There’s a Zillion Things to See at the SF Art Book Fair
The SF Art Book Fair can be a little overwhelming. Books, zines, stickers and prints blanket folding tables as far as the eye can see, if one is not looking instead at a giant crowd of people. As the annual event takes over the Minnesota Street Project this weekend, two of the literal thousands of items for sale illustrate the diversity of the fair’s wares.
One is a major publisher’s retrospective of a well-known artist. Christina Amini’s It Will Be More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine, published by Chronicle Books, spans the life and work of Susan O’Malley. The average person may mostly know O’Malley from her inspirational phrases presented on colorful backgrounds, thanks to very public displays (along Market Street, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) of her series Advice From My 80 Year-Old Self. Indeed, one of these is the book’s cover.
But as It Will Be More Beautiful makes clear, over the course of 23 essays by friends and colleagues, O’Malley’s life work was so much more than uplifting, corporate breakroom-ready signage. Optimism was a constant for O’Malley, but, as just one example, it took the form of rearranging items on people’s lawns in her well-off San José neighborhood to make the world a little more interesting.
Organizing a “Pep Talk Squad.” Listening to grandmothers. Sending files to a photocopy store in Houston to print and hang in the front window. These projects of O’Malley’s fell under the then-newish rubric of social practice, which centers the surrounding environment and its people, and which O’Malley furthered in her work as one of the first graduates of the Social Practice program at CCA.
A sad coda from the present day is that CCA is now shutting down, and the seventh-wealthiest man in the world has just pledged millions toward a plan to replace the school with one geared toward art, design, AI and technology. It’s safe to say that O’Malley’s work, which has been revered, and inspired similar projects around the world, would find no home there.
If a new visual artist working in an untraversed field like O’Malley were to come along in 2026, their work would find a suitable soundtrack in the electronic music of Daria Loard. The Oakland-based producer’s work may be more obscure than O’Malley’s, both in visibility and method, but it’s just as welcoming for those open to its embrace.
Released in an edition of 100 at the SF Art Book Fair, Loard’s new 12” EP, Spiritual Surveillance, conjures very human scenes. Opener “Backburner” cuts up synths over a bugged-out beat, as if someone handed the Invisibl Skratch Piklz an Enya record mid-set. “I Wasn’t Invited” is the sound of new age composer Ray Lynch and a Motown bassist hopping onstage during a 2000s London warehouse party.
The EP, complete with a hand-sewn fabric cover, marks an evolution for Loard, who’s releasing Spiritual Surveillance under her own name instead of her longtime moniker Bored Lord. Marking 10 years of living in Oakland after an upbringing in Memphis, it’s also the latest in a discography spanning more than two dozen releases, including the exhilarating EP For The New Moon On November 30th 2024.
Loard’s record is released by Cone Shape Top, an Oakland storefront and distributor decidedly more renegade and grassroots than Chronicle Books, and which reflects the underground with a passionate, robust spirit. Of the Bay Area’s legacy of similar collectives, radio stations and DIY spaces, Loard once told an interviewer that “no matter how hard people try to change that, it always lives on in between the cracks.”
For a glimpse into those exciting, active cracks, the SF Art Book Fair is a sterling place to start.
A signing and launch of ‘It Will Be More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine’ takes place during the SF Art Book Fair, each day from Friday–Sunday, from 12 p.m.–2 p.m. A record-release performance for ‘Spiritual Surveillance’ takes place Saturday, July 25, from 7–10 p.m. Both events are held in the warehouse at 1201 Minnesota Street, San Francisco.