Renny Pritikin is lost and late for a studio visit. Despite his best efforts, he’s on track to be late for the following visit, too. As often happens on these days, rainy ones at that, one wrong turn — literally and figuratively — leads to the next. But in the end, Pritikin’s visits result in securing works for exhibitions by Jim Albertson and Jack Ogden, and he returns to the University of California, Davis campus in time to advise MFA students on the realities of professional practice, negotiate artwork loan and funding requests from a faculty guest curator, and rummage through the university theater department’s 40-year-old archives in search of long-lost documentation of Out Our Way, Jock Reynolds’s “outrageous Fluxus-inspired performances.” He found them.
Such are the adventures of this Bay Area-based curator, art writer, and poet. And while not all of Pritikin’s arts-related experiences are as hectic or successful as the one described, they are equally layered, as recounted in his new book At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists (2023). Filled with short stories that “reflect the issues and people I met, and my satisfactions and regrets,” as he writes, the book winds its way through his four-decade career, arriving, geographically and conceptually, back where he started.
As he succinctly, and modestly, recounts in his author’s note, Pritikin began his life among artists in 1979 after shyly volunteering two years earlier to serve as president of 80 Langton Street, a groundbreaking alternative artist-run space in San Francisco (which later became New Langton Arts and closed in 2009); he co-directed the space with his wife, Judy Moran, for eight years before stepping into the role of executive director.
He later held curatorial and directorial roles at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis. The book’s title refers in part to his eventual return to the San Francisco intersection of Third Street and Mission Street, where from 2014 to 2018 he was chief curator of the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
The book’s vignettes glimpse the inner workings of funding panel decisions, cross-cultural negotiations, and other art world nice-and-not-so-niceties. But Pritikin, whom Marcia Tucker once affectionately deemed the “least trendy curator,” isn’t one for gossip or grudges. Amid minor brushes with the law, bruised egos, and miscommunications shine the early values of artist-centered spaces and his ambitions for “international, multicultural, pop-inspired, and brilliant contemporary art that was accessible to anyone.” But mostly the stories are about artists, including Jock Reynolds, Barry McGee, Ricky Jay, Kenji Yanobe, Maria Nordman, Cherie Raciti, and Survival Research Laboratories.
The final chapter is a circuitous coda of Pritikin’s outings with poet Bill Berkson, mostly baseball games and movies, memories that are charmingly unconfirmed or downright refuted. I’m reminded of my own contradictory memories of my internship at New Langton Arts during graduate school — Pritkin taught one of my classes. I acquired a metal button by Lynn Hershman Leeson that reads, “ROBERTA LIVES (inside me).” Did the artist stop by the gallery? Did she give it to me? Did I steal it?
Time can, and often does, steal life’s gifts. Items are lost, names forgotten, and debts unpaid. Feelings that at times he had “nothing to offer” may still haunt Pritikin, as he mentions at least once in the book, but At Third and Mission positions him staunchly in Bay Area art history, showing that what he’s given to these artists lives on.
At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists by Renny Pritikin (2023) is published by Museum Quality Press and is available for purchase directly through the artist.
