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Live Inside Your Art: Bay Area Artists at Home

How do artists make a life in the Bay? Take a visual tour of iconic local artist homes—from hand-carved doors to floating studios—with archivists Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander.

Schedule:
6:00 PM: Refreshments & Conversation
6:30 PM: Presentation & Discussion

Moving through decades of Northern California art history, archivists Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander explore some of the fascinating spaces where Bay Area artists have lived and worked from the 1950s through today.

From the hand-excavated San Francisco basements of David Ireland and Craig Baldwin, to the monumental wooden doors Ruth Asawa carved for her Noe Valley home; from the houses perched above Muir Beach where Dorothy Wiley and Gunvor Nelson channeled domestic life into experimental film, to the communal and mythic spaces of Painterland, the Ghost House, and the houseboats at Gate 5, artists’ homes have often become extensions of their practices: inventive, fascinating works of art in their own right.

Part visual tour, part reflection on time and place, the talk considers what Northern California’s natural and built environments have made possible (and sometimes impossible) for artists.

Spanning moments of openness and affordability alongside periods of intense financial strain in one of the world’s most expensive regions, it asks: how have artists made homes—and lives—in the Bay Area?

Speakers
Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander are librarian/archivists with the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive.

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