It was a day of extremes. On Wednesday morning, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced his search for a new executive director to oversee the city’s three art agencies.
San Francisco’s executive director of arts and culture, to be paid between $210,678 and $268,814, will head a new agency to “unify the work” of the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), Grants for the Arts (GFTA) and the Film Commission (Film SF).
But by the afternoon, news broke that the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) had suddenly and indefinitely closed. The nonprofit arts center, a Mission District hub since its founding by artists and community members in 1977, had run out of operating funds and left its empty building — owned by the city — in the hands of the SFAC.
Combined with the news of California College of the Arts’ upcoming closure, layoffs at the performing arts space CounterPulse, the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s continued limbo state, and gallery and theater closures across the city, MCCLA’s struggles top off an avalanche of recent bad news.
“There’s just so much happening,” Rachelle Axel tells KQED. “And the very local arts community of San Francisco hasn’t really been feeling like there’s been adequate attention to what has been going on.”
Axel is just three weeks into a new position as executive director of Arts for a Better Bay Area (ABBA), a regional arts advocacy group that in 2018 rallied crucial support to pass San Francisco’s Prop E, which reallocated 1.5% of hotel tax revenue to arts and culture.
Still, Axel sees the new job posting as a good sign, even as she expresses frustration with the slow speed at which it was put out. (Lurie first mentioned unifying the three arts organizations under a single leader back in May 2025.)
“There’s been a lot of talk about the arts leading revitalization efforts,” Axel says, “but when it’s been no activity for eight months out of the 12 months that the new administration has been in place, it feels like it’s a bit more talk and less action.”
On the surface, merging the city’s arts and film agencies makes a certain sense. Currently, the SFAC provides grants to individual artists, arts nonprofits and the city’s seven cultural centers, in addition to funding public art projects. It also organizes exhibitions in two gallery spaces, one in the War Memorial Veterans Building, the other in City Hall.
GFTA provides general operating support to San Francisco arts nonprofits, including festivals and parades. Film SF helps filmmakers get shooting permits and fee rebates, and operates one granting opportunity. (Now housed under the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Film SF is clearly the odd man out here.)
Wednesday’s announcement said the merger aimed for “simpler grant applications, better-aligned timelines, and ensuring resources continue to reach working artists.” Current leaders of all three agencies (Ralph Remington at the SFAC, Kristen Jacobson at GFTA, and Manijeh Fata at Film SF) will keep their jobs, but are also welcome to apply to the executive director position.
Many questions remain.
In October and November of 2025, the mayor’s office and the three agencies organized a series of community meetings around the merger, seemingly to answer some of those questions. At the Oct. 28 meeting I attended, consultants asked the audience — mostly former grantees and agency employees — “What concerns you about the merger?” and “What opportunity does the merger offer?”
My table could come up with few opportunities. All were worried, especially those who had experienced years of shifting priorities from the SFAC and delays from GFTA, that this merger would decrease the funding available to arts nonprofits. In a recent email, ABBA summarized the proceedings as leaving hundreds of attendees “with little information, and a sense of uncertainty about the future of these entities.”
Lurie’s administration was already on rocky ground with the arts community. In June, the SFAC attempted to change the way it distributes money to nonprofits, capping payment advances at 50% and requiring more paperwork in the form of quarterly reports. Nonprofit leaders mobilized to protest the sudden changes, and were granted a temporary reprieve.
Understandably, much of Lurie’s focus has been on San Francisco’s downtown, for both economic and symbolic reasons. Partnerships with nonprofits and private donors have created programs like Vacant to Vibrant (which connects local businesses to empty retail spaces), and brought in grants like Culture Forward, given out by the Svane Family Foundation.
But as Axel points out, people need the arts in every corner of San Francisco — which is why accessible spaces like MCCLA are so important.
“This stuff is happening downtown and it’s new and shiny,” she says. “But there’s not a lot of attention about or conversation with the arts organizations around the rest of the city — the ones that are working in communities, the cultural centers that have been there for decades and decades and have an incredible impact in their communities.”
The city’s arts organizations, even its most longstanding institutions, are clearly vulnerable right now. In the time it takes to hire an executive director of arts and culture — and for that person to stabilize San Francisco’s arts sector, let alone strengthen it — we may see even more announcements like yesterday’s from MCCLA.
Which is all to say: hurry up, before it’s too late.
