On any given weekend, the Mission is abuzz with dozens of cultural events, which got me to wondering. If you held a global arts festival in the Mission, would anyone notice? The San Francisco International Arts Festival is betting that the neighborhood will get behind its plan to massively amplify the creative energy already coursing through the district.
Mostly held at the bayside Fort Mason campus since the mid-aughts, SFIAF made its mark on the West Coast arts scene by presenting a disparate array of dance, theater, music and multimedia artists, many of whom would otherwise be absent from Bay Area stages. Priced out of Fort Mason last year, the festival looked to partner with San Francisco State University. But when the school’s bureaucratic inertia led SFIAF to abandon that plan, the SFIAF’s 20th season ended up unfolding at venues around the Mission in June.
What struck Andrew Wood, SFIAF’s founder and executive director, was the difference between the depopulated Fort Mason campus on its usual Memorial Day weekend slot, “and the Mission on a regular weekend,” he said. “I’m really grateful for all our years at Fort Mason, where we learned how to run half a dozen venues at once. But on a bank holiday weekend, if we wanted to activate an extra venue we had to manage it ourselves. In the Mission, I realized there are so many venues, we could never manage them all.”
Looking to build on alliances established in June, Wood has been talking with various venues, clubs, restaurants and theaters around the neighborhood, from The Chapel to the Red Poppy Art House. On Nov. 29, SFIAF is inviting artists and Mission-based artists presenters to a community meeting about how the festival, which is scheduled for the first two weeks of May, can fully engage with the local scene.
“We want people participating in the arts in all kinds of ways to give their ideas,” he said, noting that SFIAF is treating 2024 as trial run that “will be formalized in 2025. We could really try to make it so the festival defines the Mission for a couple of weeks.”
With Carnival scheduled for Memorial Day weekend (after SFIAF closes), there have been informal conversations about turning May into a performing arts month in the Mission. “We could have a neighborhood-defining event,” Wood said. He’s got an eye on visual arts too, an area the SFIAF hasn’t engaged with much in the past. “We’re reaching out to galleries and talking with Precita Eyes about mural tours. We’ve heard from people interested in site-specific productions. There are so many possibilities.”
Supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation, California Arts Council, California Office of the Small Business Advocate, Grants for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New Place Fund, the Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) and many individual donors, SFIAF is still very much a work in progress. The move to the Mission presents bountiful opportunities to expand and rethink the organization’s mission, which centers on celebrating the multiplicity of voices necessary in American democracy.
The theme of the 2024 season is “In Diaspora: I.D. For the New Majority,” a message that Wood believes will resonate deeply in the Mission. While there’s been no shortage of doom and gloom about San Francisco’s prospects in recent months, “people still think of San Francisco as the city on a hill,” Wood said. “And the Mission has everything we need and want it to do as a city and arts community. Things really worked out for us. Among my board and staff everyone was nervous about going to San Francisco State. But everybody wants to be in the Mission.”
Performance at Medicine for Nightmares
Partnerships have already taken root. On Wednesday, Nov. 15 SFIAF presents the second edition of the Last Supper Party spoken-word and performance series at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery, featuring spoken-word performances by poets Shizue Seigel and Tureeda Mikel, and music by singer/songwriter Cadence Myles. Curated by Alameda Poet Laureate Kimi Sugioka, the series started at SFIAF’s Sutter Street office in 2021, inspired by Fe Bongolan’s large-scale painting of the same name.
The Last Supper Party gatherings quickly outgrew the diminutive office space and, last month, the series transplanted to Medicine For Nightmares, “where it’s been incredibly successful,” said Sugioka, who was initially concerned about drawing an audience to the new venue. Next month’s event is scheduled for Dec. 20 with Susan Dambroff, Jeff DeMark and Chris Kammler.
In keeping with a series designed to pair lesser-known artists with established poets, Sugioka first heard Cadence Myles when she was busking in front of a bank in Alameda, “and her singing was so beautiful, and had so much heart,” she said. “I’m trying to bring in younger writers, too. The way the San Francisco poetry community works, there are a lot of really good writers, but they can be presented over and over. I’m trying to expand the pool.”
More Medicine
The Lost Trio, a musically omnivorous collective featuring tenor saxophonist and composer Phillip Greenlief, bassist Dan Seamans and drummer Tom Hassett, performs Friday Nov. 18 at Medicine For Nightmares, joined by special guest trumpeter Kris Tiner. The group has been finding musical inspiration together for more than three decades, and is known for its catholic repertoire encompassing everyone from Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn and Irving Berlin to Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell, Beck and Juana Molina. Greenlief is back in the Mission Nov. 21 performing an unaccompanied opening set at the Make Out Room’s Tuesday jazz series, followed by saxophonist Larry Ochs, bassist Kazuto Sato, and drummer Donald Robinson.
Trevor Watts at Bird & Beckett
Medicine for Nightmares isn’t the only San Francisco bookstore devoted to presenting music. Glen Park’s Bird & Beckett Books & Records has a robust jazz-and-beyond music program that focuses on top-shelf Bay Area artists. But every once in a while a traveling performer lands between the shelves. On Saturday, British saxophonist Trevor Watts, a major force on Europe’s free jazz scene since the 1960s, makes an extremely rare Bay Area appearance with drummer Jamie Harris, a fellow Brit, and local stalwarts Lisa Mezzacappa on bass and Karl Evangelista on guitar.
And on Sunday, Berkeley clarinetist Ben Goldberg presents a new ensemble, Insect Life, featuring trombonist Danny Lubin-Laden, cellist Ben Davis, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian (a rising composer who presents a suite of music for octet Nov. 19 at SFJAZZ exploring the Armenian-American experience based on his father’s writings).