Dear Mayor Lurie…
San Francisco is a city that loves new ideas and helps them grow. I have been very heartened by your attention to art and culture, and I'm writing as an artist with a few ideas for how the City can better care for its artists and cultural life.
On behalf of ArtBae, a publication founded to help people connect with art in the Bay Area, we ask the City to:
Put art everywhere: reserve at least half of the City's two-percent civic-art allocation for acquisitions and commissions from living Bay Area artists, with many opportunities under $20,000 so emerging artists can benefit.
Make opportunities easy to find: create one artist-facing, mobile-friendly City portal for grants, commissions, and other opportunities, with simple applications, visible timelines, and clear eligibility requirements.
House artists: build and protect affordable housing, permit more commercial spaces to become live-work, make the Artists Hub on Market the first of many subsidized artist-housing developments, and expand Vacant to Vibrant's pathway from temporary pop-ups into affordable, longer-term shops, studios, and cultural spaces.
Open the doors: simplify permits for places where people may gather to experience culture together.
Sustain what works: protect and deepen dependable operating support through Grants for the Arts and the Arts Impact Endowment, especially for small and mid-sized organizations, without requiring organizations to launch new programs or expand in order to qualify.
Endow the future: build on the work of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust by establishing a permanent public-private cultural endowment whose invested principal can sustain institutions beyond any one grant cycle or donor.
Keep art education in San Francisco: help keep former art-school campuses in educational use, and support partnerships that bring degree-granting art education back to the city.
Widen access: make museums more accessible with City funding: expand free or discounted museum admission for Bay Area residents under 24, over 55, and for working artists; increase evening cultural programming; and protect SFUSD's credentialed art teachers, artist visits, and cultural trips.
Show up: treat artists and cultural institutions as essential participants in civic life. Continue visiting local institutions, especially small ones, and encourage people to experience and buy art from local galleries.
Give artists a seat: invite artists into civic conversations alongside entrepreneurs, including seats on the City's advisory bodies and task forces on downtown, economic recovery, and technology.
Soon after I moved to San Francisco in 2010, a chef invited me to an Independence Day party in Bolinas. There I met a ceramicist who invited me to dinner at her houseboat in Sausalito. And from there I met Ted Nelson, who helped invent the hyperlink. With the Golden Gate Bridge behind us, he explained how much of humanity's time had been wasted moving a mouse across a screen. That chain of events, and the beauty of where it unfolded, made me fall in love with the Bay Area.
I was able to stay because local collectors bought my art; local institutions collected and exhibited my work; local artists introduced me to publishers, gallerists, and curators; and SFAI and CCA hired me to teach. The Bay Area was not exactly affordable, but it was accessible. Community invites artists to stay; opportunity makes it possible.
We warmly celebrate Dave Eggers and JD Beltran's Art + Water at Pier 29 and Laurene Powell Jobs's California Academy of Studio Arts. Both will provide artist studios and mentorship, as the Headlands Center for the Arts has done for decades. But art residencies do not replace art schools. SFAI closed in 2022, and CCA will close in 2027. Art schools create permanent communities across generations; without them, young artists will learn to make art somewhere else, and they will stay there.
We believe that art and technology are not competitors. Photography was once a new technology; now it lets people show one another how the world looks and feels. Art creates experiences and new ways of seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and connecting. Preserving culture is not resisting change. Culture is our city's memory and a core part of its imagination. It helps people belong, and belonging helps new ideas emerge.
Artists stay where they can build a life. Let's make San Francisco that place again.
With hope,
Lucas Foglia, on behalf of ArtBae
Cover Photo: "Rainy Day Bridge" by Arthur Drooker