San Francisco’s Art Scene Is Thriving, In Spite of ‘False Doom Narrative’

Earlier this year, dealer Rebecca Camacho was standing in her new and expanded downtown San Francisco gallery in Jackson Square, when she paused and pointed to the arched windows facing the street. “There have been people constantly walking by. It’s alive!” she said.

Others in parts of downtown San Francisco, like the Union Square area near Camacho’s previous location, have a different perspective. Nearly 37 percent of the office buildings there remain empty post-pandemic, a rate that is higher than the national average. Vacancies have contributed to the shuttering of retail spaces. Plus, San Francisco officials have said they are struggling to contend with homelessness and a drug overdose epidemic, while the cost of living remains prohibitively high.

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Having lost her re-election bid in November, Mayor London Breed appeared to pay for this cocktail of circumstances, which the media has dubbed a “doom loop.” In that scenario, San Francisco has effectively been written off as a ghost town, and the city’s arts sector suffering as a consequence. Such portrayals gave the impression “the art scene didn’t exist in San Francisco,” said Monetta White, executive director and CEO of the local Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). “San Francisco plays a very important part in the art ecosystem in general, in the world,” she insisted.

In fact, locals say these issues exacerbated by the pandemic are not unique to their city. “There’s been a lot of conversation about a false doom narrative … surrounding our city’s art scene. I counter that assertion,” said Ralph Remington, director of the San Francisco Arts Commission, in a phone interview this fall. While conceding the downtown area is in a phase of transformation amid “tough” times, he said, “I want to point out that our scene is, in fact, thriving.”

Some disagreed with his assessment. “The energy and the hub of what San Francisco used to be in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, even the 90’s—it’s not there anymore,” said longtime San Francisco dealer Karen Jenkins-Johnson, who also runs a space in Brooklyn. “We were the scene of the Beat poets, the scene of the Black Panthers. The Bay Area was it. And we’re not. We’ve lost that.” She said some of her artists have moved to LA in search of greater career opportunities.

But there are signs that Bay Area positivity is not just wishful thinking. This year, White launched the Black Art Week in the Bay Area; a Northern California triennial is in the planning stages, with some of the initial offerings set to appear in San Francisco in 2027. Meanwhile, art projects are being shown in empty retail and office spaces downtown, and the Fog Design+Art fair continues to take place annually, including a recently added section for young and underrepresented artists.   

“There is light at the end of this tunnel,” thanks to a “changing of the guard” at the city’s museums, Jenkins-Johnson said. She feels programming at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) has been “refreshing,” pointing to examples like SFMOMA’s recently opened Amy Sherald survey. Jenkins-Johnson also changed her reported plans to move her San Francisco flagship to LA because of an “over-saturated” market in the latter city—she’s sticking with her location in a low-rent San Francisco gallery hub called the Minnesota Street Project. Her next exhibition there, featuring Kwame Brathwaite, Gordon Parks, and Ming Smith is fittingly called “Infinite Hope.”

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

Funded by tech entrepreneurs, and operated without an endowment, the museum is “comfortable with being experimental and finding new ways of thinking about the future for an arts organization,” said founding director Alison Gass. Located near the SFMOMA, the ICA’s new space opened on October 25 with three shows, including one curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, titled “The Poetics of Dimensions,” and a first museum show for San Francisco–based artist Maryam Yousif, who is also presenting clay sculptures in Camacho’s new Project Room until December 20.

Individuals are seizing opportunities as well. Facundo Argañaraz was recently able to move his gallery, 1599 fdT, to a central spot on Market and Laguna Street, thanks to an affordable arrangement that he pitched to the building’s owners. “It leaves me the freedom to be even more risky in the programming,” he said.

There is funding out there for those willing to take similar chances. A public program called Vacant to Vibrant awards financial resources for pop-up art galleries and cultural activities in empty storefronts, and the Svane Family Foundation has set aside $5 million to support arts and culture downtown. The foundation also recently donated $1 million to the de Young Museum to acquire works by local artists.

Such support is vital, especially with artists leaving the Bay in recent years. Not helping counteract that exodus, is the closure of the 152-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, which a nonprofit led by Laurene Powell Jobs purchased for about $30 million with plans to turn it into an art institution. With that storied art school’s closure, there are fewer artists around, Argañaraz said. “We notice this lack of an influx of new talent,” he said. There is just one remaining independent art and design school in Northern California, the California College of the Arts, which just completed an expansion that will centralize its campuses in San Francisco’s Design District. But it is also grappling with a $20 million budget deficit, and in September, it laid off 23 employees to address falling enrollment.

Signs of a downturn are also evident at museums and galleries. In November, the Contemporary Jewish Museum announced that it would close its galleries for at least one year and begin a series of layoffs. A follow-up San Francisco Chronicle investigation reported many of the city’s museums are struggling under the impact of lower foot traffic. In 2020, Gagosian gallery shuttered its San Francisco space; in 2022, Pace wound up operations in Palo Alto. Some in San Francisco believe these mega-galleries closed because they didn’t engage with the local community until too late, but smaller galleries also found themselves forced out.

“It was becoming compressed,” said dealer Patricia Sweetow, whose eponymous gallery moved to Los Angeles amid increased living costs and a slow post-lockdown recovery period. “I didn’t feel I had the time to sit and wait it out,” she said.

Could the problem be local collectors? Dealer Karen Jenkins-Johnson said many dealers must “go get the money outside the Bay Area.” Despite the high concentration of wealth in San Francisco, and key, influential individuals, the city’s richest people don’t seem so interested in buying art. But others said clients come up from Los Angeles, and that this local class of collectors was merely undergoing a transition period.

“People forget that the New York art world took decades to cultivate,” said Komal Shah, an SFMOMA trustee and an ARTnews Top 200 collector. “Tech wealth is new—it’s not quite as old as the money that came from railroads … But the momentum is already very strong,” she said. She and her husband Gaurav Garg have amassed a significant collection of art by women spanning 80 years, and are currently showing it at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

“The tech community has gotten a bad rap,” said dealer Wendi Norris, who opened her gallery in 2002, and is headquartered beside Camacho’s Jackson Square space in what has become a budding gallery cluster. Norris added that the local market is “steady,” and even shows no sign of slowing down. “The money is always here, per capita,” she said, later adding that when it came to her location, “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’m able to be freer and do whatever I want to do here.”

Less competition can also be an advantage. In 2008, Jessica Silverman “realized there was a huge opportunity here to do something that looked like what was happening in LA,” said the dealer of her eponymous gallery. “If we were in LA, we wouldn’t be showing Loie Hollowell,” who already has representation there. “Marching to your own beat, I think, is actually what makes SF so great, and what makes my time here really meaningful.”

Bay Area artists evoke a similar interest in San Francisco’s famed counterculture. Historically, local artists were always “intentionally rejecting what was going on in New York and in Europe,” observed artist Lisa Rybovich Crallé, founder of the one-year-old Personal Space gallery in Vallejo, where living costs are lower than in the city. “That’s the ethos that brought me out here, and that’s keeping me here.”

Artist Ramekon O’Arwisters joins others welcoming an “uptick” in the art scene. Represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery, he has been gaining recognition for his wonderfully weird zip-tie sculptures. “I pay less attention to what has been written about San Francisco as it relates to the art scene, and how it may be declining,” said O’Arwisters. “I’m happy to be here. I need to focus on a strategy that can build my career, no matter where I am.”