Southern Exposure art gallery sends an SOS

Southern Exposure, the 50 year-old gallery and arts nonprofit that is known for its ambitious exhibitions, support of local artists, and youth education programs, is in trouble. Or, as an announcement recently released by the organization put it, “A confluence of events has put SoEx in a financial bind.”  

SoEx’s current budget deficit is highly solvable, the announcement continues, but over the next few weeks, the organization will be making “tough cost-cutting decisions,” launching a fundraiser to stabilize its finances in the short-term, and doubling down on its annual art auction on April 18th, an event which has, historically, blurred the lines between arts patronage and conceptual arts outfit dance party. The organization hopes to raise $400,000 between the fundraiser and the auction, and has raised $70,000 so far. “Come prepared to purchase 2x the art you usually do,” the announcement reads. “Bring 3x of the number of people you normally bring.”

Among the contributors to the confluence is the uncertainty of state funding. California’s budget is not in an awful situation, but it could be if the federal government successfully withholds money from the state. Also: the extreme unlikeliness of federal arts funding. Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that applicants for NEA funding now needed to certify that they would not use any federal monies to “promote gender ideology” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The ACLU promptly filed a lawsuit. The NEA backtracked, slightly — organizations can receive funding without laying out a formal theory of gender or a commitment to lack of diversity, but the NEA reserved the right to steer money in directions that seem most on board with the executive branch’s new preoccupations. 

The NEA has supported various SoEx projects, directly and indirectly, for years, says SoEx Artistic Director and Co-Director Valerie Imus. Some years none of their grant proposals get picked up, but other years they’ve pulled down grants of  $25,000 or $50,000 at a time.  SoEx won’t hear about the status of the grant application it submitted in summer of 2024 until this April, says Imus, but since it was to support a show about immigrant voices, she’s not holding her breath. 

Further uncertainty surrounds the kind of foundation money that otherwise might make up for the missing public kind. As the stock market drops, so do the assets of many foundations and with that, the 5 percent of those assets that they are required by federal law to pay out at each year. 

As local arts organizations go, SoEx has company in trouble. Tradición Peruana Cultural Center recently held an emergency fundraiser. The 47-year-old Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts laid off the majority of its staff. Last year, the Contemporary Jewish Museum closed indefinitely. The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts closed its gallery in 2023, around the time that the Pilara Foundation announced that they were no longer funding the Pier 24 Photography Museum and would be redirecting more of their foundation money to healthcare research. 

SoEx has charted rocky financial waters before — as one might expect of a 50 year-old arts organization that started in 1974 in an old can factory (the gallery’s original name was the American Can Collective, then, briefly, after a cease-and-desist letter from the can company, The American Can’t Collective). 

The gallery’s charter stipulates that it be artist-run, and over the years it acquired a reputation for being a bridge between small art spaces and larger institutions. — and for paying artists to do the kind of big projects that might not happen otherwise, like Sita Bhaumik’s  2016 “Estamos contra el muro | We Are Against the Wall” which paid local pinata makers to make a border wall out of pinata bricks, and then invited the neighborhood to a community pinata wall-smashing party.