Established | 1965 |
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Location | 1446 Market St, San Francisco, California U.S. |
Director | Allison Snopek and Scott Nielsen |
Website | www |
Intersection for the Arts, established in 1965, is the oldest alternative non-profit art space in San Francisco, California. Intersection's reading series is the longest continuous reading series outside of an academic institution in the state of California.
Intersection produces and presents new and experimental work in the fields of literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. Intersection's artists regularly provide classes and workshops to the local community. Intersection also maintains an incubation program for emerging literary, visual and performing arts groups.
Intersection is located in the SoMa district of San Francisco, on 925 Mission Street, between 5th and 6th Streets.
Intersection was founded in the Tenderloin in 1965 by an interfaith coalition of three churches. It was originally called "Intersection: Center for Religion and the Arts". [1] [2] [3] The organization began as a merger of several faith-based experiments that were using art to reach disenfranchised neighborhood youth while also providing artists who were conscientious objectors with an alternative to serving in the Vietnam War. The founding Director was Laird Sutton and full-time staff members were poetry director Adrian Ravarour, Tom Dobson, Paul Donetti, and Juan Elorreaga. By 1967, it moved to 756 Union Street [4] and remained in North Beach for 20 years. Robin Williams, Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello), Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Coyote, Bill Irwin and Country Joe McDonald performed there. Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ishmael Reed and Margaret Atwood read there. [5]
In 1985 it lost its North Beach space and a year later, relocated to 766 Valencia Street in the Mission District, moving again in 1989, to a former furniture store on Valencia Street. [6] Campo Santo Theatre Company, Joe Goode and Erika Chong Shuch, and Marcus Shelby performed there. Denis Johnson and Dave Eggers read there.
Then it relocated to 925 Mission Street, Suite 109, a 5M space in The Chronicle building at Fifth Street and Mission Street.
Over the years, Intersection has evolved into a more diverse organization with a more prominent profile, but maintains strong ties with the local community.
Intersection has worked with a range of artists including Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Ondaatje, David Henry Hwang, Carolyn Forché, and Ishmael Reed. Recently, it has developed and presented work with Jessica Hagedorn, Alice Walker, bell hooks, John Trudell, Denis Johnson, Lebbeus Woods, Mike Davis, Dave Eggers, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Stefon Harris, Naomi Iizuka, Claudia Bernardi, Joe Goode, and Gary Snyder, as well as thousands of emerging artists.
Intersection for the Arts produces anywhere from 6-11 theatrical and dance productions, 10-12 literary readings, 12-16 concerts, and 4-6 art exhibits or installations in a given year, as well as workshops in each discipline taught by the resident artists. Intersection's building also hosts a variety of community, social, and artistic events for other San Francisco artistic organizations throughout the year, including the Litquake Festival, the Jackson Award, and the Phelan Award.
Intersection for the Arts's resident artists include the theater company Campo Santo (Margo Hall, Sean San Jose, Luis Saguar, Michael Torres - Founders. Denis Johnson - Resident Playwright), Erika Chong Shuch and her dance-theater company the Erika Shuch Performance (ESP) Project, the jazz musician Howard Wiley, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Youth Speak's theater program The Living Word Project, and photographer Scott Chernis.
Outside of academic institutions, Intersection for the Arts' literary series is the longest continual reading series in the state of California. The longevity of the series has attracted an increasing number of high-profile writers, but the series continues to regularly showcase the work of emerging, local writers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In recent years, Intersection has complemented their literary series with the Independent Press Spotlight series, hosting talks with members of San Francisco independent publishers and literary magazines scene while authors perform readings from recent issues. Participants in this series include AK Press, The Believer , City Lights Publishers, ColorLines Magazine , Fourteen Hills, Heyday Books, LiP Magazine , Manic D Press, McSweeney’s, Mercury House, New American Writing, Switchback, Tachyon Publications, University of California Press, Zoetrope: All-Story , and ZYZZYVA as well as newer magazines, journals, and publishers.
In addition to producing its own work, Intersection for the Arts provides members of its incubation program assistance in funding, developing, and promoting their artists' work. Through fiscal sponsorship, the program has encouraged funding agencies and contributors to take risks in funding new projects and emerging artists by ensuring that the funds will be well managed and spent according to the funder's guidelines.
Currently the Intersection Incubator provides support to more than 120 art projects and organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area across numerous disciplines and levels of experience. Several organizations that have been in the incubation program have gone on to have lasting impact in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Youth Speaks, Flyaway Productions, The Traveling Jewish Theater, and Galería de la Raza.
The Mabuhay Gardens, also known as The Fab Mab or The Mab, was a former San Francisco nightclub, located at 443 Broadway Street, in North Beach on the Broadway strip area best known for its striptease clubs. It closed in 1987.
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately 220 undergraduates and 112 graduate students were enrolled in 2021. The institution was accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), and was a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD). The school closed permanently in July 2022.
South of Market (SoMa) is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, situated just south of Market Street. It contains several sub-neighborhoods including South Beach, Yerba Buena, and Rincon Hill.
The Mission District, commonly known as the Mission, is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. One of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the Mission District's name is derived from Mission San Francisco de Asís, built in 1776 by the Spanish. The Mission is historically one of the most notable centers of the city's Chicano/Mexican-American community.
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Precita Eyes Muralists Association is a community-based non-profit muralist and arts education group located in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1977 by Susan and Luis Cervantes.
The Intersection for the Arts Literary Series is the longest running literary series outside of an academic institution in the state of California. Organized and maintained by Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the literary series presents regular readings by emerging local writers and prominent authors.
Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) in San Francisco, California, is the oldest multidisciplinary arts nonprofit addressing Asian Pacific American issues. The organization's mission is to produce and present art that enriches and empowers Asian Pacific American communities. Notable participants include author and Asian American studies scholar Russell Leong, playwright and author Jessica Hagedorn, author Janice Mirikitani, poet and historian Al Robles, and actor and filmmaker Lane Nishikawa.
Litquake is San Francisco's annual literary festival. Originally named Litstock, the festival events took place in a single day in Golden Gate Park in the spring of 1999. It now has a two-week run in mid-October, as well as year-round programs and workshops.
New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 and located the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the United States, and New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art and involving artists in the decision-making process. Its first directors were Judy Moran and Renny Pritikin.
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The Museum of Performance + Design, formerly the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, is located in the Bayview District of San Francisco, California at 2200 Jerrold Avenue, Ste. T. The Museum collects and makes accessible materials about the performing arts, with a special emphasis on documenting and preserving the San Francisco Bay Area’s rich and diverse performing arts heritage from the Gold Rush to the present. The museum produces public and educational programs, provides library services to researchers, and conservation and archival services to performing arts institutions. The Museum's collection includes personal papers of prominent artists, original costumes and design renderings, audio-visual recordings of live performances, original artwork, other artifacts, and ephemera. The Museum also serves as the official archives for many local performing arts organizations including the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, Stern Grove Festival, and the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.
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Erika Chong Shuch is an American theatrical performer, director, choreographer, and educator based in San Francisco, California. Her work has appeared on stages in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea.
Megan Wilson is an American visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Known for her large-scale installations, public projects, and street art, she incorporates a broad range of pop culture methodologies and aesthetics to address conceptual interests that include home, homelessness, social and economic justice, anti-capitalism, impermanence and generosity. Wilson's art practice is influenced by Buddhism and Vipassanā meditation, often creating work that is conceptually rooted in elements of these practices and that is intentionally ephemeral or given away.
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Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.
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