Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Adrian Piper staged a number of collaborative performance events entitled Funk Lessons (1982–84) in which participants were invited to get down and party together. In the process of learning to discuss, dance, and listen to funk music, the events opened up individual awareness of the complex personal associations of this popular dance form with racial and cultural boundaries. The experie... More

For about two years now I have been living away from San Francisco, and I am constantly being confronted by the stereotypes people have of the art scene in the Bay Area. Apparently there are a lot of people who are quick to dismiss the art and artists in SF as being maybe not as serious as they are out here in New York. But by serious they mean hard work. Politics. Professionalism. Attitude. Getting Paid. Stuff like that. So I find myself wanting to tell the people I meet it’s not so simple, that it’s an apples & oranges comparison and that artists in San Francisco are not the crude stereotypes they make them out to be.

Still, it’s hard to fight a stereotype — especially one that has grains of truth in it. For better or worse, the San Francisco brand was writ large by the 1960s counterculture movement. Consider how, in 1967 during the Summer of Love at the first “Human Be-In,” Timothy Leary told a crowd of 30,000 people in Golden Gate Park to “Tune in, turn o... More

Thirty years ago this fall the artist Jim Pomeroy and SFMOMA curator Suzanne Foley were corresponding about his proposal to include his text “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” in her survey of 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance practices, Space/Time/Sound.  In light of recent discussions on Open Space about the New Langton Arts crisis and the role of nonprofit arts organizations, Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, here revisits Pomeroy’s analysis of modern art museums vs. artists’ spaces. Wonderfully, we ... More

During the New Langton Arts debate a few weeks ago, Renny Pritikin, who with his wife Judy Moran directed the organization in its first decade and more, mentioned to me an essay he’d written that elaborated some of the early ideas behind the institution. I asked him to send it my way, and a week later it arrived by mail. Called “The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists’ Organizations,” the essay connects the student movements of the 1960s — in particular,  ideas of participatory democracy espoused by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 — with the impulses and modes that defined Langton’s founding and first decade. You can find the original essay here; what follows below is a dialogue about the essay in retrospect. Renny is Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis.

JM: So, thanks again for this document. It’s interesting, and I think the reading you put fo... More

Julian Myers’ post on the recent turmoil at New Langton Arts gave rise to a robust and very necessary discussion about the state of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Looking beyond the immediate issues at Langton, I’d like to address the perceived conflict between the local and international art worlds. In the Bay Area, we have many world-class museums, universities and art colleges. We have the benefit of some of the world’s foremost artists, curators and critics, having chosen to work here. We have a wonderfully tight-knit and innovative arts community, full of experimentation and creative risk-taking. The smallness of our region allows for incubation of new ideas in an interdisciplinary context. Our location at the nexus of the East and the West gives us an unusually international perspective for such a small community. In theory, this should be the ideal place to be an arts worker. Yet there is an underlying tension here, too often expressed in buzzwords like R... More

Last week, in response to an announcement from the institution and a semi-public letter of resignation from its director Sandra Percival,  I posted that New Langton Arts has found itself in “serious financial jeopardy.” A conversation followed in the comments box here, mourning Langton’s loss (perhaps prematurely), diagnosing its... More

One of the country’s longest-running nonprofit arts centers has just announced that its “continued existence is in serious financial jeopardy.” While dispiriting announcements like this are common enough during the current economic recession, this loss promises to be particularly devastating. Founded in 1974, the organization has been a center of the San Francisco arts scene for the last three decades and more; it has served in that time as a vital laboratory for conceptual art, poetry, installation and performance – whi... More