San Francisco's art galleries are adopting nonprofit structures and membership models to survive amid a cost-of-living crisis, absent collector base, and closed art schools that have driven away artists and gallery owners.
Cushion Works, a Mission District gallery founded by Jordan Stein in 2018, acquired nonprofit status last year and launched a membership program to sustain operations. Stein told Hyperallergic he never designed a business model for the space. Instead, he focuses on exploring "who has lived here, what has been made here, and what can we learn from that?"
The gallery's programming spans Bay Area artists including R. Crumb and Dewey Crumpler alongside emerging and established artists like Betty Bailey, BJ Newton, Grace Rosario Perkins, and Dionne Lee.