Continuing through January 25, 2026
How lamely ironic is it to be reminded that Margaret Kilgallen’s tag was Meta? There it is, in red hand-painted script applied to a small wooden plaque beneath the serif foot of the K in “KOOK,” all part of her large 2001 (re)installation of “Main Drag.” It takes up most of a large gallery in “Bay Area Then,” an exhibition of the work of 19 artists (or collaborations) curated by Eungie Joo. In that work, elegant figures, faces and signage nestle like irregular tesserae against swathes of text and figures going surfing. In one vignette, two surfers speak early internet language with gentle sarcasm: “www.imakook.com” to which the other replies “www.crappysurf.com” as they slouch in flat water. This focus on the multivalent potential of words that change meaning through contingency is one of the great reminders of Kilgallen’s brilliance. There is a recognizable affinity with Robert Indiana’s early assemblages in wood, iron, and oil of the late 1950’s: both Kilgallen and Indiana allowed the flat graphic and epiphanic potential of words, depending on what we, the audience, bring to them. Both artists made art from the junky remnants extracted from the end of one urban cycle, on the cusp of another.
Meta. To consider that hollowed-out brand for the company that exerts megalomaniacal control over nearly every facet of online and offline life is to understand the potential urgency behind this exhibition. To be sure, “Bay Area Then” is not a perfect show, but those were not perfect times. Naturally, we think of art made at the turn of the millennium as evincing the last fragile moments before digital life vitiated physical experience. We are supposed to think about how artists once wrestled with cultural survival, and to imagine how things might have been otherwise. We might also imagine what other art could have been included, and how a larger group could have filled in some of the holes in this exhibition of interconnected artists who began their careers in the 1990s. And then one might question the decisions that led to the inclusion of these artists to the exclusion of others.
The strength of “Bay Area Then” lies less in the big aerosol on canvas declarations of political urgency than in the stranger, diffident gestures that evade such pat orthodoxies. Graffiti by SPIE ONE, an unfinished mural by Rigo 23, and other awkward aerosol works are uncomfortably cornered together on the southwest side of the largest gallery. These might have once thundered with righteous immediacy about Gaza, police violence, and surveillance, but now they risk being read as examples of ham-fisted sanctimony. That corner is juxtaposed with work by so-called Mission School stalwarts such as Johanna Jackson, Chris Johanson, Alicia McCarthy, and others. All feel alive, vital, and subversive precisely because their art embraced weirdness, intimacy, and rough-hewn imperfection. McCarthy’s pulsating aerosol weave looks miraculous against the protest slogans across the gallery that seem, by comparison, dead as a post. What was once dismissed as naïve graffi-twee now resonates as an elegantly intransigent form of refusal: these losers got more beautiful.
This queasy dynamic reveals a paradoxical hole at the heart of “Bay Area Then.” Understandably, the YBCA wants to foreground work that “speaks from the chest” about contemporary unrest, especially considering the recent fallout from “Bay Area Now 9” in 2023, in which eight artists made pro-Palestinian alterations to their works that prompted a month-long closure of that exhibition that provoked large, anti-censorship protests. Curator Eungie Joo, who can boast a history of early support of many of these artists, has an obvious interest in placing their work within a larger frame of civic resistance. But the pesky problem is that the art gets charged with solving a crises created by institutions that have nothing to do with art. Just as “META,” as used by Kilgallen, could be an infinitely polyvalent concept until it became a brand, so too do political declarations, when transposed onto gallery walls, get compressed into performative slogans. That is the case here. Inversely, when marginal, messy expressions of cultural survival are juxtaposed with political murals, the unruly force of the former becomes crystallized into something newly radiant.
No artist in BAT embodies this more than Bill Daniel, who emerges as the exhibition’s quiet star. Daniel moved to San Francisco in the late 1980s, joining a community of daredevil bike messengers who doubled as musicians, performers, and artists. Today, his life-size gelatin silver prints produced from 4 by 5-inch negatives (shot in 1989 and printed in 2025) depicting this subculture plausibly confront us as the last vestige of a physical network of information exchange before the internet rendered such labor obsolete. Customized mountain bikes overloaded with documents lend testimony to a vanished materiality. In his writings, Daniel recalls encountering Kilgallen’s graffiti during early morning messenger runs, recognizing that something entirely new was surfacing on the city’s walls.
In a dark screening room, two of Daniel’s films intimate that fleeting moment. The first, chronicling seven days in the life of a bike messenger navigating the surfaces, sounds, and rhythms of San Francisco’s financial district, reveals the city in jumbled, estranged flashes: familiar streets made grittily kinetic. Another film chronicles a nighttime celebration at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, where Daniel and Kilgallen exhibited together in 1999. His footage of boxcar hobo signage overlays with her calligraphic figures; people dance, kiss, and drift in and out of focus. It is part party, part elegy.
To see Daniel and Kilgallen together at the Headlands at the turn of the millennium is, in retrospect, like seeing Renoir and Monet painting side-by-side at “La Grenouillère” in 1869: a moment when artists danced on the cusp of articulating a new language for seeing and marking a rapidly changing city. While the Impressionists drew on Japanese aesthetics and realist landscapes, paint tubes and new trains to confront Haussmann-ized Paris to craft modern-day fete-galantes, the Mission School cobbled sources — railyard and subway graffiti, hand-painted shop signage and arcane folk motifs — into bricolage shrines to San Francisco’s fugitive draw. Not simply stylistic, their mission now seems infrastructural: binding community together against erasure, insisting on eccentricity in the face of homogenization. Johanson’s funky mazes still spark trippy wonder. Wouldn’t we all rather wonder “what if,” instead of facing the daily reminder of “what is?”
What persists after “Bay Area Then” is not nostalgia but sharp loss. To see the word META hand-painted by Kilgallen is to wish it still meant something small, playful, and open-ended, not the god-damned corporate avatars that beshat her ghost. Today, words have flattened into logos and slogans that mask vile politics. Maybe the legacy of the Mission School is the idea that culture could grow out of improvisation, collaboration, and a refusal to cede autonomy. Bill Daniel still does it every way that he can. That fragile, furtive notion may be the last redeeming lesson of this small, imperfect sliver of San Francisco’s artistic past as it is presented here. Perhaps it’s the only guide forward. Better art came out of worse circumstances.
