On a recent Thursday evening on Sixth Street in West SoMa, a dozen neighborhood artists sat around tables at an art studio with scissors and glue, making small creatures out of materials that would otherwise be discarded: scraps of wrapping paper, magazine ads, paint samples.
Their goal was to “make new species out of the detritus of society,” according to the guidance of the workshop’s leader, local artist Fuzz E. Grant.
The people gathered at 6M Community Arts, an arts space supported by the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, weren’t the kind of artists typically featured at San Francisco galleries.
One was a professional painter who lost his art studio years ago and could not afford another. Others were neighborhood residents who rarely had access to galleries, art supplies or a room where they could sit for hours and work. For many, the gallery was the only place they had to create, display or sell their creations.
“People don’t expect there to be good art here,” said Kerim Harmanaci, director of 6M Community Arts, which has provided weekly art workshops and gallery showings since 2021 to people living on and around the Sixth Street corridor, including those who have no stable housing.
“People warned me it would be dangerous. But we haven’t had so much as a pencil stolen.”
West SoMa’s contemporary arts scene has roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when spaces like Bindlestiff Studio and the 6th on 7th Photography Workshop (also managed by TODCO) began giving Filipino artists and SRO residents places to perform, exhibit and document their lives.
It has grown unevenly since, shaped by the neighborhood’s mix of affordable housing, former warehouses, social services, immigrant communities and tech offices.
Within several blocks of Sixth Street are at least half a dozen art spaces and programs, including drop-in workshops and galleries with rotating shows.
Christine “CJ” Johnson, an artist at the gallery, said she was recruited to participate in 6M by the directors of Vanguard Lab after experiencing homelessness for 18 months.
She discovered she had much to express about San Francisco, and has specialized in collaged cityscapes overlaid with sexual innuendos, a nod to her troubled upbringing.
Johnson said she was able to find buyers for her collages at gallery showings, after primarily displaying them on social media, and on the street.
“I was raised by a very bad dad. That’s why I make overtly sexual art. It’s so important to have this,” she said, gesturing around the gallery space. “I don’t have access to a printer. It opened up my awareness of art.”
Ivy Jeanne McClelland has co-run Vanguard Labs out of the 6M Community Arts space since its funding was cut last year by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). She said she recognized herself in many of the people who live around Sixth Street.
“I was a homeless runaway, practiced in street survival. I found an outlet through punk rock, art and creativity. They gave me the will to live,” she said.
McClelland founded Vanguard Labs with its co-director, Britt Creech, in 2024 as a community arts space for people who may be using drugs, doing sex work and living homeless or housing-insecure.
The opportunity to make and sell art gives people trying to survive day to day a sense of dignity, McClelland and Creech said.
Charles Blackwell, a 6M regular, said he had struggled off and on throughout his life to keep his painting going. In 1970, he lost most of his sight after suffering a concussion. It was difficult to find his way back to art. “I was a wreck,” he said. The gallery at 6M is one of few places where he can see his paintings on display again.
Finding space
Some of the neighborhood’s newer arts spaces have arisen out of the intersection between the neighborhood’s historic Filipino community and the local tech industry, according to Desi Danganan, executive director and co-founder of Kultivate Labs.
His nonprofit has helped local artists find space to create art in the neighborhood since 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Danganan said, some artists were able to take advantage of spaces left vacant by tech companies.
One of those artists was Jenn Ban who, with the help of Danganan, opened Bituin Studio, a Filipino-led art gallery and tattoo studio in 2024.
Ban, one of three co-founders, said they saw a unique opportunity in the space, a former warehouse once occupied by tech professionals. But the most important draw, she said, was that it would be located in a historically Filipino district.
“There weren’t many third spaces that we felt comfortable in that were Filipino-oriented,” Ban said. “It was our dream to just kind of world-build and see what can happen from that.”
The studio holds rows of tattoo beds that can be folded up and stored to make space for performance art, gallery exhibitions and cultural ceremonies. On a recent Tuesday, a translucent fabric sculpture by SoMa tattoo artist Hayoung Yun fell from a skylight in the studio’s double-height ceiling.
A human-sized paper light sculpture by the studio’s co-founder, an artist who goes by Saint, glowed on the cement floor.
Other creatives, like the tenants and gallery artists who occupy 447 Minna, a multi-use arts space, have benefited from a 2012 San Francisco law that mandated that large commercial developments allocate at least one percent of construction costs to public art.
In 2015, a housing developer donated the historic industrial building on Minna Street to the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, a local arts nonprofit.
CAST has made the building into a “constant, stable venue” for artists who would have otherwise been priced out of the city, said Catherine Nguyen, CAST’s director of communications.
But Danganan said it’s getting tougher to find space for artists in SoMa as San Francisco’s post-pandemic economy starts to rebound and the AI industry drives up the real-estate market.
He had to put his organization’s own mission on pause in 2025, following DEI-related cuts to their funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. He restarted operations this year, but the organization no longer has its own space.
Still, Danganan does not see the tech industry as an antagonist. He pointed to Heron Arts, an exhibition and community space founded by a former computer programmer, Mark Slee, as an example of the ways in which the tech industry can “be part of the arts community.”
“Tech companies came to SoMa because we’re free thinkers here,” he said. “This neighborhood was created by people living on the disenfranchised edge. That through-line still exists.”
For Orson Wagon, a local noise musician who has watched artists get priced out of San Francisco, the West SoMa arts scene is one of the few places where the city’s creative life has not been extinguished.
“This is the only hope,” he said after finishing a set on Sixth Street. “The soul and culture of this city are just hanging on.”
