The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco Presents What the World Needs Now Is…by Artist Brian Singer
SAN FRANCISCO (August 11, 2025) – The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco (USF) presents What the World Needs Now Is… by artist Brian Singer, from August 11 through November 9, 2025. An opening celebration with the artist will take place on Thursday, August 28, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. and is open to the public.
Part cultural anthropologist and part creator, Brian Singer (also known as someguy) is a San Francisco artist whose projects range from installations and participatory projects to intimate works with books. What the World Needs Now Is… brings together Singer’s artworks from the last decade to examine censorship, American history and social movements, as well as his own mixed ethnicity.
Attention to language and materials are central to Singer’s practice. Whether he is revealing word frequency in the Bible, reenacting censorship by cutting books, or wrapping items with the threads of unraveled flags, his works interrogate historical texts and emblems. Similarly, Singer’s installations combine familiar objects with word play and games to further explore the complicated relationship Americans have with land and property, citizenship and the American Dream. Working with Gleeson Library (where Thacher Gallery is located), the artist will remove banned/challenged books from circulation and lock them behind glass for the duration of the exhibition.
This cultural critique continues in two of his most recent projects, both informed by childhood activities. In the first, Singer grapples with ideas of masculinity by presenting Asian characters from 1970-80s popular films as romance novel heroes in a color-by-number format. What the World Needs Now Is…, the installation at the center of the gallery, invites visitors to fill in the blank to this hopeful song lyric. Its form–a life raft slowly becoming a ball pit–asks: is this play or survival?
About the Artist
Brian Singer (someguy) is a San Francisco-based fine artist whose projects have received international attention. The 1000 Journals Project, launched in 2000, was turned into a book, a feature length documentary, and has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He has shown in group and solo exhibitions, as well as public art projects throughout California, including the Torrance Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center. Singer is also an award-winning graphic designer.
About Thacher Gallery
The Thacher Gallery is a public art gallery in the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library where creativity, scholarship, and community converge. The gallery is free and open to the public daily from 12:00-6:00 p.m., whenever the library is open. Located at 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco.
About University of San Francisco
The University of San Francisco is a private, Jesuit Catholic university that reflects the diversity, optimism, and opportunities of the city that surrounds it. USF offers more than 230 undergraduate, graduate, professional, and certificate programs in the arts and sciences, business, law, education, and nursing and health professions. At USF, each course is an intimate learning community in which top professors encourage students to turn learning into positive action, so the students graduate equipped to do well in the world — and inspired to change it for the better. For more information, visit usfca.edu.
