Intersection for the Arts at Forty

Abstract

Just as the success of a community is based on collaboration, successful collaboration is based within meaningful relationships. As San Francisco, California's oldest alternative community art space (est. 1965), Intersection for the Arts has fostered strong relationships through the production and experience of art. The dynamic results have served as tools with which to gain better understanding of the life, people, and ideas that make up a community. Collaboration happens at this multi-disciplinary arts space not only between creative mediums including visual art, theater, writing, and music, but also between people--artists and viewers alike. The space is populated with artists from the community whose priorities are not to converse exclusively with other artists or the art world but with people who want to use the culture of art as a catalyst to communicate with the community around them. This has been the basis of Intersection for over forty years. Intersection's desire for radical change is rooted in the organization's unconventional and almost accidental genesis. Intersection was founded over four decades ago as a coffee shop run by radical ministers--conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war who worried that the energetic social unrest swirling around San Francisco would affect the spirituality and faith of the city's youth. They began their own forms of radical outreach, creating secular, casual meeting places throughout the city--a bread and wine mission, a coffee shop, and an art center in one location, and a storefront shop in another--so they could talk with youth in a non-confrontational way, over a soda or a game of cards. The ministers used this strategy until 1965, when all of the gathering places merged into a single entity, the Intersection of Religion and the Arts. Run out of a church basement in North Beach (a lively Italian neighborhood, home to the Allen Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac beatnik scene, strip clubs, and all-night jazz), the organization was directed by the ministers for the next six years until the first secular director took over in 1972, and the religious affiliation was dropped. Intersection for the Arts was born anew but sewn from the same communal cloth. Years later Intersection moved to its current home in the Mission District, a basin of a neighborhood at the bottom of all those San Franciscan hills, pooling with a mix of working-class families, shopping-cart homeless, drug addicts, young radical queers, artists, and immigrants. Unlike many of the city's neighborhoods nestled at the higher elevations with panoramic views of the Bay, what has always defined this urban valley community is simple: struggle. In the Mission, the view has always been from the ground, looking up. And in the early years, even early decades of Intersection, it too found itself struggling. Intersection went through directors and staff regularly, and in order for a place to establish itself as a place for community, a community within has to be established as well. This happened when the young and idealistic Deborah Cullinan became part of the foundation and a pioneer in the formation of its most recent--and most successful--incarnation. Cullinan, now executive director of Intersection, has been with the art space for eleven years. came [to Intersection] and I had no experience with this kind of thing, I had no experience working in a nonprofit arts organization.... I had a lot to learn, (1) remembers Cullinan, who has a background in social services. She says: I think it was actually great that it was in such a precarious place because it meant that [Intersection] had to be reinvented and reunder-stood. So for me it was a lot about trying to learn what it had been, what its importance had been, trying to get my hands on what the different disciplines meant and how they lived together in one place. After hiring an entirely new staff, Cullinan's strategy involved reintroducing Intersection to the community outside its doors and learning how to make it relevant and valuable to as many people as possible. …