Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) squats there in SoMa like a deliberate provocation to everything San Francisco pretends it isn't anymore. This isn't your grandfather's museum; hell, it's barely a museum at all. It's a cultural engine room where the gears are always grinding, always threatening to blow apart, and that's precisely the point.
Walk through those doors and you're confronted with the uncomfortable reality that art doesn't have to be polite. The YBCA gives zero fucks about your comfort zone. It's trafficking in the messy, the political, the stuff that makes dinner party conversations go sideways. This is where the city's conscience, whatever's left of it, comes to wrestle with itself in public.
The building itself? Modernist concrete and glass, unapologetic in its angularity. It doesn't whisper; it asserts. The architecture mirrors what happens inside: sharp edges, unexpected angles, spaces that force you to reconsider what you thought you knew. There's something almost punk rock in its refusal to be charming, to make nice with the tourist gaze.
What sets this place apart is its commitment to the contemporary moment, not as some abstract concept but as a living, breathing, occasionally ugly thing. The exhibitions rotate with the urgency of a city that's perpetually cannibalizing and reinventing itself. Indigenous voices. Digital provocateurs. Community activists using art like a crowbar.
And yeah, it sits in the shadow of tech money and corporate towers, but maybe that tension is what keeps it honest. The YBCA exists as a reminder that culture isn't just what happens after you've made your fortune. It's the wrestling match with everything that fortune destroys and creates. It's San Francisco's id, laid bare in gallery form.
Collusion / Industries 2018
Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.” But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years […]
Read
Industries 2018
I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, but I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, […]
ReadSpeculation 2018
I don’t belong here. That’s the first thing I need to understand. This isn’t my world. These aren’t my people. I’m a tourist with a golden ticket, a voyeur granted temporary access to a place most people never see, never even know exists. And I should be grateful for it. It’s three hours before curtain […]
Read
Industries 2015
I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole […]
Read
Collusion 2014
Frank Smigiel, from SFMOMA, calls me up and asks if I want to play the Mayor of San Francisco. Not the actual mayor, but some conceptual version of a mayor in a performance piece by these South African artists in the Mission District. I’m thinking: Why me? I’m not an actor. I’m not a politician. […]
Read