Walking the streets of San Franciscos Mission District, a rich tapestry of public art unfolds, wall after wall embroidered with vibrant murals. Several are by Luca Gonzlez Ippolito, an artist, teacher, activist and Mission District native. Her murals including Mission Makeover, documenting the changes in the neighborhood are regular stops on public art tours, and she co-founded the San Francisco Poster Syndicate, a collaborative that creates and distributes free political posters. My goal is to use my art to educate people and invoke questions, for those who are being unheard, she says.

Like many other local artists, Gonzlez Ippolito is navigating the rising boil of the Bay Areas economic cauldron. Tuition costs forced her to drop out of her art therapy masters degree program at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, and she stitched together a patchwork of income sources to sustain herself. But the coronavirus has threatened her stability. Her job as a preschool teacher was a pandemic casualty, and shes living on a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, creating a graphic novel about Mission District youth impacted by gentrification, gang violence and immigration issues. Shes not sure what will happen when the funding runs out.

Artists like Gonzlez Ippolito fuel the creative energy woven into the Bay Areas identity an energy that informs our sense of place as much as landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge. But the housing crisis, the disappearance of studios and galleries, and a culture that undervalues their work have made it increasingly difficult for artists to survive here. Like residents of a coral reef, weve been living through the slow bleaching of our creative ecosystem.

But as the pandemic forces us to rethink how we live and work, and energy from the protests floods our streets, people from all corners of the artistic community are seeing opportunity. Theyre moving forward with ideas and projects that have the potential to create a new Bay Area, one where artists and creative workers can survive and thrive.

Weve been working in a broken system, and COVID-19 brought that into sharper relief, says Yerba Buena Center for the Arts CEO Deborah Cullinan. We need support structures for artists and art workers, because we know how disproportionately vulnerable our artists are.

Together with YBCA Chief of Strategy and Revenue Penelope Douglas, Cullinan founded CultureBank, a social investment fund for artists doing community development work. Their first cohort in Dallas created enterprises like a literacy initiative that built reading nooks and distributed free books, and a catering business focused on immigrant women who shared stories through food. In April, CultureBank announced a new group of six West Oakland artists working on projects to spark community change.

CultureBank is also exploring collaborations with art collectors to leverage their collections value to fund forgivable loans for artists, and partnering with health organizations to pay artists based on improved health outcomes from their work.

Were disconnecting art from the financial system that ignores the value our artistic communities bring, Cullinan says. Its not a return on investment, its a ripple on investment.

Meklit Hadero, YBCA chief of program and a talented Ethiopian jazz singer and songwriter, sees potential for those ripples to become a tidal wave. Were at a place where we can reshape our systems. I have a lot of hope for this moment, she says. But equity cant be an afterthought. It needs to be baked into our recovery, as does creativity, at the ground level.

The pandemic has also accelerated the ongoing loss of galleries, vital venues where artists show and sell their work. Those that remain are often perceived as walled gardens, barring artists and audiences from entry. Gallery owner, artist and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen wants to change that. Her gallery, Black & White Projects, is temporarily closed due to the coronavirus, but Evans MacFadyen is collaborating with a group of artists on an arts-based social club model that would use tax-exempt 501(c)7 or 501(c)8 legal structures typically used by organizations like the Elks Lodge and the Bohemian Club. The social club (dubbed the Society of the Smokey Mirror) is still in the experimental stages, but when indoor spaces are permitted to reopen, Evans MacFadyen sees potential for a self-sustaining, inclusive artistic space where artists could show their work and manage their own sales transactions without paying gallery commissions.

After seeing the loss of artistic spaces throughout our region, San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Mathilde Froustey founded La Maison, a performance space, gallery and artist residency, in 2017. The physical location has permanently closed (another casualty of the pandemic), but Froustey is working on a virtual La Maison with partners from the art and technology worlds. She envisions a membership-based model that would create a digital venue for dancers to interact directly with their audiences and funnel revenues back to participating artists.

We need to be able to make a living and still dance, she says. Were all struggling.

Were in the middle of this accelerated change. We need new prototypes and new ideas, says JooWan Kim, founder and artistic director of hip-hop orchestra Ensemble Mik Nawooj. He sees tech money as one path to a sustainable creative ecosystem in the Bay Area. We need to have companies like Facebook and Amazon fund new concepts and ideas in the art world, he says. We should have a universal basic income for artists if theyre doing work that benefits the Bay Area.

But the ensemble's resident MC, hip-hop artist Sandman, also sounds a cautionary note about this potential evolution, one that applies to many sectors of the art world: We need to have a system of rotating gatekeepers, he says. Everyone has biases, and we need to make sure that artists arent kept out because of it.

Others see potential in our streets, as the pandemic forces us to rethink traditional arts spaces.

On every city block in San Francisco, we should create at least one open space that can be used by the community for creativity, says Dena Beard, director of the San Francisco experimental arts space the Lab. Doing something like that would be messy and complicated, but its the kind of messy and complicated we need. The arts are a means of changing perspective. Artists show us a different way of seeing the world.

What world would we see if these visions became reality?

Imagine it: Traditional institutions turn inside out, and art moves from behind walls and out of silos onto the streets. Those streets and sidewalks are permanently repurposed for both transportation and celebration art, sculpture, dance and performance open to all. Galleries, theaters and virtual venues evolve to give artists new ways to connect with audiences while making a living, and the legacy gatekeepers that decided who was seen (and paid) lose power. Deep financial support from sectors like health care, business and technology offer artists the time and space to make ambitious work outside the commercially-viable box, and many focus on benefiting their communities, creating deep-rooted change. Through it all, audiences are immersed in new perspectives, broadening their perception of what is possible.

An explosion of that magnitude could reshape everything. Hadero says, From art, we create culture. From culture, we build policies. From policies, we build cities. Perhaps the opportunity to build the city, society and world that we want is here and artists can lead the way, inviting us to soar.

Correction: A previous version of this story misattributed a quote to JooWan Kim. It was said by hip-hop artist Sandman.

Samantha Nobles-Block is a writer based in the Bay Area. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com.

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The opportunity to build the Bay Area we want is here, and artists can lead the way - San Francisco Chronicle