"Still the greatest place to throw spaghetti against the wall" Interview with Dena Beard, Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco
Imagine:
A woman arrives from Sweden to perform an hour of minimal drone on the organ at Grace Cathedral. From Japan, a man arranges 100 toy keyboards in a dozen concentric circles, meticulously setting toothpicks in each one to sound out a continuous maximalist drone. From Philadelphia, two philosopher-founders of Black Quantum Futurism present three days of divine jazz, poetry, art. A man from the South sings of how he snuck off the slave ship. A Pentecostal tent revival. And on and on.
Imagine that one organization is primarily responsible for making sure these mind-bending events happen in San Francisco, transcending all your traditional expectations of live music and art. The name of this organization? The Lab.
Originally founded in 1984 by five art students from San Francisco State University, The Lab is a Bay Area institution that has been devoted to the avant-garde for decades, though its survival has never been guaranteed. But thanks to people in the Bay that care about pushing art to the limits and supporting artists that explore those liminal spaces, The Lab lives on today in possibly its most potent form ever.
Read on for our interview with Dena Beard, Executive Director of The Lab. And check out our wildly eclectic playlist of artists that have performed at the Lab in 2022.
Can you tell us the story of The Lab since you joined?
The Lab was always run through a DIY ethos, a very punk ethos. It felt like theater cruelty in that sense: You would go into these noise shows and tiles from the acoustic ceiling would fall on your head. You’d be looking at a broken Xerox machine in the corner and the sets would all be made out of these old protest signs. It was very raw, a bit broken down, and abject.
I loved it. I never really thought of it as a non-profit, and I never really thought of it as an organization in the sense of having multiple employees and truly subsidizing their artists. Sure enough, the board came to me in 2013 and they asked for my help. They said The Lab was deeply in debt to the IRS and the landlord was about to shut them down for non-payment of rent, and they were getting all these noise complaints from neighbors. So they desperately needed help getting their house in order before they were shut down.
I went in there and did some forensic accounting with some people I knew, and realized that the organization was about $150,000 in debt. Long story short, I was not in a position where I could leave my job at the Berkeley Art Museum, even though they had asked me to do that. So I found a team of lawyers willing to work pro bono on the case, and they negotiated a payment plan with the IRS. Then one of the founders of The Lab came back to me about a year later and said, “We have a payment plan. I will give you $30,000. Can you get this joint back up on its feet?”
And to do that, I knew we had to do a full aesthetic reset of what The Lab was. It needed to be financially viable again. I needed to create a space that had been previously unimaginable in the public eye. For the most part, The Lab was a great space to workshop stuff and try new things and it was pretty low stakes. And I wanted to shoot for the moon and see if we could do something—what I had been proposing to museums at the time, that nobody had the courage or the wherewithal to do—which is the commissioning program. Basically the change was kind of a formalizing of The Lab’s resources, for better or for worse.
Through the good graces of the community, basically everyone stepped up. Whether they could donate $5 or lend a hand with the work parties to get the linoleum floors torn up, in various ways everybody kind of lent a hand and made it work, and we got it done in about two and a half years. We paid off the entire debt. We did an aesthetic reset of the space, we got the budget into a reasonable place where we could pay artists and pay staff to be there. Three years down the line we were looking pretty good and it's only gotten better ever since. So it’s been a journey.
The Lab has long lived inside the Redstone Building—aka the Redstone Labor Temple—at 16th and Capp in the Mission, but the building was sold to a real estate investment company last year. How do things stand with The Lab’s home now?
It’s actually, hopefully the best possible scenario. I had raised $800,000 to buy the building, which was nowhere near the $25 million it was going to take to not just purchase it, but also to rehab it and get it ADA compliant and quickly renovated. After crunching all the numbers and doing the best I could, I realized that it was just out of my means to raise $25 million. I just couldn’t do it.
The people who bought it during the pandemic are amenable to the idea of keeping everyone who is already in the building there for below market rate. So we’ll all get leases and below market rate rents. It seems a little too good to be true from my vantage right now, but it is also the best possible scenario. So we’re doing everything we can to make sure legally we have as much security as possible while they try to restructure the building and do the rehab, which will probably happen 2024-2025. Hopefully, after that’s over by 2025, we should have a 15-year lease in that space.
The miracle of The Lab is not really a miracle, after all. It was entirely dependent on the fact that we had incredibly cheap rent.
How do you determine programming for The Lab?
It's a bit scattershot, I’ll be honest. I rely on the advice, good graces, and vetting of friends and artists who have already been through The Lab. Most of the artists we bring in are through a network of advisors. There are definitely a good chunk I bring in simply of my own volition, to see certain artists perform and play. Our commissioning program is made up of folks that I have been in conversation with for many years. And it has a lot to do with who I think will resonate in the Bay Area and who resonates with local artists here. I really wanted to find people who feel like they’re in conversation with local artists here. And if they’re already local, trying to give them enough resources to bring their work to the next level, whatever that might be. So even if it's not a commission project through The Lab, I want to make sure that the artists that we’re bringing locally feel like performing at The Lab is a really special gig and a special opportunity.
So we do recordings or offer significant funds or provide something on top of the usual fare for those artists. I try to keep the program as diverse as possible, but we’re extremely well equipped for sound. So we do lean heavily on sound projects, but I'm obsessed with film and dance and all those liminal projects that don’t quite fit into any genre. And I think through the entire practice of it, it creates a kind of essayism. The through lines are a little fuzzy—they're only clear to me in some ways—but it’s very much this ongoing conversation I’m having with artists and hopefully the audience is having with artists as well. But those transcendent projects that really take you out of the mind, out of brain space and into a sensory space, I’m really invested in projects like that.
As alluded to in the introduction above, this year alone you’ve hosted two drone organists at Grace Cathedral, Japanese artist Asuna performing on 100 toy keyboards, visual artist and filmmaker Lonnie Holley, as well as an upcoming residency with Moor Mother of Black Quantum Futurism. In other words, it’s clear that the Lab isn’t putting on shows in the traditional sense. How do you approach live event production and creating these unique experiences?
A lot of times, what happens is when I’m working with a sound artist versus a visual artist, the financial economic spheres we go through are different from the music industry. And so we’ll often be asking funders in the arts to fund something that is a sound project rather than a visual arts project. It can be a little difficult to translate into grant, so sometimes we often don’t get funding for a lot of the residencies I propose because they’re just a little too weird for the arts funders, which is understandable. But I'm doing what I can and thankfully we got two major grants last year, $100,000 grants that are allowing me to put on a lot of projects that I got denied funding for earlier on. Moor Mother is one of those. And it’s really exciting to finally be able to realize that project.
The residency model is simply allowing artists to do whatever the heck they want in this space, and really not asking them to comply or to re-perform their greatest hits or to satisfy some predilection of mine. And to really challenge me and to challenge the organization to rise to the occasion we have to be flexible and limber and I have to do a good job of advocating for my staff and making sure that at every point in the process the artist, my staff, everyone is being respected and financially it feels like a good thing and doesn’t feel exploitative of any person involved.
Mick and Anthony, who work with me, are just extraordinary. They have the tuning of the space down to a science. But every project is different and every project we have to renegotiate the terms. ONO, who was in residence recently, wanted a Pentecostal tent revival, so we had to set up a tent in the space, figure out how to do lighting and sound underneath it, and create a new space for that. We had to find a filmmaker to come in and film the project. It's interesting to think about what art organizations look like when they’re not exploitative of people’s time, money, or energy—or even natural resources. And it’s hard because something’s always getting fucked up in the process, but it’s just trying to be aware of that and mitigating harm whenever possible while still managing somehow to come out with something that people value.
The Lab hosts avant-garde artists from around the world but it’s clear you have a strong connection to SF. Can you talk about that relationship and why it matters?
The first thing we have to acknowledge is how rich and extraordinary the music scene is here. It’s just phenomenal. I know people rag on the provincialism and smallness of San Francisco, but there are great scenes in Iowa and in Houston; a scene can arise from very meager resources and very small groups of people. It’s just an intimate crew of people who are willing to push each other to the next stage in their practice, the next stage in their work to really compel each other to keep making magic. Those are the things that really make a scene.
And the Bay Area has always thrived in music and experimental film because it has always had a group of people who truly believe in the work itself. Sadly, now that we’ve lost Mills College, we’ve lost a really big backbone of that scene, but I don’t think that’s going to break it. There’s no way. I think there are enough people in the Bay Area who are deeply committed to making sound art projects, who can do it regardless of the circumstances.
So I am totally and utterly committed to the Bay Area’s music scene. I think it's probably one of the best, if not the best, in the world. So how do we not only show off what we have, but make sure that the artists and musicians here have access to the live performative aspects of other makers in the world? And I truly believe in live performance as something extremely distinct from listening to something on, say, Bandcamp. The audience in the room affects the performance very palpably. I know so many musicians who come to The Lab who say it’s one the most mind-blowing, phenomenal places to perform simply because the audience is so engaged and available and open to the work. So I think that’s how that cross germination happens.
Venues, platforms, crews—What are some local organizations you admire for doing a great job of creating space for music and artistry in the Bay?
There are a lot of scrappy projects out there that are doing incredible work. Nihar Bhatt’s TVOD. Gray Area and Other Minds are definitely holding it down. And in terms of scholarship and thinking, there's a lot of labels and work being done. I would say Stranded Records [via Superior Viaduct] is doing an extraordinary job of re-releasing and thinking through a lot of the Bay Area vanguard, how to keep these legacies intact, and steward the work of new younger musicians. Steve and Filippo at Stranded have done a great job of supporting artists’ estates and younger artists’ work, so huge shout out to them.
The Center for New Music is important. The CCRMA Center at Stanford, even though they’re more on the science and design side of things, are still kind of rearing it up for all of us. Willie Winant, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Laetitia Sonami, and Maggie Payne, all these Mills people are still here and they’re still working. So it’s really just creating space for those projects to still happen. And maybe our understanding of pedagogy just needs to shift away from the classroom for a little while, which is fine.
Like so much in our world, sometimes it seems like there’s more bad news than good coming out of San Francisco and the Bay. What can ordinary people and music lovers do to get involved and make a difference in supporting local music and art?
It's really about celebration—celebration of our community and each other. Yes, there are certain individual voices that tend to be louder or their talents or expertise or whatever kind of scream louder in a specific moment. But none of us would be doing this work if it weren't collectively held. And we are doing it because of each other, we're doing it for each other, and the celebration and pushing of each other is paramount to our success in a very clear way.
The misery in San Francisco is so on the surface, it's literally sleeping on the streets, all the time, every day. And we have a very, very, very small city of seven by seven square miles. That means we're kind of a Petri dish. So you throw another corporation in there, you throw up a different wall, you change things up, a space closes, a school closes, and it's devastating. It feels devastating, and we feel wounded as a culture.
But the thing about living in a Petri dish is that you can also be extremely brave. And so there are ways in which just putting something into the Petri dish or celebrating something that’s already there will allow it to grow really rapidly. The Lab is totally a testament to that. Over eight years, we have expanded 100-fold thanks to just 5,000 people getting together and saying we really need this and we want it. And telling their friends and getting memberships and showing up to things and giving me feedback when I need feedback.
It's still the greatest place to throw spaghetti against the wall.
Bay Area or not—Any songs, albums, or artists that you've been loving lately?
Oh my gosh. I just got turned onto someone last night—Ana Roxanne. There are also the groups that have been playing down the street from The Lab on 16th Street, April Magazine and other folks at the Hit Gallery. But there are constantly new artists coming out of the Bay Area and it’s such a delight to figure out what might work and where there might be resonances. I’m always excited to meet with people and chat with people and see what might work. But as far as what I’ve been listening to in the comfort of my own home, I tend to listen to Coil’s Time Machines a lot. I’m just into full brain meltdown lately, so I don’t know. Generally that’s what’s on the turntable.