500 Capp Street honors one of the Bay Area’s most influential and beloved curators with its new Constance Lewallen Legacy Series, an annual conversation with Bay Area artists and scholars that kicked off on June 27, 2026 with “Toward A History of Bay Area Contemporary Art 1969-2004,” a talk by curators Renny Pritikin and Mark Johnson. The event took place on Saturday, June 27, 2026 at the Community Music Center down the street from 500 Capp Street.

Lewallen, whose consistently visionary work on California Conceptual art post-1960 uplifted hundreds of individual artists and demonstrated the national and international significance of West Coast art, had a deep and long running connection to conceptual artist David Ireland and his house at 500 Capp Street. A longtime friend and champion, she planted the seeds for Ireland’s MATRIX exhibition at the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley in 1988; co-curated his exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 in tandem with the opening of 500 Capp Street to the public; stepped into the role of Interim Executive Director at the David Ireland House in 2018; and wrote the definitive book, 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House, published by UC Press.

Fittingly, Pritikin and Johnson, two longtime friends of Lewallen, will inaugurate the new series with a discussion about their current joint research on the history of Bay Area contemporary art practice from 1969 to 2004.

“The period of 1969 to 2004 in the Bay Area was dynamic, generative, unusually innovative, and more importantly, as Mark likes to say, it was the leading edge of a cultural revolution in American art,” says Pritikin. “Since COVID, Mark and I started to notice that people around us—peers and mentors—were disappearing. In particular, Moira Roth, Whitney Chadwick, Bill Berkson, Susan Landauer, and Connie Lewallen. We discussed the need for a history of our generation’s contributions to contemporary art. We were inspired by Thomas Albright’s seminal book Art of the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 to 1980, which is an amazing document but neglected the importance of work by women, people of color, and queer people. It also was skeptical of most experimental work. So, we have been taking another look at the period, extending it for 24 years, and backfilling some of that neglected history. This talk will be our coming out event to the community about our research for a book we hope to publish. It’s an honor to present our work in Connie’s memory. She set the bar for ambitious and sophisticated curatorial practice in the Bay Area for forty years.”