Artistic & Cultural Experiences

"A great city has arts everywhere. Arts deserve and need to be in the neighborhoods where people live, work, play, and go to school."

—Jonathan Moscone, former Executive Director, California Arts Council; former Chief Producer, YBCA

"Mural, Balmy Alley, Mission District" by Second-Half Travels is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. Muralist unknown.

Artistic and cultural experiences are defining features of life in San Francisco, nurturing community, creativity, and economic vitality.

This sector has been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, affecting both large and small arts presenters and creatives not just in San Francisco, but nationally. Rising production costs, changing demographics, and shifts in the ways audiences engage with arts and entertainment offerings were already undermining the nonprofit arts business model—trends that continue today. California’s performing arts sector alone had nearly 60,000 fewer jobs coming out of Covid, dropping to 2010 levels.

Yet if history serves, we should look to artists and arts organizations to breathe new life into struggling neighborhoods. “Creative placemaking” has come into vogue over the last decade, but its roots as a strategy for driving social and economic benefits date back to the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project. In the 1960s, urban planners and community activists again recognized the importance of cultural activities and public art in revitalizing urban areas. Since then, success stories and case studies and have demonstrated the impact of creative placemaking on communities.The pandemic made the value of shared cultural experiences—and the impact of their absence—even more tangible. Inclusive cultural events, festivals, and artist-led community projects foster connection and a sense of renewal and shared ownership in our city’s future. The ripple effects are well documented: a diverse and vibrant arts ecosystem directly correlates to a thriving local economy, and will be essential to making San Francisco a desirable place to live, work, study, and play once more.

Source: Americans for the Arts, Arts & Economic Prosperity 6

Culture strategies for resurgence build on one of our city’s core strengths: In 2023, the nation’s leading provider of data-driven insights into the arts sector named San Francisco the country’s #1 arts-vibrant community, returning us to the top spot for the first time since 2018. Beyond major institutions such as the San Francisco Opera, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and SFMOMA—one of the largest gallery spaces for modern and contemporary visual art in the world—our entire independent, community-based, and professional arts ecosystem is among the nation’s most robust. We rank among the top cities for per capita bars, bookshops, live music venues, film festivals, and community centers. And San Francisco’s prominence at the cutting edge of AI development is already fueling artistic innovation and experimentation.