Cushion Works Goes Nonprofit as San Francisco Galleries Rethink Survival

San Francisco's Cushion Works, a gallery in the Mission District, acquired nonprofit status last year and launched a membership program to keep the lights on. That is the sharpest fact in a story about a city where the conventional gallery model has stopped working.

The backdrop is grim. A cost-of-living crisis, a seemingly absent collector base, and the closure of local art schools have spurred an exodus of artists and galleries alike. In recent years, the scene has, by most accounts, felt demoralized. The galleries sticking around are turning to alternative models to survive and foster community — nonprofit status, retail business, whatever pays the rent.

What changed at Cushion Works?

Jordan Stein opened the space in 2018. Nonprofit conversion was never his initial goal.

"I don't think of it like a gallery, and I've never had a business model," Stein told Hyperallergic. "I've never had a business model" is not a sentence most dealers would dare publish; Stein says it plainly.

His ambitions are curatorial and civic rather than commercial. He said he's interested in exploring "who has lived here, what has been made here, and what can we learn from that?"

The program backs that up. It includes a range of Bay Area artists:

• Local legends R. Crumb and Dewey Crumpler
• Outsiders Betty Bailey and BJ Newton
• Whitney-exhibiting artists Grace Rosario Perkins and Dionne Lee

That roster reads less like a sales stable and more like a regional archive — a deliberately uneven cross-section of who has made work in the Bay Area, canon and margins together.

Why are galleries abandoning the standard model?

The commercial gallery assumes two things: collectors nearby with money to spend, and a pipeline of trained artists emerging from local schools. San Francisco currently offers neither, according to the report. The tech-fueled cost-of-living crisis has pushed out the artists; the school closures have thinned the pipeline; the absent collector base has removed the revenue. What remains is a city with deep art history and weak art infrastructure.

Hence the workarounds. Nonprofit status opens a route to grants and tax-deductible donations that a commercial gallery can't touch, and a membership program converts goodwill into recurring income — closer to a public radio station's model than a Chelsea dealer's.

Stein's framing suggests the shift isn't purely economic desperation. His question — what has been made here, and what can we learn from it — treats the gallery as a research instrument rather than a shop.

Whether membership dollars and nonprofit grants can sustain a program of this ambition remains the open question, but Cushion Works has at least offered the city's remaining galleries one tested alternative to packing up.