S.F.’s recovery is missing one of the hardest things to bring back | San Francisco Chronicle

Allison Arieff

San Francisco Chronicle

In 1989, I landed my first job post-college in San Francisco — as an administrative assistant (aka gallery girl) at the Capp Street Project art gallery located in a former auto body shop at 14th and Mission streets. My salary was $16,000. I lived in an expansive one-bedroom apartment in Oakland; the rent was $600, but because the building was called the Alison Apartments, the landlord cut it down to $550. My boyfriend was a painter with a day job as an art handler. We found ourselves smack in the middle of one of the most fascinating art scenes of the era.

People know about the Beats and the Summer of Love, but little has been written about the dynamic art and music scene that was happening in San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Live/work spaces were occupied by artists, not techies. First Thursdays in Union Square were packed. Capp Street — where gallery-goers poured into the streets to see the then-emerging artists like Bill Viola and Ann Hamilton — was part of a larger Bay Area art ecosystem of nonprofits like Artspace and New Langton Arts in San Francisco’s South of Market and Pro Arts in Oakland, established galleries like John Berggruen and Rena Bransten in Union Square and art schools that produced generations of incredibly creative people.

Those were years when it felt like there was always something to see.

Hamilton carpeted the floor of Capp Street with 7,000 pennies (her artists’ fee) embedded in honey while two live sheep took up residence in a pen behind them. Viola installed a video of his wife in childbirth amidst a forest of living redwood trees. 

But perhaps most memorable was Survival Research Laboratories’ 1989 “Illusions of Shameless Abundance” — a completely insane and incredible display of the perils of man fusing with machine. “Who was in control?” wondered hundreds of spectators as SRL burned 20 pianos under a San Francisco freeway underpass at Fourth and Berry streets, while unwieldy machines — a mix of medieval catapults and industrial hydraulic precursors of Boston Dynamics dogs — battled it out.

It was dangerous and exciting, unpermitted and unforgettable. No phones, no admission fees or guardrails, nothing monetized or shared on socials.

Could never happen today.

Everyone thinks that San Francisco was perfect the day they arrived, and I’m sure I’m no exception. I can’t help but be nostalgic for a time when the arts felt core to the identity of the city.

There are incredible artists working here today, of course, but it’s probably never been harder for them to do so.

More galleries are closing. The California College of the Arts has shut down, and so has the San Francisco Art Institute — its reopening date after its acquisition by  Laurene Powell Jobs has not been announced. The Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts have closed, both citing a lack of funding. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art even lost the sponsor of its free Thursday night admissions program. No company has stepped up to fund it. 

Private philanthropy, which once could be counted upon to support the city’s major institutions, is disappearing as patrons get older. The city may be flush with private capital, but the culture of tech is largely one of metrics and results; few in this community seem inclined to support something with a hard-to-measure return on investment.

As for public support, federal funding has, of course, all but dried up under President Donald Trump. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration has repeatedly declared that art will revitalize the city, but what it has offered in the way of specifics or support is minimal at best. Public/private partnerships committed to downtown revitalization are doing great work, but are steering the bulk of the efforts toward business and commerce and not enough toward culture.

A city can’t exist just to generate capital and provide places for people to spend it. There’s got to be more than that.

Art is a means of expression, something to look at, something to think about. It’s a way of connecting, an exchange of ideas, a way of allowing us to experience the world through others’ perspectives.

When the city’s most visible artistic philanthropy — if you can call it that — is the works personally selected by a billionaire for his Big Art Loop (what I like to call the Loop of Big Art), we’re in trouble. As KQED reported last October, billionaire Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder of GitLab, is allowed to display 100 pieces of large-scale art around the city, “simply because he’s paying for it.” 

That’s no way to build an arts community.

One low-overhead intervention that could move the needle is the already established Zero Empty Spaces initiative, which transforms vacant commercial real estate into temporary, affordable space for artists to collaborate. In return, the artists agree to open their spaces to the public for a certain number of hours per week. Zero Empty Spaces just launched its first California project in Berkeley at the former Half Price Books on Shattuck Avenue.

San Francisco has its Vacant to Vibrant program. But that’s more focused on supporting new businesses rather than the arts. However, in 2010, the city had a successful Art for Storefronts program. Why not bring it back to fill some of the at least 20 vacant banks and drugstores throughout the city?

I am not suggesting any one thing can bring back the creative vitality of years past. “The arts” is an ecosystem. It’s not about one institution or one event or one creative genius — but the interconnectivity of people, practice and vision. 

My nostalgia is for a time when there were not just places to see art but schools and instructors to teach it; when there were affordable studio and exhibition spaces — large and small — to display, preserve and interpret it; magazines and journals to promote, discuss, support and debate it; and cheap, abundant housing for all members of this ecosystem.

I think back fondly on that time. I left Capp Street to pursue a master’s in art history and ended up marrying the guy I met there back in 1989. 

But nostalgia can’t bring back what was. New eras demand new approaches.

For now, something visible needs to be done, and fast. Something focused not just on commerce but on building up a community that’s disappearing before us.

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Allison Arieff is a columnist and editorial writer for the Opinion section.