Big art event canceled over homeless camp controversy
Sausalito Art Festival pulls plug on Labor Day event
After enduring a year without art events — and the revenue they bring — local painter Kay Carlson eagerly was awaiting the return of the storied Sausalito Art Festival this Labor Day weekend.
But even though COVID-19 cases are dropping, vaccination rates are climbing and pandemic rules are easing, the art festival won’t be back this year. It has fallen victim to a monthslong controversy concerning a new homeless encampment that recently formed along Sausalito’s scenic waterfront.
City officials are trying to move the encampment from Dunphy Park, which sits along a main city thoroughfare, to the more outof-the-way Marinship Park. But Marinship Park is the traditional location of the Sausalito Art Festival — often described as one of the most prestigious open-air art events in the country. With the event date rapidly approaching and no consensus on where the encampment would be by September, the organizers decided to pull the plug.
Now Carlson and more than 100 other artists from the Bay Area and beyond will miss out, for the second year in a row, on a major source of sales.
“This is shocking,” Carlson said. “From what it looks like to me, the City Council just decided to disregard the importance of the festival to the Bay Area and the town and the artists that come.”
The dilemma is another example of the fallout from the homelessness crisis confronting the Bay Area, which has become even more apparent during the pandemic. Following federal health guidelines, as well as new legal precedent, many cities are allowing encampments to stay in place.
As a result, Sausalito and other Marin County communities suddenly find
themselves grappling with large, entrenched camps the likes of which they haven’t seen before. In other Bay Area cities, including Oakland and San Jose, which have struggled with encampments for years, the camps are getting bigger and becoming more visible, leading to intense debates over how they should be managed.
The Sausalito encampment started with one tent in Dunphy Park in December and has grown from there into a tent city populated by an eclectic mix of people. Many live part time on boats illegally anchored off the shore and use the camp as a safe place to come ashore for supplies, or spend the night in case of a storm. They call the encampment Camp Cormorant and fly rainbow flags emblazoned with drawings of the black water birds.
In February, the City Council decided Marinship
Park — which unlike Dunphy Park has bathrooms and is regularly visited by a shower truck — would make a better location for the encampment. But when the city attempted to move the encampment, camp residents, backed by the California Homeless Union, sued. So far, a federal judge has sided with the camp residents, blocking the city from forcing them to relocate during the pandemic.
With COVID-19 cases declining, the city has asked the judge to reconsider. As of Monday, the judge had not ruled on that request.
As the legal battle was playing out in court, the Sausalito Art Festival Foundation was scrambling to find another location for its signature event. The organizers came up with an idea: Host the event in Dunphy Park once the encampment is moved. But as they went through the process of securing the park, which included
listening to community members’ concerns in an open forum, a host of complaints arose, according to foundation Chairman Louis Briones. People worried festival attendees would kill the grass, trample the plants in the park and snarl traffic in the neighborhood.
Given more time, Briones said the foundation could have addressed those concerns.
“The problem is there’s just not enough time to do it,” he said. “It just became apparent that it was going to be impossible to work through the issues to secure Dunphy Park, and we just couldn’t go forward not knowing if we would have a park or not.”
For nearly seven decades, the Sausalito Art Festival has been a staple of the Bay Area arts scene, drawing as many as 30,000 people from across the country to browse paintings, jewelry, woodworking and more, listen to live music and eat and drink. Some revenue from the event is reinvested in the community in the form of art scholarships and donations.
“We are sorry to receive news that the Sausalito Art Festival decided to cancel its event for this year,” Sausalito Mayor Jill James Hoffman wrote in an emailed statement.
It isn’t the first time the Sausalito Art Festival has hit a rough patch. In November 2019, the foundation was struggling as it became increasingly expensive to book musical acts and provide security following tragedies such as the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting. Organizers paused the 2020 festival and reevaluate their business model. Then the pandemic struck and festivals became impossible.
But after making some changes, including cutting back on musical acts and refocusing on art, the festival was ready to come back this year, Briones said.
Instead, he and the artists now are crossing their fingers for 2022.
“My strong hope is that the Sausalito Art Festival will persist in spite of the unbelievable challenges,” Carlson said, “because it’s worth having.”