Intersection for the Arts turns 50 next year, a venerable age for any nonprofit, especially one that has helped thousands of artists in all disciplines get their art in front of audiences. It’s San Francisco’s oldest alternative arts space — where James Broughton and Allen Ginsberg read poetry, Spalding Gray did monologues and Robin Williams honed his comedy shticks. And, through its Incubator Program that started in 1977, it’s become among the Bay Area’s largest fiscal sponsors of the arts.
But Intersection’s income dropped 54% this year, and it has run out of money to fund new in-house productions, resident artists’ plays and concerts, arts exhibitions and education programs — popular but costly activities.
The good news is that while Intersection struggles to maintain core programs, its 124 fiscally sponsored arts projects are unlikely to be affected, says board Chair Yancy Widmer. Intersection in May blasted an email to its 16,000 followers: “Our financial situation is deeply challenged, and it has become apparent that the current business model is no longer sustainable.” Intersection had a staff of nine, but June 1 it furloughed three key program directors and a communications assistant and stopped producing its own works, except for a handful already in the pipeline.
Two months after the announcement, Widmer told 150 supporters, project staff, board members and funders who convened for “A Community Conversation” about Intersection’s future, “The money we manage for the projects was never in danger. Intersection is fragile right now, but all our fiscal sponsor projects are safe.”
The projects are all Model C (preapproved grant relationship) and in every arts form: Ithuriel’s Spear, an independent small press; KIDmob, design education for youth; Embodiment Project, street dance classes and performances; Green Windows, creative writing workshops for young people and adults whose low literacy and low income put them at risk; Ensemble Mik Nawooj, a hip-hop orchestra; Jazz in the Neighborhood, mentoring and performances by professional and student musicians. And more.
As a sponsor of only arts and related projects in the Bay Area, Intersection is one of the largest in the country, on a par with New York Live Arts, whose projects hover between 80 and 130, San Francisco Film Society with 220 Bay Area projects and Springboard for the Arts, which sponsors 215 projects in Minnesota only. It’s outstripped in size by Artspire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts and its 500 projects, and the enormous Fractured Atlas — 3,531 projects nationwide in September.
In this directory, arts and culture is the most popular service category — almost 75% of fiscal sponsors have arts projects.
Intersection’s 8% fiscal sponsor fee brings in about $120,000 a year and is the organization’s largest source of unrestricted income, says Randy Rollison, Intersection interim executive director.
That won’t get Intersection through the final months of this fiscal year, which began July 1. Generating or producing any new nonfiscal sponsor projects this year will be impossible. At the July community meeting, Widmer said the cause of the financial problems was “a perfect storm” that blew in last year: “We lacked enough unrestricted income, and, like many small and mid-sized nonprofits, we had few reserves. Funding that we expected and community contributions didn’t come through. And we had a significant leadership change.” Deborah Cullinan, executive director since 1996 who took Intersection to its heights, left in 2013 to lead Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a high-profile, $11 million art venue right across from SFMOMA on San Francisco’s “museum row.”
Intersection began in 1965 in a dingy coffeehouse, a former bar on the fringe of the Tenderloin, where art, much of it racy, intersected with anti-Vietnam War activism and the socially conscious religion of its founders. It moved several times, expanding along the way, and added fiscal sponsorship services in 1977, making it one of the earliest sponsors in the country.
Sean San José was Intersection’s performing arts program director before the purge as well as director of Campo Santo. The multicultural ensemble has premiered 50 new American plays in 18 years, most recently “Chasing Mehserle” about BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s New Year’s Day 2009 shooting of transit rider Oscar Grant. Kudos for Campo Santo include the 2004 Glickman Award, a prestigious Bay Area theater prize, for its production of Denis Johnson’s “Soul of a Whore,” a play in verse based in a Huntsville, Texas, Greyhound station.
When Campo Santo started in 1996, with Intersection as its fiscal sponsor. Then it moved into a coveted spot as a resident company, and now, after the cutbacks, is a sponsored project once more.
San José believes there’s no “lack of possibilities” for Intersection to weather the crisis and that his company’s future is secure, but he has deep regrets.
“One of the saddest parts of the recent changes to Intersection,” he says, “is that cutting programming leads to the lessening of gatherings … space for people to gather, to witness, to respond. [Campo Santo] loses a home, a space for people to come and feel welcome, to share stories, to give and grow the voice of the community.”
With help from some friends, Intersection since July has made headway: a $40,000 grant from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund for financial analysis and general support; $50,000 from Forest City, real estate developer of the building complex that houses Intersection, to reinstate an artist-in-residence program at a nearby public school; and likely, but not confirmed, $25,000 from San Francisco’s Arts Commission.
Kary Shulman, executive director of San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts, which has been funding Intersection annually since 1971, says she wants to give Intersection every opportunity to regroup: “Intersection has reinvented itself several times, and there’s a lot of trust in its strength to do it again. Also, among funders, we’re most grateful for its fiscal sponsor program.”
San Francisco’s thriving arts community depends on Intersection and its long, admirable history of sponsoring projects in all art disciplines.
Posted Sept. 24, 2014