San Francisco Arts Festival

SF Arts Festival Pamphlets, 1960s

One of the things I love about social media is its capacity to draw attention to people, things, and events offline, in the physical and historical world. I also love its capacity to offer widespread, international access to the local. The annual San Francisco Arts Festival, which ran from 1946-1986, was just such a local, pre-Internet event.

Sponsored by the San Francisco Arts Commission (then known as the San Francisco Art Commission, with no "s"), the Festival featured an annual juried exhibition and served as a public forum for Bay Area visual--as well as performing--artists. It was held primarily in the Civic Center, but some years it was hosted elsewhere, such as the Palace of Fine Arts, Moscone Center, Fisherman's Wharf, Union Square, or Washington Square Park.

San Francisco Arts Festival Photographs and Records, 1948-1985 (SFP 30) is a small collection of photographs, slides, negatives, ephemera, and other printed material documenting the festival for almost its entirety. Because they're organized by year, the 8" x 10" photographs of street scenes, artists, onlookers, and artworks themselves offer the offline browser a tour of changing styles of painting, sculpture, and incidentally, clothes and hair.

This pair of photographs pictures a similar Festival scene, about 20 years apart; the top one is currently featured on the San Francisco Arts Commission homepage.

[Artists line up to register their exhibits at the Palace of Fine Arts for the Fifth Annual S.F. Art Festival, 1951]

[People Standing in Line in Front of San Francisco Art Commission Building for San Francisco Arts Festival Screening, 1972]. Notice the Capricorn Asunder Gallery sign.

Besides the photographs in SFP 30, the San Francisco History Subject Collection contains additional photos of the festival (including the 1951 photo above)  filed under folder headings such as "S.F. Districts--Civic Center--Art Show," "S.F. Parks--Washington Square,"  and others. Many of them are available online in the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection database; just type a keyword search into the search box marked "Search Digital Images."

Offline festival programs and other printed material can be found in Box 4 of SFP 30, as well as in the San Francisco Ephemera Collection, filed under "Fairs and Festivals--San Francisco Art Festival."

Plan for Rain Drum bio-acoustic sculpture by Jim Nollman, [1978]

You can find a newly-posted guide to the San Francisco Arts Festival Photographs and Records, 1948-1985 (SFP 30) at the Online Archive of California. The guide includes links to five sample photographs digitized from the collection. To view the complete offline files, please visit the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection in person at the San Francisco History Center, Main Library, 6th floor.

Finally, to get a sense of the San Francisco Arts Festival in the context of the wider history of the San Francisco Arts Commission and public art in the City, take a look at Arts for the City: Civic Art and Urban Change, 1932-2012.