The Thrilling, Improbable Return of San Francisco

For a vibe check on San Francisco’s unique cultural ethos, you can’t do much better than City Lights bookstore, cofounded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It’s got to be the only bookstore with sections for “Anarchism” and “Class War”; no bestsellers to be found, but plenty of staff picks. Though capitalism isn’t totally frowned upon — you can buy a Beat-themed onesie for $20 — it is daring, independent, opinionated, and a touch down-at-heel in a somehow reassuring way.

On some level it’s amazing that, given the city’s transformations over the decades, City Lights has managed to remain and thrive, in its low-key way. Its continued existence is a testament to San Francisco’s sui generis character: You can take an Uber, or soon your self-driving car, to a place that may persuade you to be suspicious of both locally developed technologies. That contrast is one of the reasons San Francisco may be the country’s most dynamic cultural hub at this moment, a place where pleasant surprises and juxtapositions are found up and down every steep hill.

City Lights is also a publisher, and when it brought out Allen Ginsberg’s seminal book of poems, Howl — written in San Francisco in 1955–56 — it helped ignite the Beat movement, which would prove to be one of the city’s largest cultural contributions of the 20th century. The way the Beats interrogated American culture, emphasizing freedom and personal expression over groupthink, epitomizes how San Francisco has followed the dictum to Think Different long before the tech giant Apple, located just a few miles to the south, used the phrase as its motto.

When I arrived in the city last year for San Francisco Art Week — loosely organized around the excellent fair FOG Art + Design — an idea dawned on me. City Lights seems to stand in opposition to San Francisco’s role as a tech hub, whose innovations over the last 30 years are responsible for perhaps the greatest societal transformations of all time. But in fact, both are strands of the same impulse: refusing to accept how things are, questioning everything, and gamely offering new ideas, even if they seem radical.

Viewed that way, perhaps it is no surprise that the most traditional of the city’s arts organizations, from the ballet to the symphony and the old-line museums, are all experimenting with technology lately, in ways that might be scoffed at elsewhere. It’s a cultural flowering that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

The backdrop for all this, of course, is San Francisco’s malignant media image in the past several years as an out-of-control metropolis with an acute homelessness problem, slow to recover from the ravages of the pandemic. While that perception is overblown, it’s precisely all the grousing, from both local and external voices, that is supercharging the amazingly vigorous scene. The top-tier civic organizations don’t have a choice: They must evolve and take risks.

Christopher Bedford, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, notes that a civic rough patch can actually feed artistic production and creativity. “Great art is not made on Mount Olympus,” he says. “The difficulty here, which is the long shadow of Covid, is leading individuals and institutions to be exponentially more inventive than they have been.” His sentiments are echoed by Anne Lai, the executive director of SFFILM, who contends that the city is “going through an evolution — but it’s not dying.”

In addition to year-round programming, Lai’s organization runs the San Francisco International Film Festival, the longest-running such event in the country, established in 1957, long before seemingly every place had a film festival. (In its first year it persuaded iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to attend.) The April event has evolved as an important stop on the prestige circuit, given how many members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences live there — think of all the Bay Area film greats, from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to the folks behind Pixar — the third-highest such concentration in the country.

“A start-up museum is fun, and a very San Francisco concept,” says Ali Gass, the museum’s dynamic director. “It’s an adventure.” She adds, laughing: “At times, terrifying.” In addition to Gass and her fresh attitude, the ICA SF benefits from a young board of directors chaired by former Facebook honcho Ethan Beard. As a Kunsthalle, “we can move really fast,” Gass says (not completing the phrase with “and break things,” which tech moguls are known to add).

Unlike the cutthroat art scenes in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco’s has a friendly vibe — but it’s less aimless bonhomie than strategic alliance. “The collaborative aspect of this city is unique and special,” says Gass. Her point is illustrated by Rupy C. Tut’s A Drop in the Desert, shown last year at the ICA. Tut paints dreamlike figural scenes that seem to spring from illuminated manuscript pages, and that draw on her Punjabi heritage.

Gass and her staff discovered Tut at “The de Young Open,” an invitational show of local talent put on by the de Young Museum, one of the city’s major institutions, located across town. After seeing the work at the ICA, one of its trustees commissioned a companion piece and then donated it to SFMOMA, completing a triple bank shot of involvement by the city’s museums.

As the dealer Jessica Silverman puts it: “It’s an ecosystem.” Everything is connected, with nonprofits and the big market players exchanging ideas and talent in a way that benefits everyone. At 42, Silverman has emerged as the city’s most important contemporary art dealer. A Michigander by birth, she began her dealer journey in 2008 and has built up her practice along the way, moving to bigger and better spaces, culminating with a gleaming 5,000-square-foot space in Chinatown in 2021.

She shows at the top art fairs, including various iterations of Art Basel, and is known as the Bay Area’s go-to gallerist, both for her roster of stars (feminist icon Judy Chicago, Indigenous sculptor Rose B. Simpson, filmmaker Isaac Julien) but also for her ties to the most important area patrons. At last year’s FOG fair, she had the primo booth space right in front, unavoidable for anyone attending. Usually a dealer who has had such success would immediately open a space in New York or Los Angeles, or just move away — but not Silverman.

“The long-term plan is to double down on San Francisco,” she tells me at the packed-house opening of her Loie Hollowell painting show that I attended. (Hollowell is even becoming an auction star, with two of her works going for more than $1 million in the past few years.) “The collector base is so deep here, and there’s so much more to uncover.”

Silverman notes that she and her staff lean in to the Bay Area’s more relaxed ethos. “It comes down to getting up and saying hi to people when they walk in the door,” she says, versus the frosty New York gallery method of ignoring visitors. “We like to make them feel welcome and to be good hosts. We actually have a map of the Chinatown neighborhood that we hand out.”

For someone running an organization devoted to one of the more hidebound art forms, Rojo is highly aware of her city’s status as a tech hub. “We’re at the epicenter of AI, something that will transform our society but also our art,” she says. “We’re already collaborating with AI in our marketing materials” — using the technology to enhance the images of a hired photographer and ensuring the result is “ethically sourced” rather than scraped from the Internet. In the far future, she says, “there may be a combination of humans and enhanced reality” in ballet performances.

Just saying those seemingly radical words would not surprise Thomas Campbell, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and the Legion of Honor. The de Young’s summer 2024 show, “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style,” displayed 93 frocks by the likes of Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen — with a distinctly tech twist: It featured “Augmented Reality Mirrors” developed by Snap (a company founded by three Stanford students) that allowed visitors to virtually “try on” three gowns, adapting them to different shapes and sizes.

“We’re here in the birthplace of tech, and it’s natural that audiences want to see how we might use it,” says Campbell, formerly the director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his mind, it is one of the many ways local institutions are “firing on all cylinders,” he says. “We’re doing what San Franciscans always do. We have an audience for the traditional, but we have the audience for the avant-garde, too.” Campbell made a big push for contemporary art at the Met, but he’s arguably had even more success surfing the fine line between old and new on the West Coast, showing Botticelli drawings at the same time as work by the South African video and installation artist Lhola Amira.

A cultural renaissance isn’t the only transformation afoot in San Francisco. Downtown in particular is reshaping itself as a shopping and dining destination. Out are the offices and mid-priced retailers; in are a parade of new high-end hotels, restaurants, and luxury shops. • The biggest news: the reopening of the Transamerica Pyramid, that iconic Modernist jewel of the skyline, after a $400 million renovation led by Norman Foster. At its base you’ll now find Café Sebastian, a bistro from acclaimed Miami chef Brad Kilgore, along with a new bookstore, flower shop, and a tenants-only bar. Next door, Foster & Partners has rejuvenated the beloved Redwood Park, with its 50 towering redwood trees. • Just north, Michael and Lindsay Tusk (Quince, Cotogna) have reopened their beloved wine bar Verjus, which — along with its sister restaurants and former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s new developments — has helped establish Jackson Square as SF’s culinary and creative center of gravity. • Elsewhere in the city, Michelin has awarded stars to three recent arrivals: 7 Adams, a seasonal tasting-menu restaurant in Japantown; New Nordic Kiln, in Hayes Valley; and the perpetually jammed brunch go-to Hilda & Jesse in North Beach. • Nor is there a shortage of chic new places to stay. The Jay, a block from Transamerica, has a decadent, ’70s-inspired vibe. A fresh renovation of the Inn at the Presidio preserved its Georgian Revival elegance, not to mention its superlative views of the Golden Gate Bridge. And two classics are still glowing from their 2022 facelifts: The Sir Francis Drake in Union Square reopened with a smart new look as the Beacon Grand, and the former Mandarin Oriental was renovated and reflagged as the Four Seasons Embarcadero.  —Melinda Fulmer

Ted Loos has been covering arts and culture for more than 30 years. A longtime and frequent contributor to the New York Times, Loos also writes for WSJ. Magazine and is a contributing editor at Galerie magazine. He is based in New York City and the Hudson Valley.