San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was a district born out of the unruly spirit of the California Gold Rush, and by the dawn of the 20th century it was the center of nightlife riding both sides of legality. Like many such grey areas, it was one of the few spaces where African Americans could assert their place in the city’s cultural sphere on a concrete level. In 1919, jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton made his way to the Barbary Coast and opened his own club called The Jupiter. While the establishment was short-lived, Morton’s time in the city impacted the music culture greatly. Springing up right around the corner from The Jupiter a few years later was the Modern Art Gallery. Co-founded by Miki Hayakawa’s classmate Yun Gee and their teacher Otis Oldfield the Modern Gallery was the first artists’ co-op in San Francisco. Hayakawa painted Portrait of A Negro in the same year Morton’s rendition of “Doctor Jazz” was recorded. One could easily imagine that a record player might have been propped in the corner of her studio playing this very disc.