Ali Gass On ICA San Francisco’s Shift to a Nomadic Model |
Installation view: Tara Donovan’s “Stratagems” at the Transamerica Pyramid. © Tara Donovan. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Lea Bruno
At a time when institutions, particularly in the U.S., are being forced to reassess their roles and operating models, ICA SF is in its element. Since its opening in 2020, it has explored what it means to be an independent yet public-facing institution rooted in its local community and the city it serves, shifting its focus from traditional exhibitions to context-specific artistic production. Under the leadership of it’s founding director and chief curator Ali Gass, ICA SF is guided by a clear ambition: to rethink what a museum can be by prioritizing experimental contemporary art, boundary-pushing exhibitions and deep public engagement rather than building a permanent collection.
Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter
Sign Up
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
See all of our newsletters“Early on, we understood that what we were offering artists was a space to try new things, to push their practice, often in response to specific space and context,” Gass tells Observer. Notably, ICA SF launched in the middle of the pandemic, at a moment when the need for institutions to respond quickly to urgent global issues felt unmistakable. “There was a real necessity to pull in artistic voices fast and give them the space to realize projects that could speak directly to the moment, but also for institutions to be able to take a left turn quickly when needed.”
Gass comes from a traditional institutional background, having previously worked as a curator at collecting museums such as The Jewish Museum, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the Broad Art Museum and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, before serving as director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José ICA SJ.
From the outset, Gass understood that the original venue in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood could not function as a permanent home. “The rent was incredibly expensive—about a quarter of our operating budget at the time, which simply didn’t make sense,” she says. Yet that early realization created an opportunity to pursue two priorities that felt essential to both ICA SF’s evolution and its mission to respond to the city’s shifting realities. One was to rethink how resources were allocated, not toward rent or building maintenance, but toward projects, people and programs. The other was to relocate to parts of the city where ICA SF could actively contribute to cultural revitalization, a priority that has become increasingly urgent.
While San Francisco already had strong collecting institutions, as well as a growing gallery scene and nonprofit landscape, ICA SF wanted to address a specific gap: the absence of a truly ambitious, non-collecting contemporary art museum. “The idea was to build that in a very Bay Area way—startup-like, experimental, moving........