Mayor Gavin Newsom says he’s crazy about art — but time will tell if he can transcend wonkishness to usher in a shining renaissance of the arts in San Francisco

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When Gavin Newsom spent a semester in Italy during his junior year in college, he fell in love with pre-Renaissance art. Sure, he appreciated the Renaissance masterpieces, San Francisco’s mayor-elect said the other day, "the Baroque and Rococo less so." What excited the young Newsom most, in 14th century works by Duccio, Giotto and others, were the early stirrings of perspective in Western art, the quest to represent three dimensions on a two- dimensional plane. "I was fascinated with that incredible shift in thinking."

Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic Tuesday, January 6, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle

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As Newsom takes center stage in City Hall with his swearing in Thursday, San Francisco’s panoramic arts world awaits the new perspectives and conceptual shifts that may come with a new mayoral administration. Fingers are crossed — with some eyes skeptically rolling at the idea — that a kind of arts renaissance could be in the works for San Francisco in 2004 and beyond.

A host of factors, from the economy to baroque Board of Supervisors politics to public perception, hopelessly complicates any predictions. But in the wake of an election that simplistically identified Newsom with downtown business interests and mainstream arts and his runoff opponent, Matt Gonzalez, with neighborhoods and the avant-garde, the future may play out in more nuanced ways than many arts advocates expect.

Newsom, first off, does have some specific and detailed initiatives on the table. If enacted and effectively carried out, they could, in harmony with his economic and development plan for the city, bring a broad-spectrum boon to the arts.

The Newsom proposals include "arts enterprise zones" in the mid-Market area, at Pier 70 and Bayview-Hunters Point (all long-discussed or already in the works); a new cultural affairs office to promote the arts and develop audiences; the appointment of a new film commissioner to jumpstart the foundering local film production business; a pronounced emphasis on public art; and assorted economic inducements and improvements that would, among other things, put more art in the classrooms, match arts tenants with vacant storefronts and address housing and work-space issues for artists.

Beyond that lie the telling, intangible qualities a bright young mayor with a sweeping agenda, star-quality looks and magnetic wife Kimberly Guilfoyle can generate by his own high-visibility behavior. Newsom, 36, who visits art galleries and museums occasionally but can’t recall the last theater, symphony, opera or ballet performance he attended, vows to change that record when he’s in office. His predecessor, 69-year-old Willie Brown, was a frequent and charismatic first-nighter at theaters, night clubs and concert halls.

"It’s important, symbolically and substantively, that I demonstrate not just a passing interest or election-day promise. It’s important that I show my commitment," Newsom said, and "crucial," he added, that he carry it through with decisions reflecting his "passions and priorities."

Brenda Way, artistic director of the ODC Dance Company, puts the case directly. "I am only hopeful that the new mayor will understand the depth to which the arts characterize our town and will act accordingly." That begins, she declares, by being a member of the audience. "The way you’re the best supporter of the arts is to go."

Everyone from San Francisco Opera choristers and Tenderloin theater troupes to real estate developers and tourists has a stake in the arts policy and ethos Newsom establishes. Few cities in the country are more closely identified with and dependent upon the vitality of their visual, performing, electronic and literary arts. San Francisco is, in both vibrant and vulnerable ways, an essentially aesthetic enterprise.

Newsom, like Gonzalez, is keenly attuned to that fact. Both candidates addressed the issue in policy papers, roundtable discussions with arts groups and interviews. "The arts," said Newsom in a 40-minute conversation late last week, "go to the core of what makes this city such a special place." Quickly connecting threads he’s tied many times before, Newsom linked the humanizing aspect of the arts to their economic impact, the importance of the arts in elementary-school education to the city’s diversity.

"To me, art really defines our culture," he said. "It defines who we are. It’s an expression of ourselves. It makes us more self-aware, which in turn makes us more sensitive to each other. The arts bind us together."

Sincere as they may be, those are relatively easy lines to deliver here. Pro-arts talk plays well to a San Francisco electorate. Newsom, not surprisingly, has already drawn a range of responses to his early performance as an arts-friendly mayor-to-be.

The plaudits tend to come from mainstream establishment figures. "I think the world of Gavin and have always been a huge supporter," said Carole Shorenstein Hays, who produces the Best of Broadway series at the Curran, Golden Gate and Orpheum theaters. "He brings a great sense of energy and new possibilities. I have high, high hopes for him."

Brent Assink, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, commends the specificity of Newsom’s "Art for the City, City for the Arts" policy paper and finds "a lot of reason for optimism and encouragement." In Newsom he sees a mayor "who’s made it very clear in a public document that the arts are critical to San Francisco’s future."

Top management at the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asian Art Museum offered similar endorsements, largely in a broad, boilerplate mode. Few are inclined to rock a boat, especially one in which they have a material stake, that hasn’t left the dock yet.

Asian Art Museum director Emily Sano said she hoped Newsom’s homeless policies and mid-Market development plans might make the Civic Center area more attractive. "We’re concerned about the surrounding environment," she said. "It can get kind of dicey."

ACT artistic director Carey Perloff extended that view to her theater’s neighborhood. "(Newsom’s) concern about revitalizing and cleaning up downtown will have a major impact on the arts," she said. "It can be quite a challenge to get people to come to Union Square when it’s difficult to park and you get assaulted by panhandlers on all sides."

Whatever their individual wish lists might include, it’s safe to say that Newsom’s election was greeted with a fair measure of relief at the city’s major arts institutions. During the campaign, Gonzalez floated the idea of restructuring the city’s primary arts funding mechanism, the hotel tax fund’s grants for the arts, to distribute a greater share of the money to smaller organizations. That would have taken city dollars away from the Symphony, Opera, Ballet and other big players at a time when other funding sources are withering.

Conversely, many working artists and smaller arts groups galvanized by Gonzalez view Newsom as a pragmatic politician who talks a good arts game but doesn’t really live it. Deborah Cullinan, executive director of the Mission District’s Intersection for the Arts, called the Gonzalez campaign "profound." Emphasizing that she was speaking for herself and not her organization, Cullinan said she supported Gonzalez "because of his sense of the common good, and because I don’t trust fancy policy papers put together by layers of people who are very distant from the actual issues, and the actual work." Gonzalez, Cullinan points out, has served on the Intersection board, collects arts and has published small-press books by various poets.

Truong Tran, executive director of the Kearny Street Workshop, a multidisciplinary Asian Pacific arts organization, was also an avid Gonzalez supporter. He believes the spirit sparked by the election can thrive in the Newsom years. "In some ways the Gonzalez campaign solidified our community," Tran said. "There’s art all around us that we need to nurture, and I think we all feel that now more than ever."

"I don’t think his election is necessarily a negative," said Susan Cervantes, executive director of the Precita Eyes Mural Project. "I hope he’ll be accessible and make sure the community arts programming is served and supported as well as the established art forms."

Newsom rejects an idea, expressed privately by some of his supporters, that the arts are a way to reach out to and capture a constituency Gonzalez claimed during the election. "I don’t look at it that way," he said. "I have to be myself."

The way Newsom sees himself, and the way that will play out in the arts, involves some careful sociopolitical calculus and plenty of outside advice. High on the list of Newsom influences is Richard Florida’s book, "The Rise of the Creative Class." It’s cited in his arts policy paper, and he mentioned it admiringly several times in the interview for this piece. The notion of creativity as a fungible commodity that draws business, artistic and entrepreneurial forces together is central to Newsom’s thinking. The "people climate" and "business climate" thrive together, to foster a kind of creative, self-sustaining critical mass.

The fortunes of the arts and business, then, are deeply intertwined for him. That’s apparent in everything from the obvious arithmetic of the hotel tax fund’s grants for the arts (more tourists = more hotel revenue = more direct funding of the arts) to tax incentives for the arts enterprise zones to a mutually beneficial "barter economy" for arts groups and public schools.

It’s also a personally felt conviction. Citing his own PlumpJack wine stores, restaurants and associated enterprises (named after the rotund Shakespearean character Jack Falstaff), Newsom said, "One of the reasons I love business so much is that I am at heart a creative person. I took a very small wine store and with a very creative, theatrical approach — not just by name but by design and orientation — created a very successful business. It’s a creative expression and in many respects an artistic expression."

A work team of 20 people, led by San Francisco Art Institute professor Jeannene Przyblyski, helped write Newsom’s arts policy paper. Despite her own avant-garde interests (she runs the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets, which produces conceptual performance and installations about urban life), Przyblyski said she was drawn to Newsom because of his sound economic policies. "That’s what the arts really need in challenging times."

Seeing Gonzalez as "the guy with street credentials in the bohemian community" and Newsom as the middle-class straight arrow is a "historically polarized ideology," said Przyblyski. "The arts have always had a complex relationship to the middle class. On the one hand they’re the patrons and on the other they’re vilified by the avant-garde. That’s their job. I think Gavin understands that."

That animating tension may be borne out by Newsom’s fascination with public art. As much as anything in the arts, it’s engaged him on both a personal and policy level. "Cupid’s Span," the Claes Oldenburg bow-and-arrow at Rincon Park, has teased at his consciousness ever since the piece was installed in 2002. "I couldn’t stand it at first," he said. "About a month ago I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it isn’t so bad.’ But maybe the color will fade. Every time I pass it I’m challenged. I like that: I like being challenged."

Newsom promises to charge the San Francisco Art Commission with coordinating and curating public art programs currently run by the commission, the Planning Department and the Redevelopment Agency. He’d like to see more public art linked to capital improvement projects, with more promotion and visibility. The sense of democratic debate public art engenders, he believes, is only healthy. It’s the big, brash gesture, worked into the fabric of everyday life.

"Seeing art in the public realm confronts people and also brings them together," he said. "It challenges them and softens the edges."

For the most part, arts policy is worked out in small, dot-connecting steps. In the end, Newsom’s arts legacy may not be judged so much for the flair of some mighty new outdoor sculpture as it is for the workaday business of turning the wheels.

Can he put together the one-stop-shopping package of streamlined permits and other incentives Bay Area Film Alliance policy director Darcy Brown recommends to win back the film business that’s fled to Oakland and elsewhere? Can he join forces with city Treasurer Susan Leal to close hotel tax fund loopholes and produce a larger revenue stream for arts groups? Can he finally cut through the mid-Market morass with arts as a leading edge?

Can he work with other Bay Area cities to develop regional transit, housing and related policies that will benefit the arts? Can he distance himself from Willie Brown, as philanthropist Richard Goldman advises, and make the kind of decisive appointments that will turn his boundary-spanning arts vision into reality?

In one place, not long ago, Newsom saw the arts working in the kind of inclusive, synthesizing way that makes his eyes shine. It was at Alvarado Elementary School, where art is integrated throughout the curriculum. "You go there and you can’t tell the difference between an art class and a math class, " he said, "an art class and a science class or social studies class. I mean, it’s everywhere. It permeates the halls. It’s in the bathrooms. The art is just everywhere."
‘Art for the City, a City for the Arts’ — a new policy in fine and broad strokes

"Art for the City, a City for the Arts” details Mayor-elect Gavin Newsom’s arts policy in both sweeping abstraction and specific detail. Predicated on a "human capital” agenda, the policy covers everything from housing and transportation to education and tourism, which Newsom believes affect the arts as "a model for urban community building.”

Here are some of the specific arts proposals:

— Realize arts enterprise zones in mid-Market Street, Pier 70 and Bayview-Hunters Point areas.

— Create a Cultural Affairs Office to promote San Francisco arts nationally and internationally and provide support for arts festivals, events and expos.

— Appoint a new film commissioner and fully staff the Film Office to attract film and television production business.

— Initiate new public art projects and centralize curatorial control with the San Francisco Art Commission.

— Tap a new Resource Development Office to fund expanded art programs in the public schools.

— Advocate refunding of the California Arts Council.

Newsom is also considering forging a closer relationship between the hotel tax fund’s grants for the arts program and the Arts Commission.

E-mail Steven Winn at [email protected].