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Northern California Art
In April of 2025, Marco Cochrane’s “R-Evolution,” a 45-foot tall sculpture of a nude woman in a yoga pose, was installed on public land at Embarcadero Plaza for a planned six months. The project was the brainchild of Shannon Riley, CEO of the art agency Building 180, and Sid Sijbrandij, a founder of the software maker GitLab.
In the history of the arts in San Francisco, one vexing reality comes up repeatedly: the paucity of public support the city has provided to its artists. At the same time, this fact has always been offset by a local arts community that generates support of its own.
Without independent art schools, what will the Bay Area’s art ecosystem become? What is vanishing is not only a pair of historic institutions, but a way of shaping artists in relation to the city, the Bay Area, and beyond.
The term Artificial Intelligence is largely a misnomer, implying that there is a sentient entity that exists in machine form. Where does this idea of computers being “intelligent” spring from? From the earliest days of digital media the question arose as to whether computers could actually think.
Max Blue writes: When I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 2010s, it was the last institutional gasp of the DIY ethos that refused to separate politics from art. Nowhere did that spirit burn brighter than at SFAI.
Recently a computer engineer friend working on artificial intelligence remarked that he thinks start-up entrepreneurs are the avant-garde artists of our time. When he said this, I bristled.
Is the model of a small to medium-sized urban arts institution no longer viable in Northern California?
SquareCylinder and the Bay Area’s New Era for Art and Art Journalism is a June 7th event to be held at the Minnesota Street Project that celebrates the relaunch of SquareCylinder.
A San Francisco museum director remarked that, now that their museum isn’t reliant on federal funding, they’ll be free to program as they please. But many private funders share interests with those currently in the current government. I’m concerned.
Paul McCartney’s photographs, in spite of receiving major museum treatment at the de Young, are much more celebrity relics than they are serious works of art.
