“R-Evolution” towers over Embarcadero Plaza in 2025. People have heard of the Beats and the Summer of Love, but less is known about the dynamic art and music scene in San Francisco during the late ’80s and early ’90s. 

In 1989, I landed my first job post-college in San Francisco — as an administrative assistant (aka gallery girl) at the Capp Street Project art gallery located in a former auto body shop at 14th and Mission streets. My salary was $16,000. I lived in an expansive one-bedroom apartment in Oakland; the rent was $600, but because the building was called the Alison Apartments, the landlord cut it down to $550. My boyfriend was a painter with a day job as an art handler. We found ourselves smack in the middle of one of the most fascinating art scenes of the era.

People know about the Beats and the Summer of Love, but little has been written about the dynamic art and music scene that was happening in San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Live/work spaces were occupied by artists, not techies. First Thursdays in Union Square were packed. Capp Street — where gallery-goers poured into the streets to see the then-emerging artists like Bill Viola and Ann Hamilton — was part of a larger Bay Area art ecosystem of nonprofits like Artspace and New Langton Arts in San Francisco’s South of Market and Pro Arts in Oakland, established galleries like John Berggruen and Rena Bransten in Union Square and art schools that produced generations of incredibly creative people.

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Those were years when it felt like there was always something to see.

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Hamilton carpeted the floor of Capp Street with 7,000 pennies (her artists’ fee) embedded........

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