Then and Now: Bay Area Then, SFAI, and Other Nostalgias
It is certainly cold out there this summer, culturally speaking. Perfect weather for nostalgia. But how far back do we need to go to feel some warmth? In the case of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ current exhibition, the cheekily titled Bay Area Then, the answer’s 30 years. While there isn’t anything explicitly declared in the press release, the reference to the art center’s once-beloved locals-only triennial Bay Area Now is abundantly clear. A YBCA signature show since 1997, its appearance launched a series of exciting, sometimes career-launching regional surveys; San Francisco’s attempt at biennial relevance. On the ground, it worked — for a while. The Bay art community was contentiously invested in who would be included and how, even if the reach outside the area was dubious. A warm, appreciative blanket to wrap around artists who live here.
The Bay Area Now shows varied in quality and approach over the years, but the 2024 edition was a debacle: a chaotically installed show that collapsed under the weight of the political moment. A situation we don’t need to rehash here — suffice to say it left the institution’s credibility in doubt.
YBCA has gone through a roller coaster of relevance, its past presentations are currently its strongest identity. As the first high profile exhibition since the hiring of the YBCA's new director, Mari Robles, the title of Bay Area Then sardonically acknowledges the past glories. The ‘Then’ in Bay Area Then, is primarily 1997. The exhibition, curated by Eungie Joo, includes, amongst others, a select group who were included in that inaugural BAN — Carolyn Castaño, Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, Rigo 23 (then Rigo 97), as well as Arnold J. Kemp, who at the time was YBCA’s Curatorial Assistant. Some artists are represented with vintage work, others with new, and — except in the case of those no longer living — it’s unclear why. But as mentioned earlier, the show’s take on the past exhibitions is also not explicated. Johanson’s thematically apt installation, however, is a maze-like framework that wisely includes both old and recent work.
In the continuum of past and present, it is worth noting that Joo has a long history with these artists, who she supported with early exhibitions. In 2002, the same year she earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, she grouped them in a Flash Art essay titled The New Folk, and in 2007 organized Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye & Bye, at REDCAT in Los Angeles. More recently she served as SFMOMA’s first curator of contemporary art, a position she held from 2017 to 2024, when she was abruptly dismissed. Which is to say, Joo has direct experience of the Bay Area then and now — and has a particular take on it.
The retro spirit of the exhibition favors work that exudes a street art, mural-sized, rough-around-the-edges, analog aesthetic, a tight edit of work that existed, and continues to exist, in a diverse art scene: That is, back then there was also work that was slicker, queerer, more conceptual or more pop as in the work of other 1997 Bay Area Now artists such as Rebeca Bollinger, Vincent Fecteau, Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Todd Hido, and Stephanie Syjuco. Are we meant to be inspired and instructed by how the artists in Bay Area Then responded, grittily, to what the intro text calls a bleak road, and the “apocalyptic uncertainty” of their day? Did that feeling ever go away? Apocalypse, now, feels like a growing certainty.
The show then seems more about creating a gallery-based reunion that may be more meaningful to a select group of people who were there, back in the day than in presenting new perspectives on their work. But there is an emphasis on a community of artists who, for a time, shared an urban setting and social milieu. This is expressed in a few projects here: Barry McGee presents a super salon-style presentation of works by dozens of unidentified artists in the YBCA lobby and closet-like space behind it, accessible without admission fee, and Alica McCarthy’s wall painting features a tower of initials referring to friends and colleagues. It’s about the people. (Though how do we parse the fact that most of the artists in this show no longer live in this region.)
The Friday night opening party was reportedly jam-packed: like in the old days when YBCA openings were hot tickets with lines lagging down to Mission Street, people crammed into the awkward grand lobby. It's heartening to know that community can still be activated, that there are people who stuck around with their social and institutional memory, and that there are plenty of art folks who maintain the scrappy, seemingly historic, art spirit that is reflected in much of the work on view.
During calmer gallery hours, I did bump into a couple of old friends, both former SFMOMA curators, who I hadn't seen in years. We compared how this show made us feel — energized, wistful, confused. I perused the display cases filled with zines and old flyers for music shows, wall collages of posters for activist events and exhibitions at galleries that no longer exist (with didactics that seem to have been provisionally taped to the wall — scrappy indeed). There was material on the infamous Kiki, a clubby queer hang out I have great memories of; a flyer for a 1998 motel art fair, in which I participated, called SAP: the residue of the San Francisco art scene, which was coordinated by Julie Deamer and Jim Schatz, who both had vital alterna-galleries at the time. When such spaces are in their prime, we think they’ll be around forever, but running an indie gallery is a hard, cash-draining game, prone to flaming out.
The artifacts were memory triggers for me, but I couldn't help but wonder how this show plays for younger generations or people who didn't live in SF in the late 90s and early 2000s. Bill Daniel's oversized photographs of scruffy bike messengers, for example, look like an exotic world before Door Dash and Amazon deliveries. Once the emblem of renegade bicyclists, delivery work has currently become so much more branded, GPS-tracked, and blatantly exploitative to workers. But were those messengers treated any better? This kind of corporatization and commodification has been the most standard shift in the Bay Area cultural landscape.
But how productive is this retrospective view? Is there enough purpose, or loss, to make Bay Area Then become a backward-looking triennial exhibition?
I feel conflicted about such nostalgia. On some level, it is useful to see this history, to be reminded of that moment. I remember the feeling of dark clouds, of encroaching shift, of rising rents and bulldozed studio buildings to make room for loft living. These things energized the city’s art scene, spurred an exodus, and for myself, the conflicting thrill of getting paid crazy amounts of money to write about art and technology, about shows that frantically tried to connect the two, in publications that only lasted until their start-up funding evaporated. Tech culture put the Bay Area on a global culture map, though artists working here were overshadowed by that business energy. Some, like Johanson, were being shown in the Whitney Biennial. In 2002 I wrote a cover story for the Bay Guardian, an independent weekly published from 1966 to 2014, that my editor and I titled, in that referential, hyperlocal, alternative journalism way, The Mission School. That this moniker has stuck has always seemed an expression of a regional inferiority complex in the arts, a yearning to stake a claim in art history. Or maybe it was just catchy.
Stepping out of the Yerba Buena, I went across the street to SFMOMA to see an exhibition honoring the San Francisco Art Institute, titled People Make This Place: SFAI Stories. That main title also fits the YBCA show’s sense of community, and it so happens there is an adjacent gallery that includes notable works by Kilgallen, McGee, McCarthy, and Johanson. Joo, as a curator at the museum must have known this show was in the works, but the YBCA exhibition, rather than building on the adjacency, suffers in comparison. The SFMOMA SFAI exhibition has an engaging museum scholarship gloss as it tracks an important locus of art activity, one that is truly a thing of the past. SFAI is gone. A definite then. And whatever comes of the campus, it won’t be a resurrection of the original ethos. I felt lucky to have had a moment there, taking advantage of its rebellious atmosphere as an observer, and later teaching and working there. I miss the place, but its dysfunctional administration was hard to ignore or defend. Its history has moved into archival mythology, full of stories and storied individuals who moved through those moldering halls. If there is sadness to its disappearance, there is also the pleasure of seeing the vitality of that history in the current moment.
I got the most direct hit of the past from a 1989 video excerpt on SFAI’s Performance/Video department, a document made by the notorious faculty member Tony Labat. It spoke to a playful edginess, earnest exploration; Reagan-era anger as expressed in Karen Finley’s visceral performances; the late Dale Hoyt, with indie rocker hair lauding video classes using a land line phone as a mic; Debora Iyall recalling the start of her band, Romeo Void, which went on to National success. Nearby, a case containing a stack of VHS tapes of George Kuchar films made with his students — the top of the pile is one titled The Smutty Professor.
Bay Area Then is too diffuse and loosely contextualized to capture the essence of time and space, of fin de siecle San Francisco, of the culture of YBCA. The show has the provisional energy of something that came together out of a particular sense of urgency — that is, a hole in the schedule. But the project does offer a point of reflection, a means of tracking an art past that in years wasn't so long ago, but in vibes exists in a vastly different landscape.
On my way into the YBCA galleries, I spotted one of the street banners hanging from a light post on Third. In plain sans serif type, it said "Where Would You Go Back To?" The piece is part of a Bay Area Then work by Sanctuary City Project (Sergio De La Torre and Chris Treggiari), and its question resonates as a lens with which to look at the show. Is one historical moment preferable to another? Was the work these artists were doing in the early 2000s more meaningful than Bay Area Funk or conceptualism? Or is it simply an invitation to be nostalgic?
In the midst of writing this piece, the New York Times published an article on 1990s nostalgia by social psychologist Clay Routledge. He writes that “nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination. Yes, nostalgia can be indulged. But for most people, most of the time, it is a stabilizing and energizing force.”
Maybe. But the chill is getting ever chillier, and it feels harder to locate our political and artistic agency. The more salient, difficult question is: Where do we go now?