San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ARTISTS’ FRAGILE BALANCE
Will pandemic prove the final blow to Bay Area’s creatives?
Violinist Ani Bukujian was a rising star of the city’s classical music scene. At 27, she was rounding out her second season with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra as principal second violinist. Landing the role was her proudest life achievement, and it has brought great pleasure besides. “Going to work doesn’t feel like I’m going to a job,” Bukujian says.
Then the pandemic wiped out the remaining ballet season. Offseason gigs became unlikely. After one of the roommates in Bukujian’s converted twobedroom apartment lost her job, they forfeited the lease and Bukujian returned to her family’s Los Angeles home. Bukujian had envisioned life in San Francisco for years to come, but she doesn’t see the point if work as she’s known it, involving crowded rehearsals and packed concert halls, cannot go on.
Artists have long worked furiously to stay afloat in San Francisco, surviving painting to painting or gig to gig. Over the past 20 years, many have given up fighting against soaring housing prices and a punishing cost of living, and have moved out. Now, coronavirus and its attendant shutdowns — of theaters, galleries, conservatories, studios — pose an existential threat to the arts communities that remain. Experts warn that the social and economic ravages of COVID19 could steeply accelerate the area’s outflow of artists, dancers and musicians.
Hailed as a hub for free expression and thinking, San
Francisco boasted strong arts employment through the 1990s, says Marshall Toplansky, a research fellow in demographics and real estate at Chapman University in Orange County. No longer. The ranks of people who identify as independent artists in San Francisco has hollowed by 28% since 2010, according to Toplansky. Employment in more established performing arts institutions, like Bukujian’s, has fallen. Meanwhile, the number of software developers working in San Francisco has more than doubled over the past decade.
The upshot? A decade ago, San Francisco’s employment of independent creatives hovered nearly 70% above the national average but today hangs 5% below it. Freelancers have been migrating to cheaper metros, like Nashville, Las Vegas and Austin, Texas. Performing artists have flocked to Las Vegas, Dallas and Baltimore.
Among those determined to hang on is Renée DeCarlo, a visual artist who moved through six cities over a dozen years before San Francisco finally won her over in the early 2000s. “We had traveled all over the country trying to find our place, and here was the perfect melting pot,” she says. The city’s creative richness drew her in; the tightknit community has kept her. After upgrading from a home studio to a Bayview warehouse, DeCarlo opened the Drawing Room in 2018, an incubator in the Mission District offering studio space and visual arts classes. The 48yearold single mother had built a flourishing network — connections that sell her drawings, fill workshops, generate commissions and advertise her space.
Before the shutdown, those income streams kept her one stroke above the rising cost of living each month. Now, DeCarlo can no longer teach inperson classes or rent her studio. She cashed out all her savings and has received three of 16 emergency grants she applied for.
Many of the working artists able to to survive here need familial or financial safety nets. Katerina Beckman, a 25yearold freelance dancer/ choreographer who trained at the San Francisco Ballet School and the Juilliard School, among others, lives in her husband’s family home. Even as she works five jobs, she doesn’t face the anxiety of making rent. “If I did, I wouldn’t be living in the Bay Area,” she says. “I wouldn’t be a dancer.”
A postpandemic exodus of artists would be “the third wrenching trauma that San Francisco would have to endure,” Toplansky says, citing the dotcom bust in the early 2000s and Great Recession in 2008 as the others. In the aftermath of those economic crises, the tech sector led a steroidal resurgence which, in turn, priced artists out of affordable housing and commercial workspace. Some managed through unconventional arrangements: converting warehouses, forming informal artists’ colonies and living in RVs, says Jennifer Hernandez, a landuse and environmental lawyer based in San Francisco. Or they didn’t manage and instead moved to another sector — or another place entirely.
Displacement has particularly affected artists of color, says Kelley Lindquist, president of Artspace, a national nonprofit real estate developer that builds affordable housing for artists. Some have managed to create and sell work, or perform, while juggling several gigs or jobs. But the pandemic has clarified the fragility of this balance or, as Lindquist says, “just how razorsharp that little edge was between being OK and not being OK.”
Lindquist argues that American tropes about artists — that suffering is their lot, that posthumous recognition is any kind of reward — are part of the reason artists, including the Bay Area’s, are having such a hard time of it. Some performers find a very cruel irony in the ways the pandemic has shifted artistic production: Even as Americans cling to books, music and film during quarantine for comfort and escape, their creators are not considered “essential.”
The message from society is, “You’re a musician. We can live without you,” says Alexandros Petrin, a violinist who moved from Greece to the U.S. in 2010.
To be sure, city government and philanthropies have tried to address the crisis. Community projects like Paint the Void are linking businesses with artists to paint boarded storefronts, while the de Young Museum is seeking local submissions for an exhibition (theme: On the Edge). Qualifying artists could apply to the $1.5 million San Francisco Artists Relief Fund, which prioritized historically vulnerable communities. Some flooded systems closed within minutes: Roughly 1 percent of more than 55,000 applicants received funding during the und’s first cycle, according to an applicant notification obtained by The Chronicle. An additional $250,000 has been made available. Experts emphasize that lowincome artists of color and immigrants, who face barriers to U.S. systems and may mistrust documentation, are less likely to access relief.
Whether aid reaches emerging artists could determine whether they stay in the profession. Beckman has devoted herself to dance since age 8, but is unsure whether the path is viable. “I’m at the cusp of my career really taking off as a dancer and choreographer, and I don’t know if I’m going to have an outlet,” she says. Meanwhile, companies employing foreign performers and schools training them must contend with visa challenges. At least 30 international dancers in the San Francisco Ballet have been ineligible for unemployment benefits, says Kelly Tweeddale, the ballet’s executive director. Students at the San Francisco Ballet School were sent home during quarantine without a return date.
To be sure, an exodus of artists from San Francisco could reinvigorate other communities around the country. Des Moines, Iowa; Charleston, S.C.; Madison, Wis.; RaleighDurham, N.C.; and Kansas City, Mo., are growing hot spots for artists, says Toplansky, while Beckman highlights flourishing ballet companies in Grand Rapids, Mich., Charlotte, N.C., and Boise, Idaho.
Still, there may be reasons for artists, and those who appreciate them, to take heart. More than half of the contributions to the San Francisco Ballet’s Critical Relief Fund came from firsttime donors, says Tweeddale: “People now are getting a sense there might not be a next time,” she says. DeCarlo says she has seen a boost in studio sales as people wander around the neighborhood and see the paintings she displays. The opportunities to marry the city’s tech savvy with artistic projects, from office beautification to digitized performances, are largely untapped, they both say. Rezoning land to create multipurpose living and workspaces could help artists get back on their feet, lawyer Hernandez suggests.
DeCarlo, at least, is determined to stay in the community that’s elevated her work. For others wrestling with departure, more than the four walls they live within is at stake. After all, both the maker’s space and the muse shape creative output. San Francisco, with its rolling hills and unbridled expression, its damning inequities and painful costs, has no shortage of fodder, especially in a pandemic.
But, as every working artist knows, fodder won’t pay the rent.