of the San Francisco Bay Area with an emphasis on the multicultural and multiethnic richness of the area. Her self-assigned task and her work for innumerable non-profits and foundations, has been to understand and depict the myriad ways various communities, often voiceless in mainstream media, give meaning and value to all of our lives. Workers, children, immigrants, activists and artists have all collaborated with her to make a photographic mosaic of Bay Area life. Sloane has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 2011 The University of Indiana Press published Sloane’s award winning book, Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club.