Spencer Keeton Cunningham: Farewell San Francisco at Heron Arts

For a painter who had spent more than two years living out of a bag, Spencer Keeton Cunningham had never had a solo show in the city he called home. When it finally came, in October 2016, it was a goodbye. Farewell San Francisco: A Retrospective filled Heron Arts, the warehouse gallery at 7 Heron Street in SoMa, from 8 October, with a free opening that evening from seven until ten and a closing reception on Friday 28 October. The run was then stretched by a few days to 31 October.

Portland, the Art Institute and the road

Cunningham was born in 1983 and grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he skated and painted from an early age. He went on to graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2014 he left the city on what he called a permanent painting tour, working his way round New Zealand’s North and South Islands, then across to Tasmania, the cities of Melbourne and Sydney, and out into the Australian outback. By the time of the retrospective he had painted or shown in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico, Cuba, the Netherlands, Ontario, British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, Hawaii and across the United States, coming back to San Francisco regularly to exhibit while keeping his apartment there.

The retrospective also carried paintings by the people he had shared a house with for years: Daisy Ortiz, Erlin Geffrard, known as Kid Kreyola, and the couple’s son Daylin, then four years old. Cunningham called them his art family. The four had exhibited together often, in San Francisco and further afield, including a 2013 show at Guangzhou’s Wenying Highland Art Museum in China. Hanging their paintings beside his own made the retrospective a portrait of a household as much as of one career.

How the show happened

Cunningham explained that he had come home after twenty-nine months on the road wanting, for the first time in two years, a break from travelling. He had just painted murals in Massachusetts about the protests at Standing Rock. What he found in San Francisco was a serious black mould problem in the house, going back to 2014, that the landlord would not deal with. The upshot was that he and his housemates had to leave the place he had lived in for twelve years.

He decided to turn the move into an exhibition. With the help of Noah Antineu, Tova Lobatz and Mark Slee, he pulled together a decade’s worth of stored work in a matter of days, while emptying the apartment at the same time. He admitted he had lost count of the pieces but put the total at around four hundred, from big canvases down to small works on paper. Most dated from 2004 to 2016, and a few went back to the mid-1990s, when he was a young teenager. He described his life as, more or less, hanging on the gallery’s walls.

The gallery lists paintings, works on paper, ceramics, installation and photography, and themes that run from skateboarding and gentrification to environmental damage, endangered species and contemporary Native identity. Cunningham said the building felt more like a warehouse than a gallery, with a great deal of wall, and that the work went up to the ceiling. He expected the result to overload the senses and hoped visitors would take the time to read individual pieces, since nearly every one carries a definite meaning. Many of the works on Native American issues, spanning 2006 to 2016, had become newly relevant with events in North Dakota. Seen in one place, the decade of work showed how consistently he had returned to the same questions of land, water and who gets to decide what happens to them, long before the pipeline made national news. The show served two audiences at once: an introduction for people in the city who did not know his work, and a farewell for those who did.

Half the sales to Standing Rock

Cunningham pledged half of the proceeds from painting sales at the show to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the oil line routed beneath the Missouri River upstream of the reservation. Opponents argued that a leak would threaten the tribe’s water and, by the figure he cited, the supply of some seventeen million people downstream.

He described the camp at Standing Rock as a vast gathering of Native Americans from across the country who had come to stand with the tribe against what he saw as a corporate seizure of their water, land and rights. As he was clearing out his home, he said, he wanted the show to be about more than one artist, and to give something back to people putting themselves at risk to protect water and land. He placed the pipeline in a long history of taking from Native people for profit, a continuation of manifest destiny in his words, and borrowed a slogan from his friend, the artist Jaque Fragua: “Native Lives Matter”.

He had not yet been to the camp himself but intended to go and give his time once the show came down. Friends were there already, among them the artist Richard Bluecloud Castaneda and Marvin Tsinnijinnie, and he mentioned that the actor Mark Ruffalo had also gone. While the interview was under way he was receiving messages from people at the front line describing a night-time move by security forces against protesters, with women and children pulled back to safety and men riding out on horseback. He connected them with the private guards whose use of dogs against demonstrators earlier in the autumn had drawn wide condemnation.

Three paintings about the pipeline

The dog attacks were the subject of one of the Massachusetts murals. Cunningham described a black figure, part dog and part wolf, in a scene of chaos: dynamite about to go off at its feet, bombs overhead, two arrows in its hands in a way that leaves unclear whether it is holding them or has been pierced by them, and a pipeline spilling oil on the horizon. A second painting told the story more abstractly, like a quilt built from symbolic patterns and bright colour.

The third was in San Francisco. Shortly before the show he painted a wall titled Standing Rock on Mission Street, between 20th and 21st, in the heart of the Mission. Its patterns and symbols set two cultures against each other: an oil-driven United States shaped by manifest destiny, and the tribes defending a sacred water source. He said it was an honour to be given a wall in that neighbourhood, which has its own long tradition of political murals and was itself under heavy pressure from rising rents.

A museum wall and a paper in Beijing

Since returning he had also shown a few paintings in a museum exhibition at San Francisco State University alongside major figures in contemporary Native American art, including Fritz Scholder, Frank LaPena, Jaque Fragua, Rye Purvis, Richard Bluecloud Castaneda and James Luna. Sharing a wall with artists of that standing, some no longer living, meant a great deal to him. His favourite of his own contributions was a Native American Mickey Mouse.

He had also just learned that his work would feature in a paper at the World Congress of Art History, its thirty-fourth meeting, held in Beijing. He said he had needed to look up what that was, felt he had done little to deserve it, and considered his career to be only starting. The paper, by the art historian Elaine O’Brien, proposed that Indigenous artists form a worldwide network of their own, rooted in tribal traditions while moving through international art circuits, parallel to the mainstream one. It drew on James Clifford’s 2013 book Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century and traced the exhibition histories of two older artists, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, of the Salish and Kootenai, and Frank LaPena, a Nomtipom Wintu painter and poet, both shaped by the Red Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It then jumped two generations to Cunningham, a video and mural artist whose social and environmental work appears online and on walls around the world, as evidence against the idea of a single, shared global art world.

The closing night and after

For the closing reception Cunningham planned a large interactive sculpture that visitors could help make, so that the audience would become part of the show on its last evening. After that he meant to go back on the road, to keep raising money, and to head for North Dakota. The whole thing had been a strain to assemble in the circumstances, he said, but it was worth doing if a chaotic situation could be turned into something useful for Native communities in need.

A short film of the show was made with Blake Bogosian, and supporters set up an online fundraiser so that people who could not reach the gallery could still contribute to the Standing Rock pledge.

Leaving

Asked for final words, Cunningham said it saddened him to leave a city he had called home for so long, though he accepted it was time for a change. Some of the paintings on the walls criticised the technology industry’s takeover of San Francisco; he had not imagined, painting them, that he and his housemates would end up displaced by the same forces. In his view the city had lost much of its heart and culture.

He predicted that gentrification would be ignored as bigger luxury flats went up, and that mainstream news would keep looking away from Standing Rock, but said the movement would still be there. His closing remarks were a direct appeal: to stop being distracted by television, sport, entertainment and sanitised politics, to stop chasing selfies and endless consumption, and to remember that the United States sits on Native land. He called for people to think about future generations, to teach the young, and to act together against those who have exploited the poor from the start.

The gallery’s listing for Farewell San Francisco records the dates and the other artists in the show. Since then the pipeline was completed, and oil began flowing through it in June 2017.