Off the Hook
Bay Area Then
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Ongoing – January 25, 2026
In July, I was driving to the Legion of Honor to see the Thiebaud exhibition. From the time I got off the Bay Bridge until my turn off the freeway at Golden Gate exit, I was barraged by more than a dozen billboards, every single one selling some form of AI.
Like many transplants, I miss the San Francisco that was “mine.” The one that was here when I arrived, almost 50 years ago. Heck, I still miss the 76 tower and the big clock.
The billboards I saw this month have a story to tell:
The future is now.
It is here.
There is no turning back.
Resistance is futile??? Maybe… maybe not. At least that’s the outlook from Bay Area Then where artists who were here in the 1990s remind us how they challenged the status quo. The exhibition features both historical works and new pieces by artists who were part of or inspired by that era.
1990s
The 1990s started with the Bay Area still digging out from the Loma Prieta quake, two and one-half months earlier. Meanwhile, ferries populated the Bay. Later that year, the first Gulf War started and was over, all in the space of six months.
Rodney King was assaulted, and Los Angeles rioted when the four LAPD were acquitted. Before the riot, the Oakland firestorm swept through the East Bay Hills.
The City was more economically diverse. Dotcoms, like Amazon, didn’t even start up before 1995. Nothing to worry about… hmmm. Instead we were riveted to our TVs as O.J. Simpson was found not guilty for murdering his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.
The AIDS scourge continued. The worst year was 1992 when 194,476 Americans died from HIV/AIDS. The first vaccine began testing in 1998.
Through it all, art was thriving in the Bay Area. Artists burrowed themselves into run down districts in The City and set up live/work spaces. There was plenty of crossover between visual and musical artists; after all, they were neighbors. The cultural sector at the time was electrified.
Central to 1990s Bay Area was the complex web of these artist-run and alternative spaces – essential outlets for gathering, listening, performing, and learning from each other. Photographs, ephemera, zines and flyers generated in those spaces are at YBCA, on loan from many individuals who never expected their work to grace the walls of a museum. These materials lend a grassroots feel that’s rarely vibed on a white-walled, capital-A art institution.
A Little Nostalgia
In the 1990s, we tried “surfing the ‘net” with slooooow dial-up connections that required a phone line, leading to busy signals for incoming calls. The Internet itself was a boring text-based world. (Sorry Al Gore, but it’s true.)
Google had a most basic version of its page online for the first time on September 4, 1998. Amazon only sold books! The “Streets of San Francisco” were not populated by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, rather Herb Caen celebrated the “wacky and wild and wonderful” intrepid bike messengers. Bay Area Then remembers.
Alicia McCarthy has made a painting directly on the wall of the gallery, in her recognizable style of crisscrossed lines of vibrant spray paint, similar to the mural at Market and Seventh adorning the side of the Proper Hotel.
Proper Hotel, Seventh & Market
Meanwhile, Chris Johanson and Ajax Oakford have constructed a gallery within the gallery. Visitors can walk inside a small, labyrinthine structure made of reclaimed wood and particle board to discover paintings hung on the walls.
Relevant Today
Today we again find ourselves at a moment of consequence in need of radical thought, civic action, steely determination and relentless imagination. Bay Area Then brings together historic and new works by artists who shun despair to instead assert their unique vitality, resourcefulness and camaraderie.
KQED Arts praised the exhibition for its "loving approach" and its ability to highlight the "extraordinary potential of everyday people." Other reviews noted the parallels between the social and political climate of the 90s and today.
Is It Really Art if There’s No Controversy?
Those who routinely visit the triennial Bay Area Now will remember how last year that exhibit closed for a month when the artists altered their works in a way that the YCBA deemed anti-Semitic and too pro-Palestinian, while the artists howled censorship. February 2024, YBCA made national headlines (and not in a good way) by shutting down the exhibition after the artist-led protests in support of Palestine. In the end, the show reopened and YBCA CEO Sara Fenske Bahat resigned.
Apparently, a lot of lessons were learned from that situation. With the choices of artwork displayed in Bay Area Then, the new CEO, Mari Robles, signals a shift in YBCA’s willingness to platform activist-artists.
Refreshingly, Bay Area Then acknowledges the artists’ freedom. It features contemporary works from artists active since the ’90s, including Rigo 23, whose jaw-dropping Terra Nullius is a centerpiece of the show. The mural depicts Palestinian civilians shouting through bullhorns while drones hover overhead. Inserting the Sutro Tower on the West Bank wall, and self-driving cars side-by-side with tanks, the piece expects the viewer to confront the reality of Bay Area tech giants’ military contracts, which have helped create the infrastructure for Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Rigo 23, Terra Nullius
A large-scale 2023 aerosol piece by graffiti artist, Spie One, depicts seeds blossoming into raised fists of resistance on Palestinian soil. Next to it is the 1997 work by the late graffiti legend Mike “Dream” Francisco that criticizes U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.
Not all the art in the show is explicitly political. There’s Main Drag, the last major installation by Mission School icon Margaret Kilgallen, who passed away in 2001. Across two walls, Kilgallen remixes sign-painting techniques with stylized illustrations of working-class people going about their everyday lives.
Detail (one wall) from Kilgallen’s work
As long as we’re discussing controversies, let’s not forget Eungie Joo becoming the curator of this work at YBCA. Joo was terminated last year from her position as head curator at SFMOMA. (Apparently, she does not play well with others.)
· After moving across the street to YBCA, Joo must be pleased by how warmly her exhibition has been praised. KQED called it “lovingly curated.” Joo surveys the vibrant cultures that emerged from the AIDS crisis, the LAPD beating of Rodney King and the first Gulf War and seeks to connect the ‘90s with present-day struggles.
Sometimes, when we look back, the timing isn’t right. Is a show about the 1990s too late? Or too soon? This show speaks to the world a quarter-century ago. Barack Obama wasn’t even a US Senator yet.
Is time really moving faster now? Should the “Then” have been the 2000s? Recently, I tried to watch a comedy, Vice Principals, with some Millennials. The show is from 2016, but it was just too slow for them. Get Z listens to tapes at accelerated speeds between 1.5-2 times the actual recording. Google has only been around for 27 years, yet I feel like I’ve used it almost my whole life.
In Bay Area Then, Joo has chosen to spotlight artists who recognize the extraordinary fortitude of everyday people to create a better world. Maybe it is nostalgic for people my age to wish the world was a little slower. Many people under 60 (last of the Baby Boomers turned 60 this year), feel that is unrealistic, that such a time is gone. After all, as of August 31, 2025, Donald Trump had signed 196 Executive Orders in the 223 days of his presidency. Courts are slowly overturning many of these orders. Many despair that the damage is already done with DOGE and Alligator Alcatraz.
Can the message from the 1990s be: Remain steadfast and show the fortitude of those everyday ‘90s people? Or is it all nostalgia? Bay Area Then asks the question, as the viewer, you decide.
For more information on Bay Area Then, click here.
My thanks to Nastia Voynovskaya KQED/The Do List & Max Blue SF Examiner.
