The arrival of a $5 million grant, courtesy of a San Francisco tech founder, is a bit of a relief during these, to put it generously, uncertain times.
The Svane Family Foundation’s Culture Forward grant program was announced in October, as one of many efforts to revitalize downtown San Francisco. The program gives quarterly cohorts of local artists one-time grants of up to $100,000 until 2027 to projects that benefit downtown. The first round of art organizations receiving grants was revealed in mid-April.
The foundation is the brainchild of Mikkel Svane, co-founder of customer support software company Zendesk; it initially donated $1 million in 2022 to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. SOMArts, the radical gallery space and arts incubator, is now one of the recipients of the Svane Family Foundation’s inaugural grant.
“I’ve been paying attention to who's coming to the table to provide this level of support for local organizations because, you know, city budgets are generally tapped out,” Maria Jenson, the executive director of SOMArts, told Gazetteer SF.
“For most arts organizations when you're applying for funding of any kind, it can feel a little bit like you're sitting at the table in Vegas.”
Jenson readily admits that the technology industry and the artistic community are “unique” bedfellows, at best, and, between gentrification and generative AI, have often been at odds with one another. But when fellow rich tech guys are sending pop stars to space and hoovering up funding to essential federal programs in the name of a decade-old meme, a tech founder putting money into the local arts community feels a bit quaint.
Tech philanthropy already constitutes a not-insignificant part of the San Francisco arts landscape’s funding: To wit, the Ruth Asawa exhibition that opened last month at SFMOMA received a $1.5 million grant from Google’s philanthropic arm, the largest corporate grant for a single exhibition in the museum’s history. Tech conglomerates like Salesforce and Amazon have thrown money into local theater, while Google, between its Asawa grant and a 2023 grant to the de Young Museum for its Kehinde Wiley exhibition, given substantial amounts to museums hosting exhibitions of big-name artists.
The Svane foundation’s investments have focused on local artists doing boundary-pushing work. SOMArts will use its $25,000 grant, for instance, for a series of community-oriented fashion events: workshops that will culminate in an all-ages fashion show and a ball held in partnership with LGBTQ ballroom collective Oakland to All.
“We will have all kinds of interesting categories, from art administrator to dad bod to City Hall insider and it's all ages, which is fantastic,” Jenson said of the fashion show. “I'm just a big believer in thinking about producing the type of events that really can check a lot of boxes without it being insincere.”
Other recipients include SFFILM, the Tenderloin Museum, and queer collective Unity Skateboarding, the latter of which received the largest grant this round to host an art, music, and skateboarding festival in the city.
And yet, even this infusion hasn’t necessarily alleviated the broader concerns afflicting artists and arts workers. Funding for local arts nonprofits is a patchwork of private grants, public funds, and small and large donations, all of which come in ebbs and flows. Jenson said that she’s been “sitting on pins and needles” waiting to see if other sources of funding for SOMArts are going to be cut. Already, one foundation — she declined to name which — has had to pull back their annual contributions to SOMArts as a result of cutbacks.
“There's a lot of unknown in the community right now,” Jenson said.
So, that this benefactor is coming in at this juncture feels like a glimmer of hope, albeit one with an expiration date — one that Jenson hopes fuels a growing trend of individual tech tycoons putting their money to supporting the city’s arts economy.
“There's tremendous wealth in the Bay Area,” Jenson said. “And so hopefully this acts as a beacon to attract more of the same where people come to the table and say, ‘You know, I want to invest in the arts. I want to be part of this as well.’”
