Southern Exposure, the 50 year-old gallery and arts nonprofit that is known for its ambitious exhibitions, support of local artists, and youth education programs, is in trouble. Or, as an announcement recently released by the organization put it, “A confluence of events has put SoEx in a financial bind.”
The gallery’s current budget deficit is highly solvable, the announcement continues, but over the next few weeks, the organization will be making “tough cost-cutting decisions,” launching a fundraiser to stabilize its finances in the short term, and doubling down on its annual art auction on April 18, an event which has, historically, blurred the lines between arts patronage and conceptual arts outfit dance party.
The organization hopes to raise $400,000 between the fundraiser and the auction, and has raised $70,000 so far. “Come prepared to purchase 2x the art you usually do,” the announcement reads. “Bring 3x of the number of people you normally bring.”
Among the contributors to the confluence is the uncertainty of state funding. California’s budget is not in an awful situation, but it could be if the federal government successfully withholds money from the state.
Also: the extreme unlikeliness of federal arts funding.
Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that applicants for NEA funding now needed to certify that they would not use any federal monies to “promote gender ideology” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The American Civil Liberties Union promptly filed a lawsuit. The NEA backtracked, slightly; organizations can receive funding without laying out a formal theory of gender or a commitment to lack of diversity, but the NEA reserved the right to steer money in directions that seem most on board with the executive branch’s new preoccupations.
The NEA has supported various Southern Exposure projects, directly and indirectly, for years, the gallery’s artistic director and co-director, Valerie Imus, said. Some years, none of their grant proposals get picked up, but other years they’ve pulled down grants of $25,000 or $50,000 at a time. Southern Exposure won’t hear about the status of the grant application it submitted in summer of 2024 until this April, says Imus but, since it was to support a show about immigrant voices, she’s not holding her breath.
Further uncertainty surrounds the kind of foundation money that otherwise might make up for the missing public kind. As the stock market drops, so do the assets of many foundations and, with that, the 5 percent of those assets that they are required by federal law to pay out at each year.
As local arts organizations go, Southern Exposure has company in trouble. Tradición Peruana Cultural Center recently held an emergency fundraiser. The 47-year-old Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts laid off the majority of its staff.
Last year, the Contemporary Jewish Museum closed indefinitely. The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts closed its gallery in 2023, around the time that the Pilara Foundation announced that it was no longer funding the Pier 24 Photography Museum and would be redirecting more of its foundation money to healthcare research.
Southern Exposure has charted rocky financial waters before, as one might expect of a 50 year-old arts organization that started in 1974 in an old can factory (the gallery’s original name was the American Can Collective; then, briefly, after a cease-and-desist letter from the can company, the American Can’t Collective).
The gallery’s charter stipulates that it be artist-run, and over the years it acquired a reputation for being a bridge between small art spaces and larger institutions, and for paying artists to do the kind of big projects that might not happen otherwise, like Sita Bhaumik’s 2016 “Estamos contra el muro | We Are Against the Wall,” which paid local piñata makers to make a border wall out of piñata bricks, and then invited the neighborhood to a community piñata wall-smashing party.
“It’s an experimental neighborhood art space with global recognition,” says Jenifer Wofford, an interdisciplinary artist who spent six years on the gallery’s board, regarding what makes Southern Exposure unusual compared to other art galleries, nonprofit or otherwise.
What’s given it staying power when other art spaces have come to an end is the “neighborhood” part of that equation. It’s survived because it serves multiple communities; it runs youth education, dispenses grants to even smaller and weirder art experiments, and has introduced many a budget-conscious local to low-stakes art collection via its yearly Monster Drawing Rally, among other things.
Depending on how the next few months go, those communities might be what saves it again.
H.R. Smith’s post reminds us of how valuable local arts organizations like Southern Exposure, Tradición Peruana Cultural Center and others are to the City. We don’t want to see them close their doors. There is a resource available to these organizations that could help them retain/hire staff to continue their public programs or administrative operations: SF ReServe (SFR). With funds from the City SFR provides nonprofits with a 40% hourly wage subsidy for part-time workers. In collaboration with the hiring organization it also recruits qualified applicants for these positions, and connects them with the employer. Eligible applicants are SF residents, and age 60 yrs+ and younger adults aged 18 yrs+ with disabilities who specially seek part time jobs. (an applicant could be someone you know from your community) SFR would welcome partnerships with the City’s arts organizations. To learn more about SF ReServe contact jennie@sfcommunityliving.org