In 1975 conceptual artist David Ireland (1930–2009) began renovating a dilapidated Italianate-style house in San Francisco. He had just returned to the West Coast after a year’s post-graduate sojourn in New York, and Ireland intended to make the property at 500 Capp Street—in the city’s historic Mission District—his home and studio. Yet over the course of a few years, as Ireland removed window moldings, stripped wallpaper, and sanded surfaces, he came to view the dusty site as an artwork in its own right. To preserve and highlight its various transformations— Ireland now considered the house a sculpture—the artist applied varnish to walls, ceilings, and floors, while filming the process as a performance cum installation artwork that he would title Maintenance Action.
For Ireland, each gesture of sanding and sealing became a meditation on how memory could be held in matter, as the house slowly evolved into an archive of touch and time.
Today the David Ireland House is maintained and operated by 500 Capp Street Foundation and hosts artist residencies, community programming, and periodic exhibitions. The house also continues to serve as home to the numerous artifacts Ireland acquired during extensive travels across Africa and Southeast Asia.
As 2023 Collections and Archive Fellows, Lesdi Goussen Robleto (University of California, Berkeley) and Alexander Antai Hwang (California College of the Arts, SF) recently helped 500 Capp Street catalog Ireland’s archives. Over time they found themselves questioning what makes for an artistic legacy and wondering: How might Ireland’s collection engage the history of the predominantly Latino Mission neighborhood in which it is situated today?
Notably, as Robleto (now teaching at San Francisco State University) reminds us, “David Ireland is coming out of a legacy of conceptual artists who, at the time, were in a predominantly white bubble.” Apparently Ireland never expressed much of an interest in social or political activism. Given that the conceptual art movement eventually gave way to installation, performance, and socially conscious artistic practices (on the latter recall the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a real watershed), Robleto and Hwang decided to approach their residencies as an opportunity to perform their own kind of “maintenance action”—a historical one. They accomplished this by recuperating local histories and mapping the rise of alternative spaces in the Mission District during the 1970s, ultimately placing that body of research in dialogue with Ireland’s house sculpture.
As a capstone to their fellowships, Robleto and Hwang curated an exhibition featuring local artists’ books, student protest notes, posters, and newspaper clippings. An especially memorable component of the exhibition was a 1980s gag order prohibiting artists from exhibiting their work. Speaking recently with the Luce Foundation, Robleto recalls that she was “intrigued by how you can create conversations across archival pieces in a way that functions as a visual or tangible essay that can be engaged with the audience and become an educational tool.”
“Maintenance Actions for Dis/Repair” co-curated by Archives and Collections Fellows Alexander An-Tai Hwang and Lesdi Goussen Robleto. Photo courtesy of 500 Capp Street Foundation Instagram.
At the heart of the exhibition were Ireland’s surrealist sculptures Earthquake Detectors: small, painted concrete balls mounted on wire posts, and set into concrete blocks. “In the context of the exhibition and the proposals that we put forth,” Robleto explains, “the Earthquake Detectors became a means that Ireland gave us to detect disturbances.” As imagined by the co-curators, these “disturbances” included the suppressed histories of activism and the documenting of emerging alternative spaces that challenged traditional, institutionally-sustained art narratives. In this way, the exhibition both reinvigorated and extended Ireland’s original ideas of repair and disrepair as the exhibition functioned as an archive in motion, registering the tremors of both past and present resistance.
“In the context of contemporary art, archival work is often seen as solely part of the research process for publishing in a journal or a book,” says Robleto. “But cataloging this history can make information possible to navigate by the organization and the public.” Exhibiting archival materials also reveals the cyclical nature of history, lending resonance to present-day struggles. “It’s important to remember that we have been here before in different iterations and in different ways,” Robleto says. “It’s not the first time an administration is trying to censor artists and people of color. Histories of activism surface because of these climates.”
Robleto and Hwang envisioned the exhibition as a platform for audiences to conduct their own inquiries, hence they created individualized vignettes through various groupings of texts and ephemera. “We were very wary not to retrofit a history and not to make something that wasn’t there seem as if it was there…We were committed to inviting viewers to critically question how these dialogues are happening and to also engage in the dialogue itself.”
Now a half century after it first took shape, the David Ireland House continues to evolve as an experimental space. Curatorial and organizational director Lian Ladia originally conceived the archival fellowship, supported by the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program. As Ladia and the Foundation agree, the house’s future growth hinges on expanding opportunities for artistic and curatorial collaboration. “We have a lot of intergenerational engagement,” Ladia notes, “ including educational workshops with youth and seniors” (she especially cites Ruth’s Table, a nearby non-profit that celebrates the artistic creations of older adults).
Ladia also underscores the importance of artist-driven governance. To that end one of the latest priorities for the David Ireland House has been the restructuring of its hierarchical organization. “All of us have the same pay,” Ladia points out. This equitable policy now includes Hwang, who has been running operations for the house since the conclusion of his fellowship.
Ireland always harbored an instinct for chronicling and preserving the world around him. Jars of sawdust and debris from the original renovations still rest in the basement. Today, the David Ireland House extends that spirit, as it opens its doors to a new generation of artists, fellows, and visitors, and to sustain all communities and their “maintenance actions.”
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