Meanwhile, San Francisco's art scene was spawning a second generation of Abstract Expressionism, which turned out to be mainly female. Sonia Gechtoff (who studied in 1951 at the California School of Fine Arts, married James Kelly in 1953, and moved to New York in 1958); Jay DeFeo (who enrolled in UC Berkeley in 1946, married Wally Hedrick in 1954, and began her monumental work "The Rose" in 1958); the Austrian-born Lilly Fenichel; San Francisco natives Joan Brown and Bernice Bing; etc. DeFeo and Wally Hedrick were the first artists to move into the three-story apartment building on Fillmore Street that came to be known as “Painterland" after other painters moved in: Joan Brown, Craig Kauffman, Sonia Gechtoff and James Kelly, etc.

Sonia's widowed mother Etya Gechtoff joined her in San Francisco in 1955 and founded the East-West Gallery.

Three Beat painters shared a San Francisco loft in the late 1950s: Arthur Monroe, Michael McCracken, and Michael Bowen. Monroe was a Black painter from New York who had befriended bebop legend Charlie Parker.

Seymour Locks, an art professor at San Francisco State College since 1947, a sculptor who used found objects, i.e. junk, as his raw material, started experimenting in 1952 with light shows. Locks influenced his student Elias Romero, whose light shows began in 1956, and he influenced his landlord Bill Hamm, an abstract painter. Their light shows were basically abstract paintings in motion. Light shows spread from art galleries to jazz clubs. In fact, Bill Hamm partnered with two jazz musicians (Vince Guaraldi's drummer Jerry Granelli and bassist Fred Marshall) to create cosmic shows called Light Sound Dimensions.

Bruce Conner, who had arrived in 1957 in the city, upped the ante of the Beat movement with his chaotic sculptures of junk wrapped in sexy nylon stockings (notably "Child" in 1959) and with a movie titled "A Movie" (1958) that was a montage of old newsreels and documentaries. In 1959 he formed the Rat Bastard Protective Association, which actually wasn't an association, just a name for a community of artists, poets and musicians loosely assembled around “Painterland". The group included Conner's wife and former student Jean Sandstedt, the poet Michael McClure, Joan Brown and her future husband the sculptor Manuel Neri, Wally Hedrick and his wife Jay DeFeo, Los Angeles collage artist Wallace Berman, Kansas filmmaker Robert Branaman, and junk sculptor George Herms.

Jean Conner, Bruce Conner's wife, made phantasmagoric collages such as "Temptation of Saint Wallace" (1961).

Ruth Asawa, the daughter of Japanese immigrants who, as a teenager, was interned in Arkansas during World War II, and an alumna of Black Mountain College (1946-49), moved to San Francisco in 1949 and began making wired sculptures, sculptures that were looping meshes of copper, brass and steel wires, often suspended from the ceiling, first exhibited in 1954. She later sculpted bronze fountains such as "Andrea" (1968) in Ghirardelli Square, "San Francisco Fountain" in Union Square (1973) and the two "Origami Fountains" (1975) in Japantown.

The movement of jewelry designers in the Bay Area was launched by two alumnae of the School of Design in Chicago who had moved to San Francisco: first Margaret De Patta (who arrived in 1941) and then Merry Renk (in 1951). They founded in 1951 the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco. Arline Fisch launched the metals program at San Diego State University in 1961 and Lynda Watson started teaching in 1970 at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz.

New galleries popped up all over the Bay. The ethnomusicologist Jim Newman opened in 1958 in North Beach (above the Jazz Workshop) the Dilexi Gallery, loosely affiliated with the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles (Ferus closed in 1966 and Dilexi in 1969). William Jahrmarkt, a wealthy friend of Bruce Conner and Michael McClure, opened the Batman Art Gallery in 1960 near "Painterland".

In 1957 San Francisco native Irving Levin established the San Francisco International Film Festival (today the longest-running film festival in the Americas).

In 1959 dancer and mime Ron Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe, specializing in silent anti-establishment mimed comedies inspired by the Italian "commedia dell'arte", which in 1962 moved outdoors.

Clearly, the Bay Area had become an attractive location for nonconformist artists. One reason is that during the Cold War the Bay Area was relatively sheltered from the political witch-hunt that came to be known as "McCarthism". The hunt for "communists" (real or imaginary ones) had started in October 1947 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities had launched an investigation of Hollywood's film industry. In February 1950 senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to possess a list of members of the Communist Party who were working in the US government. His mostly unfounded accusations ruined reputations and caused people to lose their jobs. Many intellectuals were persecuted by overzealous nationalists. These events created an atmosphere of terror that, like in Stalin's Soviet Union and in Mao's China, forced individuals to become informers about their own friends. Innocents were convicted on the basis of testimony that was later admitted to be false. Besides Hollywood stars (famously, Charlie Chaplin), the persecution affected writers and musicians, even physicists like Albert Einstein (who was denounced as a communist spy and surveilled by the FBI), even Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. The media that didn't go along suffered, notably radio personality Drew Pearson until a television journalist, Edward Murrow, in March 1954 exposed the senator's dishonesty on his national show "See It Now". The Bay Area probably looked like a distant paradise for dissident intellectuals who elsewhere risked being shamed as communists. Much of the legendary creativity of the Bay Area may be due, indirectly, to a fascist demagogue who scared creative minds away from other cities.