Coinciding with the June primary election, IdeaSF took place at Gap headquarters, a brick postmodern building standing at the lip of the bayfront. The stated goal of the event was to “… explore the kinds of ideas — emanating from the Bay Area and beyond — that move us forward.” Behind the glass doors, security personnel and event staff checked in guests who paid up to $495 for general admission. They gathered to hear from a variety of local powerhouses, ranging from filmmakers to athletes to CEOs, to discuss the future of San Francisco. Outside, a small group of protesters representing local arts workers held signs and distributed flyers, urging attendees to consider artists’ role in the city’s culture. While the event included artists and creatives, their contributions mostly occupied five-minute time slots called “Spark Talks.”
The first panel discussion, “Leadership at Scale,” featured Mayor Daniel Lurie and Gap CEO Richard Dickson, moderated by Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone. Mayor Lurie thanked Gap for investing in downtown office space, citing corporate alliances and the return of conferences as key components of his growth strategy for the city, while Dickson highlighted Gap’s efforts to support the neighborhood through its relationships with local community organizations. When Stone pressed for nuance, Lurie and Dickson kept the tone light, though both acknowledged the need to confront difficult truths to achieve progress. This dynamic set the stage for two major themes of the event: the financial plan for the city’s future is grounded in a philanthropic funding structure that combines private and public voices, and this dictates the tone of conversations about said future.
Maria Jensen, executive director of SOMArts, delivered a five-minute talk rich with history and metaphor regarding the vital relationship between innovation and a thriving artistic community. She cited hexagrams from the I Ching, using divination as a metaphor for the current moment in San Francisco, where the community is collectively sitting with uncertainty and waiting for the future to come into focus.
Director Joe Talbot presented a short film, 48 Hills, 24 Frames, in another Spark Talk, made by students of his new summer camp, 48 Hills. San Francisco voters would soon reject Proposition D, the labor-backed “Overpaid CEO Tax.” In this context, the invitation to Talbot carried a particular resonance, given the themes of displacement and belonging explored in his film The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His participation highlighted one of the conference’s recurring dynamics: artists were invited to help imagine the city’s future, while many of the longer conversations focused on partnerships among civic leaders, corporations, and philanthropic institutions to affect decision-making now. In the work Talbot presented, we saw a delightful, sunny representation of San Francisco’s future as interpreted by the students at his camp. Teenagers need creative refuge to imagine an optimistic version of the future, but are the adults in the room willfully skipping the conversation that needs to be had about what obstacles lay between us and that utopia?
Artists were invited to help imagine the city’s future, while many of the longer conversations focused on partnerships among civic leaders, corporations, and philanthropic institutions to affect decision-making now.
The next day’s panels began with Shola Olatoya, CEO of the San Francisco Downtown Development Corporation (DDC), who outlined initiatives to transform downtown. She described a process that adapts successful strategies from her experience with similar projects in Cincinnati and Miami to fit San Francisco’s unique identity. Olatoya reported that the city is planning for an influx of 20,000 residents over the next 20 years, researching office-to-residential conversions, and relying on private donations to close funding gaps. She noted that voters directly determine major DDC projects like a Powell Street renovation. Sparse laughter and applause followed her mention of disassembling the Vaillancourt Fountain, which grassroots organizers had petitioned to renovate before San Francisco Recreation and Park Department deemed it unsafe and cost-prohibitive. This reaction illustrated a deeper friction between community-led organizing and private-sector investments.
Eliza Marks, CEO of the Big Art Loop, gave a tour of the Embarcadero section of what is apparently the world’s largest public sculpture trail. While the project is privately funded, Marks explained that the Big Art Loop consults with community groups to place work in neighborhoods. Local artist Dana Albany was there to represent her sculpture, Coralee, a piece she fabricated in tandem with local children at the residency where it was created in Derbyshire, England.
Following that was a bewildering talk titled, “AI is a New Frontier; Where Are We Headed?,” which featured Carina Hong, Founder and CEO of Axiom Math, and Michael Chui of QuantumBlack (AI by McKinsey & Company). Hong mostly explained her academic background and the nature of AxiomMath, which utilizes Lean, an open-source code compiler, to qualify its mathematical answers with something akin to deductive logic, in math terms referred to as a proof. She lauded its ability to complete proofs for mathematicians who died before finishing their work. When asked about her primary concerns regarding AI, she stated that she feared being stunted by technical limitations, things like computing power for the thousands of lines of code that these proofs require. Notably absent from the discussion were topics of labor displacement, algorithmic bias, environmental costs, and public safety concerns.
“Culture as Infrastructure” featured prominent figures from major institutions who offered their perspectives on how they support community building through their work. The panel also included Zac Posen (creative director of Gap Inc.), Rodney Jackson Jr. (artistic director of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company), Lindsay Tusk (co-owner of Quince & Co.), Lex Sloan (executive director of the Roxie Theater), and Christopher Bedford (director of SFMOMA), moderated by Jennifer Arceneaux of the Emerson Collective. When Arceneaux asked how their initial experiences of community informs their work, Jackson noted the competitive environment of growing up in San Francisco alongside artists like filmmaker Joe Talbot, while Posen related his childhood in SoHo and experiencing the neighborhood’s “development” as the son of two artists illegally occupying a loft. When asked what they are betting on, Sloan emphasized community and giving artists space to dream, while Tusk cited the unifying power of food. Bedford noted that post-pandemic, museums have had to pivot toward a local audience, arguing that the traditional model of visiting a museum solely “for your betterment” no longer satisfies contemporary local programming needs. Ultimately, the discussion underlined an effort to connect cultural organizations with broader conversations about how the city might retain the important human touch that gives it appeal, but didn’t address much in terms of barriers and threats to an autonomous creative economy here.
While the table at this year’s conference was occupied by civic leaders, CEO’s, creative directors, and technologists, the conversations avoided addressing uncertainties head-on. Those who hold the highest positions of power signal to the rest of the group what should and shouldn’t be said, and there didn’t seem to be an emphasis on open dialogue about how to find solutions, though an openness to ideas presented cordially was certainly there. With time, the slow building of trust between powerful institutions and its constituents could provide the foundation for building a vision together, but the voices and ears present in the room create a complex landscape for those conversations to unfold.