ArtHouse

P Segal, nee Roberta Pizzimenti, was born & raised and still lives in San Francisco’s North Beach. She is a professional writer. She established ArtHouse to help artists, writers and musicians to remain in San Francisco.

P Segal has been a lifelong member of the city’s arts community. In 1990, she suggested moving Burning Man to the Black Rock Desert, and she opened the Center Camp Cafe in 1995. The event was planned in her flat for a decade.

Her zine, Proust Said That, was the first serial publication on the World Wide Web, and it’s the longest running publication online. In 1994, she introduced the engineers developing the Web to the young artists who would apply their skills to building the new field of computer graphics.

The need for ArtHouse became apparent when the cost of living escalated in San Francisco, and the once enormous community of artists was priced out. 

According to a 2017 Arts Commission survey, 75% of the artists still here in 2010 had already moved away or were planning to soon. Much of the community was already gone by 2010. P began to develop plans for a co-op format project for artists’ housing and venues that would enable them to come back.. 

In 2019, ArtHouse joined forces with the Intersection for the Arts, our fiscal sponsor. Since then, we’ve searched for foundations that had artists’ housing in their funding guidelines, and found none, and we looked for individual-nonprofit—or corporate-nonprofit—partnerships.

In recent months, we’ve opened discussion with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, that wants to help us find buildings and return artists to the city. Artists created a new art movement here nearly every decade of the 20th century. The last new movement was Burning Man, and we’re curious about what magic will happen when the community returns.