If there have been no posts recently, it’s because ArtHouse has been forced to take a new approach to moving things forward. In June, we were told that our policies no longer qualified us for fiscal sponsorship, since current guidelines did not allow our fiscal sponsor to represent an organization that involved real estate or that offered a benefit to someone in the private sector. As a result, the immediate objectives have changed, and we’re in the process of filing for our own 501(c)3 status.
The news was hard to fathom, for a variety of reasons. The first was that we’d been sponsored by the same organization since 2019, when it was still run by a director who’d been there for 40 years. He told me not to bother with philanthropy or government funding, but to look for support from the private sector. After he retired, I learned he was right; I couldn’t find a single foundation in America that had artists’ housing in their guidelines, and the city of San Francisco had no intention of helping. Although the NEA offered to fully fund our project, if we could partner with the city, no one in city government would talk to us at all. The private sector remained the only option.
It was also a very strange policy because every nonprofit with a reasonable budget has an office, which involves real estate and profit to a member of the private sector, their landlord. ArtHouse isn’t seeking ownership of property, but partnership with building owners to give them huge tax deductions for in-kind charitable donations. Apparently, fiscally sponsored organizations can have an office, but not a partnership. Only organizations with their own 501(c)3 designation can embark on corporate-nonprofit (or individual-nonprofit) partnerships, and so that’s our current goal.
The process is tedious, even if you are low-budget and qualify for the EZ application. It’s somewhat less expensive if you have no money, but it still involves countless unpaid hours to fill out the multiple forms, draft the requisite business plan, contact all the government agencies involved, edit the website, research the fine points, et cetera.
This is a labor of love for me, which I carry on with whether there’s money in our account or not. I was born at 200 Columbus Avenue, in an era when San Francisco was the epicenter of literary culture, and the most famous poets alive were at the same table in the Caffe Trieste every day. I lived in the years when musicians in the Haight became globally famous, the punk scene exploded south of Market and on Broadway, where the world’s most famous comedians were regulars, Latin rock emerged from the Mission, and we got art forms that never existed before: performance art, machine art, environmental art, and zine culture. In 1990, the last new art phenomenon to come out of San Francisco , Burning Man at the Black Rock Desert, was conceived and planned in my living room until 2000. They were fascinating times in a stunningly beautiful place. I loved this city so much, not just for its beauty, but for the fortune of creative energy that made it shine.
There are still creative people here, but far, far fewer. And people can no longer come here to start a career—without a trust fund— because you can’t rent an apartment without pay stubs proving you make three times the egregious rent. As a writer, I can’t rent an apartment here, and for the first time in my adult life, I don’t have a lease with my name on it. But I can provide a magnificent in-kind charitable donation to a landlord with a big, empty flat for ArtHouse.
This is also a labor of love for my fellow San Franciscans, to give them back the quality of life I’ve known in this city humming with creative energy and the improved mental health it brings, proven in hundreds of academic studies. I can almost guarantee what I want to do will undo the city’s economic downturn. I’m in search of the right collaborators, to give them the opportunity to do something as remarkable as starting Burning Man, some life-changing and rewarding pleasure.
But first the paperwork for the 501(c)3.
psegal (at) arthousesf.org
Proust Said That © 