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The Redstone Building on the corner of Capp St & 16th St in San Francisco, where The Lab has been since 1995. Photo by Robert Divers Herrick.
Dear friends,
The Lab is a testament to transformation. We believe in the visionary capacity of artists and their work to lead us toward new ways of being together in the world. The nature of this work is never finished, and yet year after year we see more spaces close, and more artists and working people forced out of our region.
Now one of the longest-running alternative art spaces in the Bay Area, The Lab stewards a cornerstone of labor history in the San Francisco Labor Temple’s Main Auditorium. In 2021, when our building was sold to a real estate investor after our own unsuccessful attempt to facilitate and negotiate a collaborative purchase, we were faced with a choice: do we leave this historic site and the decades of work that had been invested into it for something with likely less space and less accessibility to transit, or do we take the opportunity to invest further in our site, in our immediate community, and in artists? We chose the latter.
In 2023, we negotiated a lease that provides 12 years of flexible renewal options without any ties to market forces. As a part of this lease, we expanded our space to encompass the entirety of the Main Auditorium of our historic building. We negotiated a well-below-market rate for this expansion – functionally, six months of free rent – but there is still work to do to make it fully usable. While we aim to accomplish this on a relatively lean budget, there are major aspects of this project that still require significant resources that require additional support.
After completing this work, The Lab will be one of the most flexible, creative, and truly experimental spaces around, with a capacity to showcase artists’ projects to an ever-growing community. We will build out a multipurpose exhibition and gathering space, alongside a 3,500 sqft. performance space that will greatly expand our capacity at a time when The Lab’s growing audience shows no signs of slowing down.
This work has never been more urgent. In the face of attacks on culture, on marginalized people and communities, on funding at all levels, and on artistic freedom, The Lab will continue to stake a claim to the revelatory, the weird, the challenging, and the visionary. The Lab has long been about the way we work, not just what we do, and with your help we will continue transforming alongside artists as we enter this next exciting phase of our life cycle.
Forever unfinished,
Andrew C. Smith
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The Lab is currently raising $200,000 for the near-term restoration of our historic space.
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In 2023, The Lab negotiated a below-market lease with renewal options extending through 2035. This lease expanded our space to include an additional 2,400 sqft portion of the Redstone Building that was adjacent to The Lab as part of an unpermitted partition, but never formally occupied. Since 2023, The Lab has used this space as a green room, storage, and small-scale exhibition space, but is now embarking on a campaign to formally restore this historic Main Auditorium of the San Francisco Labor Temple.
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https://www.kqed.org/arts/13937804/the-lab-new-lease-redstone-building-sf-labor-temple
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