Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two
June 19–August 23, 2025
Still Burning
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Ant Farm’s Media Burn
July 4–August 23, 2025
San Francisco 94110
United States
Hours: Friday–Saturday 12–5pm
T +1 415 872 9240
visit@500cappstreet.org
This summer, 500 Capp Street celebrates two iconic voices of the Bay Area’s conceptual art scene with the next installation of 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Mildred Howard’s Collaborating With the Muses and a 50th-anniversary tribute to radical art and architecture collective Ant Farm’s 1975 performance and subsequent video work, Media Burn.
Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two
June 19–August 23, 2025
2025 Guggenheim Fellow Mildred Howard (b. 1945, San Francisco, CA) returns to 500 Capp Street this Juneteenth for Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two, presenting a never-before-seen installation from a new body of work titled Untold Histories/Hidden Truths.
On 500 Capp Street’s outdoor patio, visitors will encounter a reincarnation of a Junípero Serra monument draped in red textile. Referencing the Serra statue in Golden Gate Park that was toppled in 2020—as well as many other monuments removed amid nationwide protests following the police murder of George Floyd—Howard reimagines this figure to engage public space and collective memory, contributing to the city’s ongoing reckoning with its civic monuments. Through Collaborating With the Muses, Howard reaffirms her belief in art as a catalyst for dialogue and healing—bringing her lifelong commitment to political engagement, site-specificity, and community-centered practice into urgent contemporary discourse.
In conjunction with the showing of Howard’s installation at 500 Capp Street and related pieces from the same body of new work on view as part of FOR-SITE’s summer exhibition at Fort Point, Black Gold: Stories Untold, tours to both sites will be offered throughout July and August, led by local artists such as Tricia Rainwater, Malik Seneferu, Weston Teruya, Anna Lisa Escobedo, and City Studio. Details available soon at 500cappstreet.org. There will be a free closing reception on August 21, 2025, Thursday, 5-8pm as well.
This project is presented with the generous support of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials, a project of San Francisco Arts Commission.
Still Burning, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Media Burn
July 4–August 23, 2025
On July 4th, 1975, Ant Farm, a Bay Area-based, radical art and architecture collective, drove a customized 1959 Cadillac Eldorado across the parking lot of the Cow Palace and into a pyramid of burning TV sets. The infamous performance (and subsequent video work) was named Media Burn, and its embers still radiate. It was Ant Farm’s desire to somehow jar loose the tightening grip mainstream media had on a mesmerized public through an aggressive, hyperbolic, and satiric art gesture.
This July 4th, Ant Farm commemorates its 50th anniversary of Media Burn with the opening of a new multifaceted exhibition at 500 Capp Street, curated by Steve Seid in collaboration with the artists. This celebratory exhibition includes a rich display of documentation surrounding the outrageous performance, including a wide array of Ant Farm souvenirs, press releases, architectural drawings of the site, and extensive documentation of the customized Cadillac, known as the Phantom Dream Car. Dozens of photographs, taken by local photographers, will adorn the walls of 500 Capp Street. The video work will be offered in a specially prepared screening area. Unique to 500 Capp Street’s exhibition will be a new installation by original Ant Farm members Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier that specifically highlights the Phantom Dream Car and its radical customization. There will be an opening reception with the artists on July 4, 2025, Friday, 5-8pm.
“The importance of Ant Farm’s audacious performance lingers to this day as a seminal example of Bay Area conceptualism, as the marker of a rarely seen collective ambition, and as a reminder of the usefulness of potent images in the contestation of power,” says Seid, who has written extensively about the work.
A final special feature will be the installation of Curtis Schreier’s letterpress, used to print many of the original Media Burn artifacts. At the opening reception on July 4 from 5-8pm, gallery attendees will be able to reproduce the original Media Burn logo as a souvenir.
