LIFE MET ART HERE
Part one: 1965-75 Forty years ago, Intersection for the Arts began as a place where religion crossed paths with the arts. It became a breeding ground for creativity.
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, June 13, 2005

In 1965, a small coffeehouse ministry opened in a former bar at 150 Ellis St. in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin district. Intersection for the Arts was started by an interdenominational Protestant group looking to bridge artistic and spiritual ideas in a way that grabbed young folk turned off by the traditional church. The place became a hothouse for new music, theater, comedy and other arts sprouting here in the explosive 1960s. It grew from three earlier San Francisco experimental ministries: the Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue, started by the United Church of Christ; the United Presbyterian Church's 14th Street Art Center; and the Precarious Vision Coffeehouse on Bush Street, started by the United Methodist Church and run by Ted McIlvenna, the activist Glide Urban Center minister and soon-to-be sexologist who got Intersection going with collared colleagues like Donald Kuhn.

THE ART OF RELOCATING
Part Three: 1985-95 Intersection had to leave its North Beach home and make a new one -- in the Mission
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Bonded to North Beach by location and cultural identity, Intersection for the Arts was destined for seismic changes in the 1980s. After leaving the church on Union Street, the San Francisco performance, visual and literary arts organization would move three times to relocate and remake itself in the Mission District. .

Frances Phillips, Intersection's executive director from 1988-94, senior program officer at the Walter & Elise Haas Fund: "My history with Intersection goes back to 1971-72, when I was in college in Oregon. My roommate came to San Francisco for the weekend, went to this art center, had an affair with somebody she met there and came back with a Dan O'Neill 'Odd Bodkins' comic book. So, of course when I moved to San Francisco, I started going there.

EMBRACED BY THE COMMUNITY
PART FIVE: THE FUTURE
David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, June 17, 2005

Sitting by the second-floor gallery window at Intersection for the Arts on a recent Friday afternoon, Kevin Chen announces matter-of-factly that after 40 years, and several locations around the city, and finding countless ways to make art interact with the challenges of the real world, "Intersection is no longer alternative."

Back in the '60s, when the organization was created by anti-war activists and socially conscious churches, creating art as a way to protest war or to demonstrate the need for racial, social and economic parity -- especially creating art through community-based collaboration -- was considered alternative, not mainstream. Four decades later, as the organization of eight employees and resident artists looks to the future, it has come to an institutional realization that is has become an accepted player in the cultural mainstream of San Francisco.