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INSIDE
OUT: NEW
LANGTON
ARTS (AND
THE ARTIST
SPACE
MOVEMENT)
SUSAN MILLER

IN introduction R CTION
Artist spaces are those quirky little galleries, theaters, and collectives
formed in the 1960s and 1970s, built on the values of the experimental
artists of the day. With an emphasis on creating new art and interdisciplinary
and ephemeral activities, these spaces challenged accepted
traditions in art making and presenting, 1those that were embodied in
commercial or collecting institutions, namely mainstream museums,
theaters, and galleries. Artist spaces emerged almost organically from the efforts of
artists living in cities all over the United States and Canada. 1 As such they reflect both a significant
national (and international) movement and very local and specialized regional practices.
Sometimes called alternative spaces, these organizations usually have nonprofit tax status and are
predominantly artist run. Their development in the 1960s and 1970s, their eminence in the
1980s, and their near disappearance in the 1990s and 2000s mirrors a shift in cultural, political,
and social forces over this period. This project seeks to explore those shifts through the concrete
and real events faced by artist spaces. In particular, the work will focus on one of the
nation’s earliest, New Langton Arts, a San Francisco artist space where I have been executive
director since 1993.
The project is divided into three periods, organized chronologically. The first spans the decade
of the 1970s. At Langton, this period is defined by events that began with its opening in 1975
Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (artists collective), mobile electronic message board, 2000.
From C2C, September 20–November 11, 2000. Courtesy New Langton Arts. Photo credit: Rachel Churner.
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and ended with its relocation from Langton Street to its current site, just a few blocks away, in
1983. A brief view of the period preceding Langton’s year of incorporation, including a view of
sister institutions elsewhere, will be critical in understanding Langton’s origins. An understanding
of the social and cultural forces of San Francisco and the United States during this time is
also highly relevant. The free speech and feminist movements, Proposition 13, the “me generation,”
and the election of Ronald Reagan to national office are some of the factors that
influenced the programming and ideology of those involved in shaping and running Langton’s
programs in this early period.
Lyle Ashton Harris, Untitled (Mother),
1998, photograph.
From Alchemy, January 14–March 14, 1998.
Courtesy New Langton Arts.
Photo credit: 6th Street Studios.
3
and ends in 1991, the last year of director Renny Pritikin’s tenure. 2 Langton was characterized in
4
The second period begins at the point in 1983 when Langton relocated to 1246 Folsom Street
this period by an increasing professionalization, growth, success, and visibility. 3 Although there
5
were some in and around Langton who criticized these factors as antithetical to the core values
of the organization, 4 who said that administrative and funding needs were threatening the purity of
the artistic programming, a growing public came forward and embraced Langton and its success
as if they had discovered it themselves. So much of the experimental artwork 5 produced in relative
obscurity in the 1970s, at Langton and other artist spaces, was now increasingly visible in
museums and galleries. Works were selling for significant amounts and the mainstream news
media had caught on to the excitement of the day. This increased exposure brought the work of
the artist space to the general public for the very first time. Growth, wealth, and acquisition,
both inside the doors of the artist space and in society at large, became the model for success.
This directly impacted the original vision of Langton, and other artist spaces, that focused on
the practice of art first and the business later. The impact of a bullish stock market, the
increasing commodification of contemporary art, conservative political and religious movements,
and growing media attention, both positive and negative, were the primary factors influencing
the field during this time.
The third period extends from 1992 through 2001. This period was characterized by organizational
instability, poor public image, and the threat of extinction—a near full reversal from the previous
era. As the conservative governments of the Reagan/Bush years publicly criticized the values and
works with controversial sexual or religious content produced during this and the previous period,
the visibility of the artist space, and the artists it presented, became a liability. Congress, with
6
the help of public opinion shaped by a scandal-hungry news media, effectively dismantled federal
funding for the arts. By 1995, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was reduced to a
shadow of its former self with funding for artist spaces, experimental programming, and artists
eliminated. The withdrawal of federal support for living artists and contemporary art impacted
artist spaces immediately and adversely. Many closed their doors permanently. 6 As artist spaces
became less and less viable, more and more of their leadership nationwide emigrated to the side
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of the “enemy” 7 to work in major museums and theaters, helping those institutions address the
new contemporary art market and its audiences. Other employees dropped out completely, packing
their bags and moving to the for-profit sector, exhausted by the fight. Those that made it past
these changes saw the urban development boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s as the final
blow. Rising real estate costs forced many urban artist spaces, especially in New York and San
Francisco, out of their rented properties and into the street. Without a place to present work to
the audiences, many more institutions closed.
Can the future be seen in the past What do these institutions really represent Are they valuable in
8
and of themselves Who cares about these spaces and why How is success or failure measured It
seems to me that the value system artist spaces made concrete in the 1970s was so effectively
reflected in the organizations themselves and the work produced in them, that the artist space
can be defined as the material expression of an ideology. 8 By exploring how that material expression
passed through periods of cultural, social, and political change, one can better understand how
value systems have changed in American society at large over the past twenty to thirty years. One
can better understand how what was once alternative (1970s), then more mainstream (1980s), is
now without significant visibility (1990s, 2000s) and struggling to remain in existence.
. .
. . . . . .. . . . 10
W what IS is AN an ST artist space SPA CE
If alternative (artist) spaces are to be maintained only out of inertia or out of nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s (as the only surviving
institutions of the counterculture), then they are not worth the effort. If, on the other hand, artists’ organizations engage with contemporary
artistic and social concerns, if they serve contemporary artists’ needs, media, and goals, and if they make possible a
re-imagining of society and human life that neither the right wing’s unified culture nor the art world’s museum culture is capable
of, then their survival is indeed crucial, not only to the art world but to the wider society as well.
Glen Harper, “Alternative Futures,”
9
in Organizing Artists: A Document and Directory of the National Association of Artists Organizations (1992) 9
Many of the earliest artist spaces in the United States were established sometime between 1965
and 1975. They were built as a home by and for artists to support the broadest range of artistic
expression possible in response to the dearth of presenting opportunities that a sizable group of
experimental practitioners nationwide were facing. They emerged as an underground reaction to
traditional presenting institutions such as museums, with their mandates to collect art; mainstream
theaters, with their marketing strategies directing artistic selection; and galleries, also
with a sales-based business model. Like many other progressive associations of this era, the artist
space movement, 10 and the value system it embodied, was staunchly anti-establishment, culturally
inclusive (at least in principle), and politically progressive.
The reader should note that an in-depth discussion of each of the three periods will be presented
in the final thesis. This reading provides the thesis introduction, an elemental overview of the
artist space governance model, and a review of events that led to the current state of the field,
specifically using New Langton Arts as an example.
Artist spaces proliferated largely, although not exclusively, in urban centers with a proportionately
high number of young artists and decent studio space. Collectively, artist spaces embodied a
11
national movement that was an alternative to the mainstream art dialogue and a living example of
how the sum of the parts is larger than the whole. Before going into the specifics of the history of
New Langton Arts, it’s important to understand some basic principles guiding the field at large. 11
artist run: As the name suggests, artist spaces are artist run, meaning both members of the
board and staff are recognized and credentialed artists. No hobbyists need apply. National guidelines
require that boards and staff be represented at least as equally by professional artists as
12
they are by career administrators and businesspeople. All curatorial decisions are made by a
team of professional artists who are volunteer members of the board of directors. Choices are
made without additional evaluation or approval from the staff or board. No second-guessing by a
higher authority. There are no oversight committees questioning the authority of the artists within
the institution. 12 This governance model assures each artist a vote in the system. By contrast,
museums, galleries, and mainstream theaters are managed and programmed by professional
administrators who once may have practiced and generally are not practicing artists currently.
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Amy Knowles, 2x10x10x10x1.
Performance date: September 25, 2001.
Courtesy New Langton Arts. Photo credit: Nancy Ericsson.
Nao Bustamante, Say No More.
Performance dates: January 10–11, 2002.
Courtesy New Langton Arts. Photo credit: Nancy Ericsson.
not-for-profit/not-for-sale: Most artist spaces are intentionally set up as nonprofits with 501c3
federal tax status, allowing the institution to receive contributions for a work in advance of its
production. This removes the pressure on artists to make art with a built-in sale value and allows
for a broader range of artistic expression. The not-for-profit model was both a fashionable and
practical alternative to a profit-making model in the early years. In their purest forms, artist
spaces do not sell work or rely significantly on ticket sales to support the production of a work.
This hard-line no-sale policy has eroded over time, however, with artist spaces needing to find
new ways to subsidize their work without NEA funding. Sales are now a significant measure of
13
financial health and an important source of income. Art sales, auctions, and ticket revenues are
the main source of income replacing lost federal grants. 13
multi/interdisciplinary: Many artist spaces also challenge the modernist position that holds
painting and sculpture as the highest art forms by encouraging experimentation across areas of
study. This doesn’t mean that painting and sculpture are not represented. It merely implies a
search for work that is nontraditional in form and content. Organizations like New Langton Arts,
Artist Space (New York City), Diverseworks (Houston), Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago), and
others were developed as multidisciplinary sites presenting concerts, performances, readings,
exhibitions, and screenings of film and video in a single facility. Often the crossover of audiences,
many of whom are working artists, and the critical dialogue developed among these
disciplines encouraged collaboration among genres. This crossover is evidenced in theater-based
presenters as well, such as Antennae Theater (Sausalito, California) or the Kitchen (New York
City), where new media, performance, and music are commonly mixed in a single presentation.
art is work: Although not always reaching the goal of fully paying for an artwork before its fabri-
14
cation, artist spaces do require that artists receive at least a fee payment and hopefully adequate
production funding. Not everyone is paid the same across the field, or even within a single institution,
and not everyone is paid adequately, but the standard requirement of payment for work is
nationwide. 14 This requirement stems from artists’ commonly held perception that they and their
work are devalued in society. Artists remain very conscious of long-held stereotypes about them
taking from rather than giving to their communities. By stating that artists’ work is valuable and
productive, artist spaces make a strong and visible public gesture about the politics of work and
the value of artistic practice. This position redirects popular representations of the artist away
from some of the most disparaging labels (e.g., that artists are cons, as in “con artist,” or lazy
bohemians, or that artistic genius is a product of insanity). Artists are elevated to the status of
team players, even outstandingly innovative members of the workforce.
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Much of the community-based, collective work in San Francisco’s local art history blurs the line
of distinction between art and work by modeling new and innovative strategies for addressing
social problems. Examples include Bonnie Sherk’s The Farm, a working farm in the city of San
Francisco; the Clarion Alley Mural Project, a neighborhood renewal effort of a group of mural and
graffiti artists; and Rhodessa Jones’s Medea Project, a theater program of the San Bruno County
Jail for incarcerated women. The inventiveness of their social interventions has brought considerable
public attention and funding to each of these artist/producers.
Finally, artist spaces require that artists retain full ownership and rights to the work produced,
even if the organization pays for the entire project. Any profit-sharing arrangements would be in
conflict with the vision of the artist space to support free expression and the rights of the artists.
local focus/focal locus: In most cases, artist spaces were realized through the efforts of a dedicated
group of people in a specific local community. Artist spaces are predominantly social
spaces that require the presence of a very inspired and committed collective of individuals, people
who live in a particular place with enough time and resources to contribute to their growth. This
is primarily because these start-ups do not come with the not-for-profit equivalent of venture capital.
The Langton network of donors, artists, board members, volunteers, and underpaid staff comprises
about one thousand people in any given year, most fully donating their time and services.
Working with volunteers who are given a high level of authority within the institution also assures
that the individual career interests of paid staff don’t influence the programming direction of the
15
institution. The artist space governance model that prioritizes the skills of volunteer artist/curators
on the board of directors, members who rotate off on a regular basis, promotes the inflow of ideas
from multiple sources. Given that the artist/curators are also living in the area, with direct access
to their community of peers, the focus on local work is natural. Of course cultural, political, and
aesthetic issues from outside the region are influential, but when it comes to the very essential
motivations of the artist space, the local value system remains dominant. 15
new work: Artist spaces are producers of new artworks. They are the research and development
arm or laboratory of the global art ecology. Artist spaces are facilitators of artists’ ideas, unafraid
to support the unknown and embracing the challenge of invention, especially when something
can be made out of nearly nothing. And lots can be made out of nearly nothing. In Langton’s
early years, the focus was on work that could be put up and taken down, made and removed,
performed and remembered all in a single theater/gallery/studio space. A 1980 mission statement
described the work presented at Langton as “time bound art forms.” This was strictly in opposition
to the values of the museum system that made even more precious artworks that stood
the test of time, made with materials that were archivally sound, like bronze and oil paint. At
Langton, and at other spaces, the idea was important, how to communicate effectively came
MILLER | 056 Marie Sester, Artifice + Sensation, 1999, video installation. From Côte Ouest.
Courtesy New Langton Arts. Photo credit: 6th Street Studios.

next, and thirdly, a consideration of historical preservation. An idea can exist without an object to
represent it. It can be a memory or a story told to another and passed on in time. It doesn’t need
to be made for storage in an air-conditioned vault and preserved for posterity.
Jim Pomeroy, installation of performance components including
invented instruments, shower curtain, costumes, ca. 1978–1989, mixed media.
From Jim Pomeroy: A Retrospective, June 9–July 24, 1999.
Courtesy New Langton Arts. Photo credit: 6th Street Studios.
invisible spaces: If the artist space’s standards of practice described here are not clear or selfevident
today, it is because the cultural ecology surrounding the institutions has shifted in both
dramatic and subtle ways. In the most extreme sense, the United States’ conservative political
and cultural climate of the past twenty years has nearly fully subsumed the values of the 1960s
and 1970s that gave birth to the artist space. Artist spaces have been weaned from federal funding
prematurely, the founding leadership has “graduated” to bigger and better funded institutions,
and there is more competition from mainstream entertainment providers, be they commercial or
nonprofit. Museums and big-budget theater companies have adopted the artists that were first
discovered in the artist space. What was once on the surface now is obscured partially by a new
and significantly antithetical value system.
If artist spaces are to remain viable, they need to be seen on the surface of a cultural landscape
that has changed quite dramatically since the 1960s/1970s. It is in their materiality, in terms of
the physical, structural model described here, that there is an opportunity to make artist spaces
more visible by reminding us that these spaces are the only artist-designed component of the art
making system, expressing the value system of the makers first. To see how this expression manifests
itself over time, over the past twenty-five years, it is beneficial to look at the interaction
between artist spaces and broader cultural factors. Following is one example in the form of a very
summarized overview of New Langton Arts since its founding.
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new langton arts: looking back (to see the present)/a summary review: At its inception in the
mid-1970s, New Langton Arts, then 80 Langton Street, encapsulated a vision shared by many
experimental artists working in many different arenas. It created a true home where there wasn’t
one before, at least one with a reliable permanent address. It was a meeting place where artworks
and artists commingled in an environment that encouraged opinion, expression, and freedom. It
was protected ground where new ideas and difference could be cultivated safely and could be
cherished. The place, as much as the participants and the events that occurred there, was the
physical manifestation of an ideology, one that challenged and questioned accepted standards of
artistic practice. Its existence alone represented a conquest over the status quo—it was a factory
for manufacturing dis-consent that stood up visibly against the factories that produced consent.
Its success, measured by the quality and number of influential works produced and the enthusiasm
of its audiences, implied a future as a working model of individuality and free expression.
And as the decade of the 1980s began, it seemed that the artist space model was indeed the
ideal it purported to be. Langton, like many of its peers nationally, benefited directly from the
storm of increased visibility and funding. NEA support swelled, private foundations and individual
donors generously funded Langton, audiences grew, and press coverage was celebratory. What
began as a small and intimate club, earning its reputation largely through word-of-mouth publicity,
suddenly emerged from peaceful obscurity. In 1983, Langton moved from its first home on
Langton Street to become New Langton Arts at 1246 Folsom Street, not far away. As funders
and press began to see the influence that the work produced in artist spaces was having on
contemporary artistic practice as a whole, they flocked there too with admiration and charitable
contributions. These were the swan days.
As the decade progressed towards the 1990s, the increased visibility of artist spaces, and the
works they presented, garnered the attention of the leadership of a growing conservative movement
in the United States. That leadership was centered in the United States Congress, the White
House administration, and Christian fundamentalist groups. The efforts of these powerful bodies,
16 17
provoked and inflamed by the mainstream news media, forced the dismantling of the NEA, the
main source of support feeding the growth of the national artist space community. What began
with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his first successful attempt to defund the
NEA 16 continued into the present with the most recent chairman, Michael Hammond, who came
into office in time to preside over the reversal of two NEA grants. 17 It was the visibility that was
brought on by the success of the artist space movement and the bravado associated with the
content issues addressed in the works produced through that movement that ultimately led to
its destruction.
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Ruben Lorch Miller, Falls, 2001,
mixed media installation with audio.
From LifeLike, June 27–July 28, 2001.
Courtesy New Langton Arts.
Photo credit: 6th Street Studios.

The period beginning in 1992 is characterized as one of organizational transition, a weakened
18
public image, and financial instability. Not only was the country in economic recession, but, like
its colleagues nationally, Langton suffered an added financial loss when many of its NEA programs
were eliminated in 1995. 18 Negative stereotypes of artists persisted in the news media,
fanning the flames of conservative attacks on artists and institutions that represented them.
These national pressures unfortunately were not the only sources of Langton’s woes in the 1990s.
Not only was decreasing NEA support a problem for an organization that had known only how to
grow since it opened its doors, but between 1992 and 1993 Langton experienced a downward
spiral that few thought it would survive. In 1992, Renny Pritikin, the executive director of thirteen
years, resigned to take a highly visible position at San Francisco’s new Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts; a relocation plan was cancelled in the middle of a capital campaign; the executive
director who was hired to replace Pritikin resigned within a year; and to head off a major deficit,
the board cut the budget in half, firing most of the staff to meet severely reduced income projec-
19
tions. By 1993, I was hired with co-director Christiane Robbins to nurse a greatly weakened
institution back to the memory of what it once was. By 1998, after several years of rebuilding
(including debt repayment and infrastucture building), the organization had found its own
ground once again. 19
As the economy turned around in the late 1990s and into 2000, the picture seemed to brighten.
Unlike many of its counterparts nationally, Langton survived. Having paid off its debt, Langton
20
fully restructured its staff and board and was prepared to receive the generosity of the masses, as
stock market wealth promised to fill the empty bank accounts of investors who in turn would
share their fortune with the nonprofit sector. Before this dream could be realized, a disaster
emerged in the form of a real estate crisis. Few anticipated the development rush in San
Francisco and other major cities around the country as the dot-com industry bought up warehouse
property, once the purview of artists and artist spaces. In San Francisco this boom resulted
in a bust or near demise for many long-standing arts organizations. 20 Still recovering from the
loss of federal funding and the resulting institutional changes, artist spaces saw their facility
leases up for renewal at exorbitantly high rates. Many who could not secure a new affordable
lease closed their doors.
. . .. . . .... . . . .
longevity. It is about how the values of American society have shifted from individuality to homogeneity,
from experimental to traditional, from the political left to the right. It is about how the
American cultural landscape has changed, endangering elements in it that do not have meaning
in it or simply can’t be seen. In creating physical places to house their ideas, the pioneers of
the artist space movement must have thought they were making a more permanent, stable, and
visible place to store them in. It appears, however, that they did not anticipate that the reliance
on certain mechanisms of cultivation, be they funding or public opinion or a space to work in or
charismatic leadership, creates vulnerability. As these vulnerabilities challenge the character
and strength of the original vision, there is an opportunity to bring the artist space movement
back into focus, to recover its values from the past by bringing them visibly into the present
through the telling of stories and writing of histories.
. .. ....
. . . .
. .
.
. . .
.
The artist space movement is a story of nurturance of something cherished in a climate of hostility.
It is a story about how social values can be made material, but this is no assurance of their
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NOTES
1 As of 1992, there were approximately 219 full members of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations
(NAAO), a national membership organization based in Washington, D.C. To be a full member, the organization
had to adhere to the standards of practice including having professional artists making curatorial decisions and
paying honoraria to participating artists, among other tenets. Members hailed from nearly every state in the
nation. Annual budgets ranged from just under $50,000 to over $1,000,000. Canada’s equivalent to NAAO is
the Artist-Run Centers.
2 Renny Pritikin’s staff leadership at Langton began in 1979 when he was hired by the board of directors as the
business coordinator, one of the initial staff positions, leaving his role as board president to take the job. Later,
as executive director, Renny continued to lead the organization until he was hired by San Francisco’s Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in 1992. (YBCA is a non-collecting museum and theater developed by the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency in the Yerba Buena Gardens district.) Renny’s move was perceived by some as
a threat to Langton’s future, as board members and others feared his artistic and fund-raising contacts would
follow him to his new job in a highly visible and well-funded institution. And although this leadership transition
did impact Langton deleteriously, other factors, such as the sagging economy of the day, the Culture Wars, and
the commerciality of the art market were also influential in Langton’s “red” days. By the late 1990s Langton was
in recovery, regaining ground and public credibility in its artistic program and organizational solidarity.
3 Success, growth, and visibility were three characteristics that generated funder attention in this period.
Institutions were rewarded for their successes, measured in terms of organizational growth and visibility, with
new and increased support. These successes facilitated more growth that in turn made the institution more
likely to receive more funding. Langton’s first institutional funders were the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Van Loben Sels Foundation in 1978. By 1990, foundation support had expanded to include over twenty
institutional funding sources that supported the organization at some point in its fifteen-year history.
Artist spaces professionalized in formalizing their staff and board structures, improving both their fund-raising
abilities and their services to the field. Langton was first staffed in the late 1970s by a program coordinator
and a business coordinator. The titles were intentionally chosen to reflect the staff’s role in facilitating board-led
artistic programming rather than dictating its direction. In announcing Renny’s appointment to the position of
business coordinator, board member Robert MacDonald said, “We do not have a manager, someone who controls
and manipulates the institution” (80 Langton Street: June 1978–May 1979, 2). Eventually the positions of
development and executive directors were established, putting more and more of the institutional responsibilities
on the paid staff and bringing Langton closer to a museum model, one that was familiar to funders and
seemingly more effective in communicating to them.
4 Jim Pomeroy, an artist and one of the founders of Langton, was one of the most articulate and vocal critics.
In describing the condition of the artist space in the 1980s, Pomeroy wrote:
“Growth oriented VAOs (Visual Artists Organization was the name of the NEA’s funding category for artist
spaces) seek wider audiences and new sources of revenue. Corporate, foundation, and wealthy patronage is
available to organizations with proven track records and like longevity … Frustration with increasing proportions
of art monies drained by intermediate administrative costs, consultancies, studies, and legions of new nonartist
professionals, stirs demand for direct support for individuals from state, federal, foundation, and corporate
sectors …” Pomeroy, “Provocative Apocrypha,” Afterimage (October 1986): 13.
5 Installation art, performance art, video art, and interdisciplinary practices, for example.
6 Of the artist spaces that have closed since this time, some of the most notable are the Washington Project
for the Arts, the Washington, D.C., artist space that hosted Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment when it
was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989, and Chicago’s Randolph Street Gallery. For many years
these organizations were exemplary VAOs (Visual Artists Organizations), receiving the highest level of support
from the NEA before the VAO category was eliminated in the mid-1990s.
“Randolph Street Gallery did not close for any one reason. Built on the support of government and private
foundations, RSG was able to present a wealth of valuable art to its audiences. But no one player felt financially
responsible for the survival of the RSG space: The NEA’s budget was cut, private foundations shifted their
funding trends, members can only give so much, volunteer board members could give time but not money, and
staff can only work so hard. The evolution of the nonprofit sphere and personal evolutions within the staff left
RSG with a vacuum at the top, and funders had become more skeptical of consensus-based organizations.
Trends in art shifted to different concerns. RSG did not close simply because it was a bad business venture,
and it did not close because it did not attract enough new audiences. RSG closed because it could not uphold
its mission without compromise.” Kathryn Hixson, “Randolph Street Gallery: What Happened” National
Endowment for the Arts Publications, online at http://arts.endow.gov/pub/Lessons/Casestudies/Randolph.html.
7 Here are several examples: Former Langton director Jock Reynolds left his job as executive director at the
Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, D.C.) to run the Addison Gallery of Art (Andover, Massachusetts).
Philip Brookman, Washington Project for the Arts curator also during the Mapplethorpe period, picked up the
position of curator of media arts and photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Locally, Jennifer Dowley, executive
director of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California), resigned to take a position at the
National Endowment for the Arts, and Renny Pritikin moved to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
8 The ideology is one that holds artists and their work in the highest regard. It rejects the old standard that
curators, collectors, dealers, critics, or business professionals know what it takes to make and run a successful
venue for the production of new art forms. Its expression is made physical within the artist space governance
model to be discussed in the following section, “What Is an Artist Space”
9 Glen Harper, “Alternative Futures,” in Organizing Artists: A Document and Directory of the National
Association of Artists Organizations (1992), 57.
10 Like the civil rights, free speech, and feminist social movements, artist spaces proliferated first as an unofficial
collective effort, challenging cultural and political values that did not reflect those within its community,
and emerged organically across a broad geographic region within a definable period in time. By 1982, the
movement formalized itself with the National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO), which was founded
as an advocacy and membership organization for artist-run spaces. Artist spaces also were called “alternative
spaces,” further identifying their position relative to the establishment institutions. For these reasons, the artist
space community, the institutions, and their values can be organized and defined as a movement.
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11 Most of these standards were in the eligibility guidelines of the NEA’s Visual Artists Organizations (VAO)
program and were required for full membership into the National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO),
a membership consortium of the national artist space community. With the elimination of the VAO program in
the 1995 NEA cuts and the loss of NAAO’s influence nationally, these standards have almost fully relaxed.
12 This is the same governance model, a peer review system, that was used by the NEA in selecting programming
and that Congress worked so hard to dismantle in the 1990s. Charging nepotism in order to gain control
over the decisions made on the committee level, Congress required the NEA to add steps of oversight to the
process. The most damaging requirement is that all grant selections made by the peer review panel are subject
to review and possible recision by the Independent Commission, a White House–appointed committee that is
politically conservative.
13 These efforts are much more labor intensive, leading to staff and board burnout and general disillusionment
caused by the gap between the idealism and the reality of working in an artist space. As artist spaces become
more and more administratively burdened, an ideological question arises: Can artist spaces be both effective
fund-raising machines and producers of experimental artworks
14 The fee payment requirement mirrors the values of the labor and civil rights movements, strong influences
on the artist space governance model. The labor movement recognizes the value of all forms of work. The civil
rights movement, as well as the feminist movement, works to uncover cultural stereotypes, sexism, and racism
across all sectors of society. The values of these movements were carried into the artist space community, not
only in recognizing cultural and gender difference as an important value, but as a way of elevating the role of
the artist and artists’ work in society.
15 The Côte Ouest program was a French-initiated and funded exhibition series that was organized by New
Langton Arts and featured the work of Marie Sester, Mathieu Laurette, and Rebecca Bournigault. Although
none of the artists were from the San Francisco Bay Area, the exhibition was carefully selected to reflect the
media, performance, and narrative languages and interventions that Bay Area artists employ in their work. In
the case of Marie Sester, seen in illustration, here is an artist experimenting in new technologies, e.g., largeformat
X-rays of vehicles used in cross-border customs, video, computer animation, sound, and installation.
16 In 1981, his first year in office, President Ronald Reagan appointed a task force to review the activities of
the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). That task force recommended a radical 50
percent cut in the budget, which Congress limited to a 10 percent reduction. By 1995, the NEA and NEH programs
barely escaped whole from congressional reauthorization with nearly all individual artist fellowships and
organizational grants eliminated and the budget cut by 40 percent. In addition, Congress mandated that all
NEA funds were to be eliminated by 1997. The latter event did not occur.
17 The grants were for a retrospective exhibition of works by performance artist John Pope L. at the Institute
for Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and for a production of Homebody/Kabul, Tony
Kushner’s play about Afghanistan. Michael Hammond died one week into his service as NEA chair.
18 In 1992, at the height of federal support, Langton received $125,000 or 27 percent of its annual budget
from the NEA. NEA funding for individual artists and annual artistic program support was cancelled in 1995,
which eliminated the Regional Initiative Artist Regranting Program (RIARP), a project of the NEA, the
Rockefeller Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Langton was one of RIARP’s host
administrators and awarded $60,000 a year in new works production funding to regional artists. NEA programs
that funded Langton’s music, literature, video, visual arts, and performance program nearly every year were also
cancelled.
Langton has replaced NEA funding by expanding its annual artist auction and by raising over $125,000 each
year in unrestricted cash and in-kind contributions. It is a very labor-intensive effort. Although essential to the
organization’s financial health and visibility, the auction does conflict with the original noncommercial vision of
the organization by relying on the art market, the appetites of art collectors, and the saleable contributions of
artists.
19 To accomplish these goals, the board and staff focused artistic programming on the highest standards in
the production of new work, secured a long-term lease at a low rate, invigorated the collective model it was
founded on by increasing the authority of volunteer committees on the board, improved financial record-keeping
and other administrative responsibilities, and restated the artist-run authority on the board of directors, among
other efforts. Currently the staff is 25 percent and the board is 40 percent practicing artists.
20 American Indian Contemporary Arts, Dancers Group Footwork, Downtown Rehearsal Studios, Art Explosion,
San Francisco Cinematec, Mission Dance, San Francisco Camerawork, and 9th Street Media Center are among
many institutions that have either closed or relocated as an emergency response to doubling and tripling of
their rents with the space crunch (1998–2001). Although the real estate market has calmed significantly since
the economic downturn and decline of the dot-com industry, rental payments are still far from the reach of
most institutions. Langton managed to secure an affordable five-year lease through March 2006.
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