How do you nurture a creative community
A story of creativity over capitalism with Griff Williams, Director of Gallery 16
In the mid-2010s in San Francisco I had a really boring day job as a project manager on an audit team with a Big 4 accounting firm. As part of my job requirements I had to sit in a cubical by myself for 8 hours, down the hall from my teammates who all got to work together in the same room. For security purposes, the office was covered in sound proof tiles, making it eerily quiet. The final nail in the coffin was that I was required to wear business attire in a city that was known for its hoodies and flip flops. Oh, the injustice.
It was crushing my soul and despite my efforts to make it more interesting, it was never going to be something it wasn’t. To fill my time, because the actual work took up about 2 hours of my day, I took on personal projects that would allow me to engage with the local community.
The first was taking over a lecture series called The Painting Salon that had been started by artist Rebekah Goldstein in her living room. Every month two artists did a slideshow and spoke about their work for 45 minutes, with breaks for snacks and mingling with other artists. The second was jumping on as one of four co-directors of the artists run space, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, in Oakland.
Both these projects took a ton of admin and coordinating with people. It was a perfect way to take my mind of my depressing surroundings, if even just for a few extra hours a week. I got to network and think about art, even if I wasn’t making it.
Plus, these activities meant I was doing my part to keep a struggling art scene alive. San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general, was beginning to experience an exodus that would only pick up steam as the years went on. People I knew were leaving the city in droves as the rents and housing prices started to skyrocket with the influx of tech money. 18 year-olds were making 6-figures on their first coding job and it only went up from there. The city was being ravaged by this alien population who seemingly had no interest in museums or collecting artwork, or giving back to their city. They drank Soylent as a meal replacement and HODL-ed Bitcoin, splurging occasionally on Lamborghinis. (True story, I overheard two tech guys talking about how world hunger would be cured if only they would put Soylent in the water fountains.)
Helping to create spaces for artists and art-lovers to convene felt like a rebellion against the strange spiral we had been sucked into. One of the most memorable events with The Painting Salon was at Gallery 16 in June 2016. The talk showcased the work of Libby Black and Serena Cole, inspired by their shows up at the time.
Gallery 16 is a Bay Area fixture, running programs and a print-making studio for the past 30 years. In November of last year Griff Williams, the Director/Founder and a talented artist in his own right, joined me for a conversation at The Space Program where I asked him about his tenure running the gallery, as well as his first documentary film, “Tell Them We Were Here: A Story of Creativity Over Capitalism”, he created with his son about the Bay Area art scene.
The film attempts to capture the spirit of generosity and anti-capitalism that runs through the Bay Area art community through the lens of 8 artists, although many more were interviewed for the project.
Williams talks about the Herculean task of being one of the few people able to act as archivist of this scene, and what motivated him to make the film:
We've been continuing to document, but it's daunting. It could be a full time job for somebody. You know? It's just, there's so much to talk about there and, and it is important to be able to- I felt in some ways the disappearing ethos that I felt like was at the center of the film, and also at the center of my business and my relationships and all the people that I feel like are doing this extraordinary work in the Bay Area, I felt like a lot of that was leaving.
Part of it's being pushed out because the economics, um, you know, the income disparity cannot be overstated. And so I felt like making the film at the time that we did it was a way of marking time to remind people that there was a different attitude, you know, a different philosophy that might be diminishing before our eyes.
One of my questions for Williams was about the trade-off of managing and archiving a community as a gallerist and filmmaker versus participating in it and critiquing it as an artist. What I found for myself, and what Williams echoed, is that running a space or a community project inevitably takes time and attention away from your personal work.
The potential pay-off is that you are able to give back on a larger scale, make connections that you might not have made had you been working alone in your studio, and get a birds-eye view of what kind of art is important and truly impactful to people. Also, it can be fun.
What I took away from our conversation was how important it is to have people committed to fostering a community, but also that those people have a bigger vision of what is at stake. What is the driving force of the community that makes it important to hold on to?
For Williams and Gallery 16, it’s about finding value in the artists and the way that they live and not just the end product of the work that they make. It’s about existing outside of traditional modes of production that prioritize the value of an artwork like a stock.
Take for example, Alecia McCarthy, a former Painting Salon lecturer who was featured in the film. In the movie we learn that while making a large scale mural project for the city of San Francisco, McCarthy split her fee evenly between all the members of her painting crew rather than paying them an hourly rate. This radical model flies in the face of hundreds of years of the master-apprentice relationship, and questions the nature of authorship in the artist-fabricator dynamic.
Griff on art beyond the market:
You see something sold at auction and we're not talking about what it is. We're talking about what it's worth, right? And for all of us that are involved in the arts, we recognize that this is really about these choices and this kind of lifestyle and a philosophy. You know, the thing that comes out of your studio practice is just a physical remnant of all of these principles, of these ideals, right?
And so Alicia [McCarthy’s mural], it represents something much deeper, you know, for some people, it's probably just a cool looking thing, but it also has all of this depth. And every one of the artists that we've ever worked with at the gallery and that I respect- and folks that ended up in our in our film- it's this bottomless well that you can get into talking about the universe that they've created.
It might be a cool looking thing that someone buys and hangs in their home and becomes part of a collection or whatever, but it really is just a representative of an ideal.
In the podcast, we go on to talk about the idea that it’s the artist’s job to make the revolution irresistible. All of us, not just artists, are living a life that reflects our values. So what revolution are you living your life for? Or do you need to shift things to make your life more in line with your revolutionary interests?
For me it’s about being out, and about telling the story of my life even if it’s not what I would have pictured for myself at this age. It’s about giving artists agency and about showing people that they can be free of the rules they grew up with. (A lesson I am still learning for myself.)
A final word of woo, the recent solar eclipse in Aries is a new moon cycle at the beginning of the astrological calendar for the year. It’s a great time to welcome in a personal shift that will take you forward into the unknown. What will you be calling in?
Looking forward to seeing this and listening to the podcast. Intriguing thought about the artist making the revolution irresistible.