Streetopia

by Erica Dawn Lyle (Editor), Rebecca Solnit (Contributor), Chris Kraus (Contributor)

After San Francisco's new mayor announced imminent plans to "clean up" downtown with a new corporate "dot com corridor" and arts district--featuring the new headquarters of Twitter and Burning Man--curators Erick Lyle, Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich brought over 100 artists and activists together with residents fearing displacement to consider utopian aspirations and plot alternative futures for the city. The resulting exhibition, "Streetopia," was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in venues throughout the city, featuring daily free talks, performances, skillshares and a free community kitchen out of the gallery. This book brings together all of the art and ephemera from the now-infamous show, featuring work by Swoon, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23, Xara Thustra, Ryder Cooley and many more. Essays and interviews with key participants consider the effectiveness of "Streetopia"'s projects while offering a deeper rumination on the continuing search for community in today's increasingly homogenous and gentrified cities.

Genres: Art, Essays

312 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2015

About the author

Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, experimental musician, curator, and cultural instigator who lives in New York and Florida. Formerly the touring guitar player for Riot Grrl punk legends, Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, she has released musical collaborations with Bernadette Mayer, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purnell, and many more. The author of several books, she has been a frequent contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and other publications. Her artist books are in the permanent collection at MOMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Yale's Beinecke Library, the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, and other institutions, and her writings, papers, and correspondence are permanently held and viewable at the Erica Dawn Lyle archive at University of Miami. In collaboration with her partner, Midnight Piper Forman, she is currently at work on Our Place In The Sun, a speculative fiction film about climate collapse and gender transition in Florida that has screened as a work in progress at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and California School of The Arts in Valencia, CA. Her most recent book is The Knight of Cups (Belladonna Press, 2023).

Reviews

[Scott Satterwhite]

Great book. The chapter that stands out to me most is the one where someone just started planting trees everywhere he went. Cool idea, and cool book.

[Keith Schnell]

A review of Streetopia is going to depend entirely on what the reviewer expected going into it. The most basic purpose of the book – to document the 2012 arts festival by that name that aimed to present an alternative vision of San Francisco to the increasingly gentrified and tech-dominated one that was being pushed by city and media leaders – is one that it accomplishes with great success. Probably no arts festival has been documented in greater detail and with greater quality of reporting, and certainly not one as eclectic and full of fascinating characters and background as this one. With that being said, this book’s sporadic attempts to address the larger social and economic issues that prompted the festival were ultimately disappointing, and reflected the kind of confusion of ideas that prevented these same activists from making any real progress towards making a city that is livable and prosperous for all of its residents. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Chapter 9’s documentation of activist Ivy Jeanne McClelland’s idiotic and patronizing attempt to solve the very real problem of poor health care availability for poor people by teaching them to scavenge supposedly healing roots and herbs from city parks. This serves only to demonstrate the hugely counterproductive effect that the existence of hippies has always had on social and economic progress. Eric Lyle’s “Future of Nowhere” essay in Chapter 13 is also representative, handicapped as it is by half-assed ideas and lack of research even where it dances around a useful history of gentrification in San Francisco and a good general understanding of the problem. Ultimately, Streetopia does a good job of identifying why attempts to manage gentrification have fallen short, albeit as a negative example more than anything.

[Anna Alexander]

I don’t believe corporations are ever going to save us. I don’t believe putting a box store in a marginalized neighborhood is going to help “clean it up”. What will save the world are artists, writers, poets, and creative people. This book makes me want to do more for my community.

[Buren Renick]

This is actually a really interesting set of essays, it just gets incredibly repetitive. They are mostly the same thing over and over with little expansion on the core idea of the book.

[dimwig]

lots of good stuff detailing aspects of the thing (free cafe, events/installations at the luggage store, tenderloin national forest) + ephemera, reminiscences, manifestos, histories, interviews; but the key things are solnit's history of san francisco and lyle's centrepiece essay on gentrification as about "nothing less than the complete reorganization of our inner lives—up to and including the manufacturing of our deepest desires and the redefinition of all human interactions."

[Jaina Bee]

Pleasurable and poignant peek into the quickly receding glory days of my youth. Ahhh…