500 Capp Street | The David Ireland House
Saturday, June 27, 2026
6:00 – 8:00 PM

500 Capp Street is pleased to announce the first event in the Constance Lewallen Legacy Series, a Curator’s Talk with Renny Pritikin and Mark Johnson. Constance Lewallen’s connection to the David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street runs as deep as anyone’s. A longtime friend and champion of David’s, she planted the seeds for his MATRIX exhibition at BAMPFA (then the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley) in 1988, co-curated his exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016—coinciding with the opening, across town, of 500 Capp Street to the public—stepped into the role of interim executive director at the house in 2018, and wrote the beautiful 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House, published by UC Press. 500 Capp Street is proud to host the first event in the Constance Lewallen Legacy Series, a Curator’s Talk, honoring one of the Bay Area’s most influential and beloved curators, whose consistently visionary work on California Conceptual art post-1960 uplifted hundreds of individual artists and demonstrated the significance of the West Coast at a time when the eyes of the art world were still fixated on New York.
Discussing the trajectory of Bay Area art from 1960 to 2004, and Connie’s significant role in shaping that history, will be two curators who have been both observers and participants in the scene, Renny Pritikin and Mark Johnson. Their talk will provide an in-depth look at their current research. The talk, followed by a reception at 500 Capp Street, will take place at the San Francisco Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street—just down the block from the David Ireland House—on Saturday, June 27, 6-8pm.

Admission is free with RSVP. Check back for an RSVP link in the coming days.

Renny Pritikin was chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, after serving as co-Director at New Langton Arts. He was a senior adjunct professor in the graduate program in curatorial practice at CCA for twelve years and writes art criticism regularly for squarecylinder.com and Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal. His memoir At Third and Mission was published in 2023.

Mark Johnson is a curator, writer and Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University.  His books including Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008; Stanford University Press) and When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California (2019: UC Press).

Constance M. Lewallen organized hundreds of exhibitions, including touring exhibitions that expanded the world’s understanding of Bay Area art. Her exhibitions included retrospectives of work by artists ranging from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to the Ant Farm collective to Paul Kos to Bruce Nauman, to name a few, and State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (with co-curator Karen Moss). Most recently an adjunct curator at BAMPFA, after serving as MATRIX Curator and Senior Curator in the 1980s and 1990s, Connie joined 500 Capp Street as Interim Executive Director in 2018.