Kadist, a Paris-based nonprofit known for commissioning works by key artists, will shutter its San Francisco space after 14 years, bringing an end to one of the city’s richest non-commercial art venues.
The organization announced the closure on social media late on Thursday evening, writing only: “Exhibitions, events, residencies, and conversations: it would be impossible to include everything.”
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve shifted more and more of our attention and work to international collaborations with museums in different parts of the Americas and the world, so while we are closing this venue, KADIST is continuing,” Joseph Del Pesco, Kadist’s Americas director, told Mission Local, a San Francisco–based publication. Del Pesco said Kadist did not face funding issues.
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Opened in 2011, five years after the organization was founded in Paris, Kadist’s San Francisco space was defined by its globalism, with solo shows mounted for artists ranging from Hank Willis Thomas to Jota Mombaça, from Wadada Leo Smith to Pio Abad, from Ad Minoliti to Erick Beltrán. Kadist also staged a range of group shows, including a 2015 version of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” a celebrated exhibition about contagious illnesses mounted by Hong Kong’s Para Site two years earlier.
Kadist was launched in Paris by Vincent Worms and Sandra Terdjman, and will continue to operate a space in that city. The organization also holds a collection of more than 2,000 artworks.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, a San Francisco–based artist, told Mission Local that Kadist’s closure marked “a loss to the city.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, a string of influential art spaces have closed in San Francisco, including nonprofits like the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and commercial galleries like Gagosian and Ratio.3. These closures have spurred discussion beyond San Francisco about whether the city’s art scene is declining, but critics and dealers based there have rebutted those reports.