Comment on Books mark a genre in Bay Area art

What began life as a “one-time, temporal intervention into a specific real estate development scenario,” co-curated by longtime San Francisco writer Erick Lyle and Mission School artist Chris Johanson and Bayview Hunters Point artist Kal Spelletich in 2012, eventually evolved into an art book of the same name, featuring work by artists like Barry McGee, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23 and Xara Thustra. “Unlike entertainment meccas like New York or L.A., San Francisco has historically been the city that a certain kind of creative person moves to, the kind that isn’t interested as much in individual success or an art career, but who is more interested in developing arts community, collaboration or conversation, or is more interested in political change,” explains Lyle from Baltimore, where he’s scheduled to speak. “Arts movements which offer little possibility of financial success — poetry, experimental film, book arts — have always done well in S.F., as those disciplines are often the core of strong and supportive countercultural communities,” says the author of On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City. Plains to the Pacific, “California BookWorks” offers an opportunity to reveal some never-before-seen contemporary volumes produced by Charles Hobson, Crown Point Press and Edition Jacob Samuel in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts collection, says curator Colleen Terry. Mission School followers will want to see prints from McGee’s 2006 “Drypoint on Acid” portfolio, depicting faces and figures from the margins, and Dana Smith’s “Mission Miracle Mile Trilogy,” capturing the sidewalks, street vendors and crushed pills of the neighborhood — “everything that makes the community full of life, but referencing the seedy and crowded nature as well,” Terry notes. The ‘Streetopia’ book was intended to inspire folks in other cities facing similar issues as S.F.,” Lyle says, “but was also intended to be a kind of time capsule that would send the ideas, projects, hopes and history of many of S.F.’s utopian arts, literary and political movements together into the future as a kind of seed library of ideas that could hopefully take root again in some other time and place where conditions are better again.