An art museum is leaving its home in Dogpatch for San Francisco’s beleaguered downtown, moving at essentially no cost into the five-story modernist building known as “The Cube,” among a lineup of Montgomery Street banks.
The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco on Thursday signed a license agreement with developer Vornado Realty Trust to occupy the building at 345 Montgomery St. for two years. While the museum will pay for minor move-in costs, the developer offered the space free of rent and utility fees, hoping the museum will lift the building’s profile and lure tenants who want to be neighbors with the cutting-edge creative institution.
The new digs represent a quantum leap for ICA SF, a nonprofit newcomer to San Francisco’s art scene, which has made a name for itself showing Bay Area artists at pivotal moments in their careers, as well as international artists who have made waves in the contemporary art world. For example, New York-based sculptor and painter Jeffrey Gibson, who was selected to represent the U.S. at this year’s Venice Biennale, had his work shown at ICA SF in October 2022.
ICA SF does not charge admission and keeps no permanent collection, emphasizing experimentation and nimbleness, according to Alison Gass, the founder and director. The new space will cut costs drastically and allow the museum to pursue its goals of breaking down barriers in exhibition and raising pay for artists and staff, Gass said.
“We were founded on this vision of allowing artists to dig into their back pocket and imagine what they would do if they had a little bit of time and a little bit of money to create something new,” said Gass. “That’s really where we want to put our funding dollars.”
ICA SF will fill 345 Montgomery’s ground floor, which will serve as a welcome space, and first basement floor, which will be the main gallery. At 29,700 square feet, it’s nearly three times the size of the museum’s current hangar-style home in the Dogpatch, where it has been located alongside more than a dozen other galleries since opening in October 2022.
Institutes of Contemporary Art have cropped up across the country since the original was founded in 1936 in Boston. Gass, who was formerly director of ICA San Jose, was able to found San Francisco’s outlet in the wake of the pandemic by raising more than $2.5 million.
ICA SF’s role as an outlier is apparent in its funders, many of whom are big names in tech — a class that has received criticism for a lack of support for the arts. Among its backers are Andy Rappaport, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who co-founded Minnesota Street Projects with his wife, Deborah.
“In terms of ICA, I do think the concept of it being a startup is attractive to people who work in technology,” said tech entrepreneur Ethan Beard, who got in early as a director at Facebook. “Having spent my life in tech and startups and contemporary arts, this is a huge love of mine, and this was really a love of the combination of those two. It’s a startup museum, and how often do you get to get involved in a startup museum?”
The new location has architectural significance. The Cube, a 78,000-square-foot sidecar to the Bank of America building next door, was designed in 1971 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, two years after the plaza’s anchor building was finished. In 2020, a redevelopment project was completed by the same firm, adding a fourth floor and cantilever stairs to make the space more accommodating for reuse.
“I think many building owners have struggled to find uses that could occupy these large spaces. And so, you’ve seen some of them turned into, like, Walgreens and things like that,” said Leo Chow, a design partner at SOM and project lead for The Cube’s redevelopment. “So the owners were trying to figure out how to use the space, and they thought if we could create a really unique space, they might be able to attract an interesting tenant such as a tech company.”
Light pours into the building from all sides and flows over the thin doughnut of open floor that hugs the walls of the atrium.
“Vornado redeveloped The Cube to serve as both an architectural landmark and a key component of the city’s most vibrant urban campus,” said Glen Weiss, executive vice president for Vornado Realty Trust, in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with the incredible team at ICA SF and the diverse range of artists who will further enliven and elevate the Financial District as a nexus for culture and commerce.”
Developers have an urgent need to find new uses for downtown buildings. San Francisco’s downtown office vacancy rate climbed to a record 37% in the second quarter, up from 36.7% in the first quarter.
South of Market Street, several institutions — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, to name a few — form an arts stronghold downtown. North of Market, where there is a larger concentration of high-rises, has less of an arts presence.
But as the Transamerica Pyramid rears up for an unveiling of renovations on Sept. 12, and Jony Ive continues to invest in Jackson Square, north of Market may be seeing a renaissance. ICA SF founding board member Susan Swig seems to think so.
“I’ve been dreaming about arts coming to this part of the city for a while,” said Swig, who also serves as a board member for SFMOMA and is on the steering committee of the FOG Design + Art Fair. “This is where people go to work, there are restaurants, and all the sudden, up pops ICA SF, which will be available to everybody in their own backyard to participate with.”
ICA SF will have its grand opening in the new space Oct. 25, with a group show, “The Poetics of Dimensions,” curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and a project from Bay Area ceramicist Maryam Yousif.
To learn more about ICA SF’s upcoming shows, go to https://www.icasf.org/exhibitions.