Bank of America’s former Financial District flagship has reawakened from its slumber, its original trappings of commerce replaced by those of creativity.
The Cube, a 78,000-square foot, five-story space on the corner of California and Montgomery, is now the home of San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA SF).
ICA SF isn’t like the city’s other art museums. It’s more nimble, able to turn on a dime to respond to a cultural moment. There’s no permanent collection to consider, just the experimental, boundary-piercing work of artists from around the world—work to which public access is never restricted by admissions fees.
“We may not be the biggest museum in San Francisco, but we’re the fastest,” says Ethan Beard, chair of ICA SF’s Board of Directors.
Curator Larry Ossei-Mensah.(Aaron Ramsey)
Since opening in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood two years ago, ICA SF has welcomed more than 50,000 to view its regularly rotating exhibitions. At The Cube, a space at the center of the city that’s several times the size of the museum's original home, they’re likely to entice a much larger audience of both locals and visitors.
ICA SF’s inaugural show, which opens to the public this weekend, features three very different collections. Riverbend is the first institutional show for SF-based Iraqi-American Maryam Yousif. Inspired by the anonymous blog of a young woman in Baghdad during the American occupation in 2003, Yousif blends its narrative with her own early memories of the city in a ceramic style influenced by mid-century Iraqi Modernism, Bay Area Funk, and Mesopotamian and Assyrian antiquities.
In Spotlight: Kathleen Ryan, Ryan confronts American consumerism with monumental sculptures that recast decaying fruit into gem-encrusted symbols of rotting excess. In her largest piece, Screwdriver, she uses salvaged auto parts and a patio umbrella to construct an oversized cocktail garnish that confronts the illusory qualities of American culture.
Melissa Joseph 'Indian Dirty Dancing', 2024 (needle felted wool on industrial felt). (Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas. Commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. Photo by Beth Devillier)
Guest curator Larry Ossei-Mensah compiled the work of 11 artists transforming everyday objects through artistic expression in The Poetics of Dimensions, which extends across The Cube’s lower floor. Each piece is an homage to histories often overlooked by the majority, including Anthony Akinbola’s Neapolitan, which uses durags as a symbol of African-American identity to challenge perceptions of abstract art, and Moffat Takadiwa’s The Towering Twins, a vibrant textile made from discarded bottle caps and woven using the techniques of Zimbabwe’s Korekore community.
“When I think about contemporary art, it’s about pushing the narrative and giving the artists a platform to share their ideas,” says Ossei-Mensah of the exhibition’s motivation.
In addition to visual art, ICA SF will continue its missions of public education and engagement, offering free makers workshops for kids, a teen program, exclusive membership experiences through the 901 Club, and a variety of other events, including coffee and chef pop-ups. With a stage and stadium-style wooden seating at its center, there are virtually endless opportunities for putting the cavernous new digs to use in innovative ways.
Ultimately, though, it is the work of artists big and small, local and international, around which ICA SF revolves—and admission to enter will always be free.
“We are obsessed with art,” says says David Hornik, treasurer for ICA SF's board of directors. “Art is what makes us think. Art is the thing that moves us. Art is fucking epic.”
// Opening weekend at The Cube is October 25 to 27 with regular hours Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm and Thursdays from 11am to 7pm; 345 Montgomery St. (FiDi), icasf.org.
Maryam Yousif 'Habibti in Album Dress', 2023.(Courtesy of the artist and The Pit, Los Angeles)
