San Francisco art scene thrives even amid ‘false doomsday narrative’

Earlier this year, dealer Rebecca Camacho was standing in her new and expanded gallery in Jackson Square in downtown San Francisco when she paused to point to the arched windows facing the street. “There were people walking by all the time. It was live! ” she said.

Others in parts of downtown San Francisco, such as the Union Square area near Camacho’s former location, see things differently. After the pandemic, nearly 37% of office buildings in the region remain vacant, a rate higher than the national average. The vacancies resulted in the closure of the retail space. Additionally, San Francisco officials say they are grappling with homelessness and a drug overdose epidemic while the cost of living remains prohibitively high.

Mayor London Breed appears to be paying the price for the complications, which the media has dubbed a “doom loop” after losing his re-election bid in November. In this case, San Francisco has effectively been considered a ghost town, and the city’s arts sector has suffered as a result. Monetta White, executive director and CEO of the local Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), said such depictions give the impression that “the art scene does not exist in San Francisco.” “San Francisco plays a very important role in the world’s arts ecosystem,” she insists.

In fact, locals say these problems, exacerbated by the pandemic, are not unique to their city. “There’s a lot of discussion around the arts scene in our city about a false apocalyptic narrative. I refute that,” San Francisco Arts Commission Director Ralph Remington said in a phone interview this fall. He acknowledged that downtown is in a transition phase during “tough” times, but said, “I would point out that our scene is actually booming.”

Some disagree with his assessment. “The energy and the center that San Francisco was in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, even the ’90s, that’s not what it is anymore,” said longtime San Francisco dealer Karen Jenkins-Johnson. Johnson, who also runs a store in Brooklyn. . “We were the place for the Beat poets, we were the place for the Black Panther Party. The Bay Area was it. But we are not. We have lost that. ” She said some of her artists have moved to Los Angeles to pursue greater career opportunities.

But there are signs that the Bay Area’s positivity is more than wishful thinking. This year, White launched Black Art Week in the Bay Area; a Northern California Triennial is in the planning stages, with some preliminary works set to be shown in San Francisco in 2027. At the same time that art projects are being exhibited in empty retail and office spaces downtown, the Fog Design + Art Fair continues to host a space every year, including a recently added section for young and underrepresented artists.

Jenkins-Johnson said there was “light at the end of the tunnel” thanks to a “changing of the guard” at the city’s museums. She finds the programming at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco (FAMSF) “refreshing,” citing SFMOMA’s recent Amy Sherald survey as an example. Jenkins-Johnson also reversed course on her reported plans to move her San Francisco flagship store to Los Angeles because the market there was “oversaturated” — insisting on a location in the Minnesota Street Project, in the heart of San Francisco’s budget galleries. Her next show there, starring Kwame Brathwaite, Gordon Parks and Ming Smith, was aptly called Infinite Hope.

Arts-related projects are also temporarily moving into vacant spaces downtown for free or at low cost. The two-year-old Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF) is one of them. The non-collecting “start-up museum” received a rent-free two-year gig in a former bank downtown and is open to the public free of charge.

Funded by tech entrepreneurs and operating without endowments, the museum is “open to experimentation and finding new ways of thinking about the future of arts organizations,” said founding director Alison Gass. The ICA’s new space, located near SFMOMA, opened on October 25 with three exhibitions, including one titled “Poetics of Dimensions,” curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, and the first museum show by San Francisco artist Maryam Yousif. Clay sculptures are also on display in Camacho’s new project room until December 20.

Individuals are also seizing opportunities. Facundo Argañaraz was recently able to move his gallery 1599 fdT to a central location at Market and Laguna Streets, thanks to an affordable arrangement he proposed to the building’s owner. “It gave me the freedom to take greater risks in programming,” he said.

There are funds available for those willing to take the risk. A public program called Vacant to Vibrant provides financial resources for pop-up art galleries and cultural events in vacant storefronts, and the Svane Family Foundation has earmarked $5 million to support downtown arts and culture. The foundation also recently donated $1 million to the de Young Museum to acquire works by local artists.

This support is crucial, especially for artists who have left the Bay in recent years. The closure of the 152-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, which the nonprofit led by Laurene Powell Jobs bought for about $30 million and plans to sell Transformed into an arts institution. Ajanaraz said that with the closure of the famous art school, there are fewer artists around. “We noticed a lack of influx of new talent,” he said. Northern California’s only remaining independent art and design school is CalArts, which has just completed an expansion that will centralize its campus in the San Francisco Design District. But it also faces a $20 million budget deficit, and in September it laid off 23 employees to address declining enrollment.

Museums and galleries are also showing clear signs of decline. In November, the Contemporary Jewish Museum announced it would close its galleries for at least a year and begin a series of layoffs. Follow-up actions san francisco chronicle Survey reports show that many of the city’s museums are struggling due to reduced foot traffic. In 2020, Gagosian Gallery closed its San Francisco space; in 2022, Pace closed its Palo Alto operations. Some in San Francisco believe these large galleries are closing because they haven’t engaged with the local community until it’s too late, but smaller galleries are also finding themselves being forced out.

“It’s being compressed,” said dealer Patricia Sweetow, whose eponymous gallery moved to Los Angeles due to rising costs of living and a slow recovery from lockdowns. “I felt like I didn’t have time to sit back and wait for it to be over,” she said.

Could the problem be local collectors? Dealer Karen Jenkins-Johnson said many dealers have to “go outside the Bay Area to make money.” Despite San Francisco’s high concentration of wealth and the presence of important, influential individuals, the city’s wealthiest people don’t seem all that interested in buying art. But others say the clientele is from Los Angeles and that the local collector class is simply going through a transition period.

“People forget that the New York art scene took decades to cultivate,” said Komal Shah, SFMOMA trustee and artistic director. art news Top 200 collectors. “The tech wealth is new – it’s not as old as money from railroads … but the momentum is already very strong,” she said. She and her husband, Gaurav Garg, have amassed an extensive collection of women’s art spanning 80 years, which is currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive.

“The tech community gets a bad rap,” said dealer Wendi Norris. She opened her gallery in 2002, headquartered next to Camacho’s Jackson Square space, which has become a burgeoning gallery cluster. Norris added that the local market was “stable” and showed no signs of even slowing down. “On a per capita basis, the money has always been here,” she said, later adding of her position, “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Here I have more freedom to do what I want matter.”

Less competition can also be an advantage. In 2008, Jessica Silverman “realized there was a huge opportunity here to do something similar to what was happening in Los Angeles,” said the dealer at her eponymous gallery. “If we were in Los Angeles, we wouldn’t be showing Loie Hollowell,” who is already represented there. “I think going at your own pace is actually what makes San Francisco so great and why my time here has been really meaningful.”

Bay Area artists took a similar interest in San Francisco’s famous counterculture. Historically, local artists have always “deliberately rejected what was happening in New York and Europe,” observes artist Lisa Rybovich Crallé, founder of a year-old personal space gallery in Vallejo, where the cost of living is lower than in the city. “That’s the spirit that brought me here and that’s the spirit that keeps me here.”

Artist Ramekon O’Arwisters joins others in welcoming the “rise” of the art world. He is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery and is recognized for his quirky zip tie sculptures. “I don’t pay much attention to what’s being written about San Francisco as it relates to the art world and how it might be declining,” Oavistes said. “I’m happy to be here. No matter where I am, I need to focus on strategies that will build my career.”