The inaugural conversation of the Constance Lewallen Legacy Series @ 544 Capp Street | Community Music Center + 500 Capp St
544 Capp Street | Community Music Center (with Reception to follow at 500 Capp St)
Admission is free with RSVP.
500 Capp Street honors one of the Bay Area’s most influential and beloved curators with its new Constance Lewallen Legacy Series, an annual conversation with Bay Area artists and scholars that kicks off June 27, 2026 with “Toward A History of Bay Area Contemporary Art 1969-2004,” a talk by curators Renny Pritikin and Mark Johnson.
Lewallen, whose consistently visionary work on California Conceptual art post-1960 uplifted hundreds of individual artists and demonstrated the national and international significance of West Coast art, had a deep and long running connection to conceptual artist David Ireland and his house at 500 Capp Street. A longtime friend and champion, she planted the seeds for Ireland’s MATRIX exhibition at the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley in 1988; co-curated his exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 in tandem with the opening of 500 Capp Street to the public; stepped into the role of Interim Executive Director at the David Ireland House in 2018; and wrote the definitive book, 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House, published by UC Press.
Fittingly, Pritikin and Johnson, two longtime friends of Lewallen, will inaugurate the new series with a discussion about their current joint research on the history of Bay Area contemporary art practice from 1969 to 2004.
“The period of 1969 to 2004 in the Bay Area was dynamic, generative, unusually innovative, and more importantly, as Mark likes to say, it was the leading edge of a cultural revolution in American art,” says Pritikin. “Since COVID, Mark and I started to notice that people around us—peers and mentors—were disappearing. In particular, Moira Roth, Whitney Chadwick, Bill Berkson, Susan Landauer, and Connie Lewallen. We discussed the need for a history of our generation’s contributions to contemporary art. We were inspired by Thomas Albright’s seminal book Art of the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 to 1980, which is an amazing document but neglected the importance of work by women, people of color, and queer people. It also was skeptical of most experimental work. So, we have been taking another look at the period, extending it for 24 years, and backfilling some of that neglected history. This talk will be our coming out event to the community about our research for a book we hope to publish. It’s an honor to present our work in Connie’s memory. She set the bar for ambitious and sophisticated curatorial practice in the Bay Area for forty years.”
Selected works by artist Rigo 23 will be projected throughout the evening. As one of the final artists Lewallen championed through the MATRIX program, Rigo 23’s work serves as a bridge between the Bay Area histories discussed by Pritikin and Johnson and the contemporary questions artists continue to confront today. His contribution honors Lewallen’s lifelong commitment to keeping artists at the center of the conversation.
The free talk takes place at the San Francisco Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street—just down the block from the David Ireland House—on Saturday, June 27, 6-8pm. To attend, kindly RSVP here.
A free reception follows the event at 500 Capp Street. Guests will have one last opportunity to enjoy the exhibition Amitié, featuring the work of artists Léonie Guyer and Joyce Burstein, curated by Nancy Nguyen and on view through June 27. The two artists come together through their shared connection to David Ireland, each bringing their own sensibility to the house and pairing it with a number of never-before-shown works by Ireland. Guyer, whose post-minimalist abstract work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces, will be in attendance at the reception.
About Constance Lewallen
Constance M. Lewallen (1939-2022) was widely regarded as one of the foremost experts in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, especially West Coast Conceptualism, and spent her career championing Bay Area artists in particular. In 1980, she became associate curator of the MATRIX program at BAMPFA and later returned to serve as senior curator from 1998 through 2007. As MATRIX curator, Lewallen organized nearly eighty exhibitions, showcasing local artists such as Robert Bechtle, Elmer Bischoff, Bruce Conner, Bill Fontana, Howard Fried, Rupert Garcia, Doug Hall, Jess, Paul Kos, and Tom Marioni, and bringing the work of important national and international artists to the Bay Area, many for the first time. After leaving BAMPFA, Lewallen continued to curate exhibitions focusing on California artists and the history of Conceptualism. She served as Interim Executive Director at 500 Capp Street in 2018.
About the Speakers
Renny Pritikin was chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, after serving as co-Director at New Langton Arts. He was a senior adjunct professor in the graduate program in curatorial practice at CCA for twelve years and writes art criticism regularly for Square Cylinder and Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal. His memoir, At Third and Mission, was published in 2023.
Mark Johnson is a curator, writer, and Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University. His books include Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008; Stanford University Press) and When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California (2019: UC Press).