Whenever I hear the word "community…”

What does “community” really mean when museums start using it like a brand strategy? Evan Moore takes us on a sharp stroll through a few recent Bay Area art exhibitions—unpacking how local gestures can be thrillingly organized or frustratingly siloed.

As the global art fair circus’ed its annual tour through San Francisco last January, I stood woozily astride the bar while an inebriated flagship New York art dealer berated me. “You guys gotta care more about your guys, man!” Our conversation had veered towards museums and local art history. After a single afternoon at SFMOMA, while passing a healthy array of his own decidedly un-California roster on view, he had come to this tidy conclusion.  At the moment I disagreed with this sentiment, my mind flooding with hundreds of counter-examples but it was futile as our conversation quickly morphed into other marketeering lamentations. When the conversational deluge of commerce for cash-and-carry wallworks and design objects wound down, one of the few thoughts that lingered were those of the drunken art dealer.

At the outset of the pandemic and just past Black Lives Matter, there was a tangible shift in the language that museums used to communicate to the public. Words like community, care, and local began to permeate press releases and some words lingered throughout a number of museum reopenings. In the Bay Area the use of a sticky word, “community”  went into noticeable overdrive with institutions offering reflection and introducing new initiatives, new appointments, and new self-enlisted responsibilities, all in effort to reinstate public good will. At a macro level, all Bay Area institutions have experienced a tangible shift in collecting, exhibition making, and programming that have taken a much needed turn into factoring more diverse voices. Buried in so many wall texts, press releases, instagram captions, and so on, I found the self-referential use of the word “community” an attempt to signal these institutions’ place within its local populations.

This attempt at quickly cozying into their “communities” has also produced a new emphasis on spotlighting and exhibiting works made by local artists. Since the pandemic, SFMOMA has opened their second floor collection galleries free to the public. The final three to four galleries at the end of the collection hang almost always loudly spotlight work by Bay Area artists, collectives, and arts organisations. In 2020 the de Young presented their inaugural triennial, the de Young Open, which occurred again in 2023 with a raucous post-pandemic attendance. In 2024, these initiatives and exhibitions are all ultimately positive, necessary, and interesting. However, walking through the other collection galleries and negligence of incorporating other works given the unstable relationships with the public these gestures start to smell funny. When more formal collection exhibitions include works by local artists, the works are often only installed in dialogue with works by other Bay Area artists. While refocusing toward the local and its diverse populations is generally laudable, this practice of siloing local artists into locals-only galleries limits the full potential of individual works being understood on their own terms and in dialogue with more expansive national and international art histories.

The most exciting exception to my lament is an experience I had in January of 2023. Walking through SFMOMA with a group of friends, we found ourselves meandering through their ongoing collection exhibition “Freeform: Exploring Abstraction” on the fourth floor consisting of works from the collection. Turning a corner, we were all struck by a painting none of us had ever seen on view at the museum before. A modestly sized painting, rich in surface textured adorned in muddied taupes and two biomorphic shapes, one a dusty blue with dabs of yellow, the other a deep mustard. This work caught all our hearts. We all stood in front of it for a moment, commenting how much we liked and how thrilled we were to walk through the slow-changing collection galleries to encounter a new favorite. One friend approached the wall label, and excitedly exclaimed “Bolinas?!”, which was listed as the city where the artist had died in 2009. We were all astonished, assuming the work was by an esoteric European and rushed to the label, the painter was Arthur Okamura, born in Long Beach in 1932 and lived and worked in San Francisco and Bolinas. What was so refreshing about the encounter was not only did it introduce an underknown local painter onto our radar, but it did so with force in the company of enormous paintings by Cy Twombly in the periphery.

One friend, Cole Solinger, with us for that initial spiritual viewing, had just recently opened a gallery, House of Seiko, and was so moved by the work he got in touch with the family, studied the work they had in storage in Bolinas, and presented a tight exhibition of his work the following winter. This gallery exhibition joined the chorus of independent curators, scholars, and truffle-hunting outside of major institutions that has been occurring (seemingly forever) with great personal effect over the past decade.  Projects like Cushion Works, Delaplane (RIP), Et Al., / (Slash), to name a few, have embarked on much of the legwork of canonizing artists of Northern California who have yet to find their institutional due.

One of the most awe-inspiring projects was Jordan Stein’s (principal of Cushion Works) research, exhibition, and tome published on the painter Miyoko Ito. Born in Berkeley, the artist then attended UC Berkeley until forcibly interned during the Second World War. She eventually ended up finishing her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, the city where she would go on to live and work in. Ito’s work was woefully unknown except for a small group of artists and collectors. In 2017, Stein hunted down as much work as he could find and presented a dozen paintings spanning the artist’s career as a Matrix exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum. As Stein and others discovered more works, Artist’s Space in New York exhibited a deeper survey of her career. Over the course of the next five years, Stein took on the labor-intensive task to locate and document as much of the work as he could find. It grew into an exhaustive four-hundred-and-sixty- page book, accompanied by an essential essay placing Ito’s work into the canons of American art history.

Despite the critical acclaim of the publication no comprehensive retrospective materialized. One painting, Reservoir (1981), exhibited in the 2017 exhibition was acquired by the museum and thanks to kismet was on view for the first time since in the group exhibition, “What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection”. This collection exhibition was the result of the newly appointed director Julie Rodriguez Widholm’s introductory delve into the institution's holdings. This tradition of immersing newly hired staff in the collection was continued after the 2023 appointments of Margot Norton, Victoria Sung, Anthony Graham, and Tausif Noor, all of whom had a hand in developing the 2024 collection exhibition, “To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection”. Taking on the broad conceit of ephemerality, the curators conjured a poetic exhibition building upon the institution’s own history in exhibiting artists working with the immaterial throughout the twentieth century. Evolving over the past year with subtle rearrangement one may find themselves concurrently thinking through the practices of  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Eva Hesse; Bruce Conner with Robert Irwin, and so on. The result is an intriguing exhibition—one I have seen six times since its opening and recommend to all passing through the area.

The Bay Area is a place littered with potent secrets that can not begin to reveal themselves from a cursory Google search. The aesthetic red threads running throughout the area are not only deserving of canonizing blockbuster exhibitions (which is not rare - see: Ruth Asawa’s retrospective at SFMOMA now!), but a considered and perpetual integration into the larger national and international discourse. Because when the penultimate retrospective closes, when the catalog goes out of print, when the lecture is over, what remains? What local seeds can be planted and tended to not let the dust settle on the rich aesthetic histories in which these museums are situated.

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