This summer 500 Capp Street will celebrate two seminal voices of the Bay Area’s conceptual art scene with the next installation of 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Mildred Howard’s Collaborating With the Muses and a 50th anniversary tribute to radical art and architecture collective Ant Farm’s 1975 performance and subsequent video work, Media Burn, curated by Steve Seid.
‘Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two’
Mildred Howard returns to Capp Street to present a never-before-seen installation from a new body of work titled Untold Histories/Hidden Truths. Known for her assemblage work and installations, Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945, and has received many awards and recognitions for her approach to art and storytelling. On 500 Capp Street’s outdoor patio, visitors will encounter a reincarnation of a Junípero Serra monument draped in red textile. This recalls the Serra statue in Golden Gate Park that was toppled in 2020 as well as many other monuments removed amid nationwide protests following the police murder of George Floyd. Statues of the Catholic saint and missionary were removed, driven in part by the protest movement and the recognition of the impact of Spanish Missions on Native American populations. Howard reimagines this figure to engage public space and collective memory, contributing to the city’s ongoing reckoning with its civic monuments. Howard’s art is a catalyst for dialogue and healing as part of her lifelong commitment to political engagement, site-specificity, and community-centered practice into urgent contemporary discourse.
This exhibit runs through Aug. 23. (Additional works from this installation are currently on display at Fort Point as part of Black Gold: Stories Untold.)
‘Still Burning’
July 4, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of a performance art event at Cow Palace titled Media Burn, conducted by Ant Farm. Ant Farm was a Bay Area-based radical art and architecture collective established in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels. Both architecture graduates, they were joined by another architecture graduate, Curtis Schreier. Ant Farm’s earliest projects often involved inflatables as architecture. In 1974, a commission from a wealthy Texan created Cadillac Ranch, a tribute to the automotive tailfin as seen through 10 partially buried Cadillacs (Lord, Michels, and Hudson Marquez).
Media Burn took place on July 4, 1975, the day they drove a customized 1959 Cadillac El Dorado across the parking lot of the Cow Palace and into a pyramid of burning TV sets as a commentary on the grip media has over mesmerized audiences. American symbols — the automobile and the TV set — fueled the performance, which took more than a year of planning. Media Burn included multiple volunteers and coverage by four local television crews, and included hundreds of spectators. The resonant image from the moment the El Dorado collided with the stacked televisions was widely distributed via postcards and videos. By 1978, a catastrophic fire in Ant Farm’s studio at Pier 40 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero resulted in the disbandment of the art collective.
Diagram plan for Cow Palace by Ant Farm 1975 — Courtesy of Ant Farm.jpg
This celebratory exhibition includes a variety of documentation surrounding the outrageous performance, including Ant Farm souvenirs, press releases, architectural drawings of the site, and extensive documentation of the customized Cadillac, known as the Phantom Dream Car. Photo documentation taken by local photographers will adorn the walls, and video work will be offered continuously in a specially prepared screening area.
Guest curator Steve Seid was an experimental media curator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, where he curated hundreds of public programs, taught media literacy for high school teachers, and engaged in preservation projects for 25 years. He coedited Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000. Seid also published Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image.
This exhibition runs from July 4 through Aug. 23.
About 500 Capp Street
500 Capp Street in San Francisco is the historic home turned environmental artwork of the late, pioneering artist David Ireland. It is a 360-degree portrait of one of the West Coast’s most important practitioners of conceptual and installation art. It is not a museum or historic home in the traditional sense; it is a living sculpture. As an organization, 500 Capp Street is committed to artistic experimentation while holding up Bay Area conceptualism via driven spaces and process-oriented, provocative arts programming.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Lawrence Halprin as involved with the Ant Farm. Updated 10:54 a.m., July 1, 2025