There was no predominant form of art in 1970s San Francisco. The "anything goes" zeitgeist of the 1960s evolved into a range of equally viable forms of art.

Commercial galleries assembled around the Civic Center, particularly in the multi-story building where John Berggruen opened his gallery in 1970 (228 Grant Avenue), but Martin Muller opened in 1979 Modernism, the first commercial art gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) district.

In 1973 Henry Hopkins was appointed director of the Museum of Art, which two years later was renamed Museum of Modern Art or SFMOMA and began to gain national prominence.

The Bay Area schools were raising painters exploring a wide range of styles and artistic currents.

A movement of new abstractionist painters emerged in the 1970s, mostly graduates from the San Francisco Art Institute, and they generally preferred non-flat canvases of arbitrary shapes: David Mackenzie, a Los Angeles native (class of 1970), Gregg Renfrow, a Bay Area native (class of 1972), Cherie Raciti (who graduated from San Francisco State University in 1968), Joe Doyle (San Francisco State University class of 1971), who specialized in abstract "trompe l'oeil" illusions, etc.

William Allan, a 1960 graduate from the California School of Fine Arts, who taught at UC Berkeley in 1965-68 alongside William Wiley and Robert Hudson, made surrealistic paintings such as "Traveling in Strange Circles" (1973).

The tradition of impressionist landscape painting was kept alive by Wade Hoefer (California College of Arts and Crafts class of 1972), based in Santa Rosa.

Black painter Raymond Saunders (class 1961 of the California College of the Arts) made mixed-media "paintings", basically two-dimensional assemblages, notably the series started in 1972 about the pioneering Black boxer Jack Johnson.

Black painter Robert Colescott (UC Berkeley class of 1952) indulged in the agit-prop Pop Art of paintings such as "Bye Bye Miss American Pie" (1971), and distorted famous historical events imagining that Black people had been protagonists, like in "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook" (1975) where all the characters are Black. He also revisited famous artworks, like "Eat Dem Taters" (1975), in which Vincent Von Gogh's potato eaters are Black.

Paper became fashionable again. In 1972 Garner Tullis opened the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking in Santa Cruz. San Francisco sculptors such as Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Harold Paris made three-dimensional paper sculptures at that institute.

Photorealism came to the Bay Area in the 1970s. Paul Sarkisian, a Ferus Gallery abstract expressionist who in 1962 had opened the Aura Gallery in Pasadena with George Herms and others, made large-scale photorealistic paintings after moving to Berkeley in 1970, notably of cramped home facades ("Mapleton", 1972). Joseph Raffael, a New Yorker, converted to photorealism when he joined UC Berkeley in 1969 ("Lizard", 1971).

Monterey-based David Ligare crafted the "Thrown Drapery" series of sheets flying on the waves ("Andros", 1978; "Symi", 1979; etc) and metaphysical beach scenes such as "Penelope" (1980).

Distinct from traditional painters, street artists and muralists forged a communal spirit and developed a visual language closely tied to the urban environment and their social backgrounds.

The Mission district of San Francisco had a large Mexican and Chicano population. In 1970 a group of Chicano artists, including Nicaraguan-born Rolando Castellon and Rupert Garcia, opened the Galeria de la Raza. The gallery fostered the graffiti movement that spread through the Mission in the 1970s. In 1972 two Chicanas, Patricia Rodriguez and Graciela Carillo, started painting murals in their neighborhood, soon joined by other women, mostly students of the San Francisco Art Institute. They came to be known as "Las Mujeres Muralistas", and specialized in sociopolitical activism, such as the large mural "Panamerica" (1974). Recognizing that art existed beyond the traditional White-dominated channels, in 1976 the San Francisco native, and ethnic Filipino, Carlos Villa curated the exhibition "Other Sources" at the San Francisco Art Institute, featuring artists from marginalized communities, Taiko drummers, Polynesian dancers, an orchestra of Chinese instruments, San Francisco Chronicle's music critic Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle's art critic Tom Albright, San Francisco Art Institute's curator Fred Martin, and ethnic artists like Rupert Garcia. This was the first of a series of exhibitions, symposia and publications curated by Villa under the “Worlds in Collision” umbrella. That "collision" was visible in Villa's own art, for example "Mask-Unmask" (1977), a work of airbrush acrylic and feathers on unstretched canvas.

In parallel, Susan Kelk (San Francisco Art Institute class of 1968) and her husband Luis Cervantes founded the mural art organization Precita Eyes in 1977.

The Haight-Ashbury Muralists were another collective of muralists. They painted (in their neighborhood) "Rainbow People" (1974, mainly by Miranda Bergman), and "Our History Is No Mystery" (1976, mainly by Jane Norling and Miranda Bergman).

Quite isolated was John Wehrle, raised in Texas and relocated to San Francisco in 1969, who painted large murals such as "Positively Fourth Street" (1976) in San Francisco with John Rampley, the 63-meter mural "Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo" (1984) in Los Angeles, and “Revisionist History” (1995) in his hometown of Richmond.

Several mavericks stood out in the realm of sculpture.

New abstraction was practiced in sculpture by Brian Wall, a former assistant to Barbara Hepworth in Britain who was hired by UC Berkeley in 1969, and Roger Berry, who created large steel sculptures such as "Duplex Cone" (1982) and "Rising Wave" (1984).

Richard Shaw's collaboration with metal artist Robert Hudson, now turned polychrome mixed-media sculptor, led to porcelain casts of found objects ("S on a Pillow", 1971).

San Diego-born Deborah Butterfield graduated from UC Davis in 1973 with her first horse sculpture (made of sticks and mud), the genre for which she became famous after she moved to a Montana ranch.

In 1976 Jock Reynolds invited Manuel Neri to create a plaster sculpture every day for eight days at his new gallery 80 Langton Street, resulting in the exhibition "The Remaking of Mary Julia" named after Neri's model and new lover, Mary Julia Raahauge).

Fletcher Benton, who began teaching at San Jose's California State University in 1967, was a sculptor influenced by Constructivism for his "Folded Square Alphabet" series, started in 1978, large cubic steel sculptures designed around the alphabet letters.

The Mexican-born Robert Graham (San Francisco Art Institute class of 1964) debuted with absurdist mixed-media tableaux (including the photorealistic "Works 71" of 1969) but, after moving to Los Angeles, devoted himself to bronze sculptures, notably the ones of nude athletes on very tall pedestals ("Lise", 1977; "Dance Column", 1979).

Carlos Villa (Mills College class of 1963, professor at San Francisco Art Institute since 1969) was a performance and conceptual artist who made wearable assemblages resembling shamanic cloaks with materials such as feathers and bone dolls ("Third Coat", 1977).

Chicana installation artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, a Santa Clara native and former San Francisco hippie, made ofrendas (home altars) from found materials, starting with the one dedicated to Frida Kahlo at Galeria de la Raza in 1975.

In 1979 Stanford University's professor Carl Djerassi (a co-inventor of the birth-control pill) purchased land in the Santa Cruz Mountains west of Stanford and started the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. The program would attract dozens of world-class artists to create sculptures in the forest.

Textiles became the medium of choice for several artists working at the intersection of painting and sculpture.

The California College of Arts and Crafts held in March 1971 the first West Coast exhibition of fiber arts, "Dimension of Fiber", curated by student Barbara Kasten (her graduation thesis), who had given up a painting career to return to school. It included Kasten's own large-scale off-loom woven sculpture "Carcass" (1971). The second show on the West Coast, and more famous, was "Deliberate Entanglements", curated by Bernard Kester at UCLA in November 1971. Textile art, already championed in Oakland by Trude Guermonprez at California College of the Arts, and by Ed Rossbach at UC Berkeley, was boosted by the Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts, a school and gallery founded in 1973 in Berkeley by the Hungarian-born environmental sculptor Gyongy Laky (UC Berkeley class of 1971). Fiberworks organized the "Symposium on Contemporary Textile Art" in 1978, an international event that attracted hundreds of textile artists, and not only from the USA.

Ed Rossbach's student Lia Cook (UC Berkeley class of 1973) debuted with works of woven wool and cotton such as "Space Continuum I" (1973) but then specialized in "woven paintings" such as "Landform Red" (1978).

The Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association was formed in 1975 in Los Altos (Silicon Valley) by a group of women (who had studied with a teacher named Shirley Thomas), and in 1977 it opened the American Museum of Quilts & Textiles, the first of its kind in the USA, which later moved to San Jose and was renamed Museum of Quilts & Textiles.

The most dynamic and provocative art movement of the decade was Conceptual Art, which broke decisively with the traditions of painting and sculpture.

Tom Marioni brought Conceptual Art to the Bay Area. A sculptor who had moved to San Francisco in 1959, who had become an installation artist under the influence of Joseph Beuys and who had been hired as curator at the Richmond Art Centre (originally an art school founded by artist Hazel Salmi in 1936), Marioni organized a show titled "The Return of Abstract Expressionism" in September 1969, which featured the future protagonists of the scene, such as Mel Henderson a World War II veteran who had studied at California College of the Arts, Paul Kos, who had graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967, and Terry Fox, who had returned to San Francisco in 1969 after a sojourn in Europe. Then, in 1970, Marioni founded the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco.

Performances and installations such as Paul Kos’ "Richmond Glacier" (1969, a big melting block of ice blocking the entrance to the center), Terry Fox’s "Levitation" (1970, in which the artist tried to levitate on top of a pile of dirt holding four long tubes containing blood, urine, milk and water), and Tom Marioni's own "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art" (1970, which consisted of just that, the artist drinking with friends) challenged the very definition of art. Tom Marioni debuted "Sound Sculpture As" (1970) at his Museum of Conceptual Art which, together with Paul Kos' "The Sound of Ice Melting" (1970), that recorded the sound of the disintegrating ice, pioneered sound sculpture. He also organized a pioneering exhibition of feminist artists, "California Girls" (1971). His museum held one of the very early exhibition of video art, “Body Works” (1970), organized by Willoughby Sharp, and featuring videotapes by Terry Fox and New York artists such as Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim (who had graduated from rom Stanford in 1965 before moving to New York) and Keith Sonnier.

Bruce Nauman had laid the foundations of Conceptual Art with works such as "Self-Portrait as a Fountain" (1966) and "Mapping the Studio" (1968). Nauman began exhibiting his "corridors" in 1969, narrow walled walkways in which the audience was invited to walk, thereby staging their own performance. In 1969 Nauman, his wife Judy and Meredith Monk staged a performance at the Whitney Museum that consisted in simply repeatedly throwing themselves against the wall.

In September 1969 the Dilexi gallery staged a happening with the collaboration of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his wife, the choreographer Anna Halprin.

In 1969 Doug Hall and Jody Procter (former Harvard roommates who had just moved to San Francisco) launched the performance project Land Truth Circus, which was then renamed T.R.Uthco (for "Truth Collective"). They staged pieces such as "Great Moments" (1971) and "Thirty-two Feet Per Second Per Second" (1972), the latter simply a closed-circuit video broadcast of them sitting in chairs bolted to the facade of La Mamelle.

In 1970 Howard Fried, who had just graduated from UC Davis after staging "All My Dirty Blue Clothes" (1969), founded the Performance and Video department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Notable people of the department would include: photographer Annie Leibovitz (class of 1971 at the San Francisco Art Institute, later famous for the photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono a few hours before Lennon was murdered), David Ireland (class of 1974), Paul Kos (the department's second chair after Fried in 1978), Sharon Grace (who had engineered "Send/Receive" in 1977), Doug Hall of Uthco fame (who would join the faculty in 1981), Karen Finley (a punkette and performance artist who would graduate in 1982), etc.

The Halprins had been organizing since 1966 multi-week workshops in secluded locations north of the Bay for students of dance and architecture that often involved nudity with the goal of fostering collective interdisciplinary creativity. Students included Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Robert Morris.

Mel Henderson, a teacher of sculpture at San Francisco State University and one of the artists of the original Funk Art show of 1967, who had participated in the five-month strike of 1968–69, staged several politicized public art events: in November 1968 "13 Searchlights" operated by the public in a central street to protest against the Vietnam War; in September 1969 "Oil" to protest an oil spill (writing the word "OIL" on the water of the bay with biodegradable dye); and so on, peaking in December 1976 with "Celebration of Wonder" (COW), which consisted in four thousand cardboard cows staked along 300 kilometers of the highway between Reno and San Francisco.

In 1970 Bonnie Sherk, who had just graduated from San Francisco State University, sat still for one hour in places visible by traffic ("Sitting Still", 1970) and ate lunch in an empty cage at the zoo next to a cage of lions ("Public Lunch", 1971). She started "The Farm" in 1974 (with musician Jack Wickert) in the Mission district, a pioneering space for communal urban agriculture.

Stephen Laub, who graduated from Berkeley in 1970, inspired by British psychiatrist Ronald David Laing's theories, inserted himself into life-size wall projections of old photographs of his family ("Relations", 1970).

Terri Keyser, her husband Marc and David Shire were pranksters who staged farcical art shows in a fake gallery in downtown Berkeley, Sam's Cafe. In 1971 they were arrested for a prank that was borderline an attempted scam but had the effect of mobilizing the press. The border between Conceptual Art and prank and crime was becoming blurred.

Between 1972 and 1978 Terry Fox, who had converted to performance art while in Europe, made a series of works inspired by the circular labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, notably a one-hour composition obtained by superimposing the purring of eleven cats, "The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats" (1976). The namesake show of 1977 at the Site Gallery consisted of several performances and was subtitled "Metaphors for Falling".

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean raised in San Francisco who graduated from UC Berkeley, staged enigmatic performances like "A Ble Wail" (1975) and "Other Things Seen Other Things Heard" (1979). In 1980 she moved to New York, where she published an even more enigmatic linguistic experiment, "Dictée" (1982), shortly before being murdered at the age of 31.

Helene Aylon, already an established "process artist" in New York thanks to her series "Elusive Silver" (1969–73) made with industrial materials (metal, plastic, spray paint), moved in 1973 to San Francisco where she made the series "Paintings That Change" (1974–77) and "The Breakings" (1977–79), made by pouring linseed oil on paper, whose outcome depended on chance.

San Francisco's Conceptual Art community found its first refuge downtown even before Marioni opened his museum. In 1969 East Coast art dealer Reese Palley opened his West Coast art gallery in a store that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed in 1948 in downtown San Francisco (his only commission in San Francisco) and until 1972 allowed a young woman, Carol Lindsley, who had just curated an exhibition of plastic sculptures, to curate a series of conceptual shows and performances in the basement, which became known as the Cellar Gallery, by the likes of Tom Marioni, Bruce Nauman, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, etc.

In 1973 the Museum of Conceptual Art organized an event called “All Night Sculptures”: nine artists (including Terry Fox, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Bonnie Sherk and Marioni himself) staged performances or installations which ran between sunset and sunrise. Pasadena native Barbara Smith, who had graduated at the age of 40 from UC Irvine in 1971, staged "Feed Me" (1973): lying naked on a mattress in a small room while a tape recorder repeated “Feed me", she welcomed visitors who "fed" her any way they wished, from sharing drugs to engaging in sex.

Barbara Smith was also involved in a show conceived by curator David Smith at Caltech, "I Am Abandoned" (1976), that the conceptual artist and her student Kathy Niles (two attractive young women) hijacked. The Caltech audience was invited to interact live and remotely with an Artificial Intelligence chatbot named "Doctor" running at MIT that simulated a psychologist (a variant of Joseph Weizenbaum's epochal "Eliza" of 1966). Then a chatbot developed at Caltech and named “Parry,” which simulated a schizophrenic patient, was also able to interact with "Doctor", thereby pioneering the idea of two A.I.s talking to each other. However, Smith tried to seduce the program "Doctor" and Niles tried to seduce the Caltech engineer operating "Patient", causing the curator to interrupt the show.

The ultimate site-specific installation was David Ireland's own Victorian home of 1886 which the artist began to remodel with sculptures made of found objects right after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974.

Chip Lord's Ant Farm created one of the most influential installations in 1974 in the desert of Texas, "Cadillac Ranch", using parts of old cars. Ant Farm also organized multimedia performances such as "Media Burn" (july 1975) during which they burned in public a pyramid of television sets. Ant Farm collaborated with T.R.Uthco for the videotape and installation "The Eternal Frame" (1975) that re-enacted and re-interpreted the Kennedy assassination.

Jo Hanson, a sculptor who had moved in 1955 to Marin County, created "Crab Orchard Cemetery" (1974), a mixed-media work comprising sculpture, prints, photographs and sound to recreate her family's ancestral graveyard in Illinois, but more influential was perhaps her participatory performative art project "Street-Sweeping", which consisted in making assemblages and sculptures out of the trash littered in her neighborhood, which were first presented in the exhibition "Public Disclosure" (1980).

Phil Garner, relocated to Los Angeles after serving in Vietnam and graduated in 1970 from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, where he trained in automotive design and made the fiberglass sculpture "Kar-Mann" (1969), a car with human legs and ass instead of the tail. Relocating to the Bay Area, Garner collaborated with Chip Lord of the Ant Farm collective and contributed to Search & Destroy and RE/Search magazines. He was mainly an inventor of absurd inventions worthy of Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics that were also thought-provoking conceptual artworks, like a car that drove backwards ("Immaculate Misconceptions Backwards Car", 1974). A witty satirist of the consumer society, he published them in a mail-order catalog titled "Better Living Catalog" (1982). In 1992 the middle-aged artist had sex surgery and became Pippa Garner not because of gender identity but simply as a work of art involving her own body.

The escalating size of these conceptual works was due to the influence of European artists. For example, in September 1976 the Bulgarian Christo Javacheff and his wife Jeanne-Claude Denat, already famous for their large-scale projects, completed a 40-kilometer long, five-meter high, white nylon fence with two thousand steel poles in the hills north of the Bay down to the ocean at Bodega Bay.

Jim Pomeroy, who had graduated in 1972 from UC Berkeley, created the Dada zoetrope "Newt Ascending Astaire's Face" (1974), the zoetrope being a 19th century precursor of cinema, and the sound installation "Composition in D" (1974), in which the artist fired slingshots at music boxes.

Jim Melchert, who had studied ceramics under Peter Voulkos at UC Berkeley (1961), and was now a teacher there, turned to an art of silent slide projections, such as "Changing Walls" (1972), which consists of 80 slides in which artist Howard Fried is shown painting a wall that turns out to be just a large piece of paper which he then tears apart, and "Points of View - Location Project #10" (1974), which consists of a week of daytime images projected at night on the outdoor wall of an Oakland movie theater (five of which are the theater's own emergency exit stairs).

Don Potts, at San Jose State College, sculpted entire cars, starting with the motorized and radio-controlled "The Master Chassis" (1970).

The Oakland-based Mark Thompson, trained as a scientist, devoted his artworks to honeybees: video (the 30-minute "Immersion" of 1974 in which the artist's head is slowly covered by a swarm of 40,000 honeybees), installation ("Honey Jars", 1976) and performance ("Backpack Hive", 1977). Interacting with the bees became a metaphor of coexistence and communication.

By the mid-1970s San Francisco's art scene was shifting towards video, performance, installation and mixed-media arts, increasingly participatory and often accompanied with live electronic music.

Conceptual art was the subject of an exhibition organized in December 1979 by Suzanne Foley at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, "Space/ Time/ Sound", featuring Mel Henderson, Lynn Hershman, Paul Kos, Stephen Laub, Tom Marioni, Jim Melchert, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Bonnie Sherk, Richard Alpert, Ant Farm, etc. Jim Pomeroy's installation, "Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog" (1979), simply consisted of large-scale reproductions of his correspondence with the curator aimed at emphasizing how exhibitions failed to document the real history of art.

Within the conceptual art movement, feminist artists emerged as a distinctive and influential force.

Lynn Hershman graduated in 1972 from San Francisco State University and staged "The Dante Hotel" (1973) in the room of a real San Francisco hotel, in which two life-size dolls impersonated a sleeping couple, replete with sounds of breathing, pioneered site-specific installations. Beginning in 1975, Hershman invented a whole person, "Roberta Breitmore," who impersonated by the artist herself as a sexy blonde in a miniskirt, lived a real life in the real world, documented in photographs, audio tapes and diaries, dealing with real people and real situations. Meant as a study of alienation and loneliness, Roberta's life ended in 1978 with an enigmatic "exorcism" in Italy performed on the grave of Lucrezia Borgia.

Another study of identity was conceived by Berkeley-based photographer "Lutz Bacher" (a pseudonym), who in 1976 interviewed herself on the subject of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated US president John Kennedy, producing an 18-page photo-collage in the form of photostatic prints, "The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview" (later also a video installation and a multimedia performance). Incidentally, Bacher never revealed her real name.

Feminist artists included Judith Barry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, two students of Bertrand Augst's classes on film theory at UC Berkeley, a campus where feminist practice was being influenced by emerging research in Semiotics, Post-structuralism and Cultural Anthropology. Judith Barry's performance "Pastpresent-futuretense" (1977) ended with the artist buried in sand. Barry also wrote with the film historian Sandy Flitterman the essay "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making" (1980).

The South Korean-born Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who, like her mentor Jim Melchert, had initially studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos, graduated in 1978 having already produced performances (“Barren Cave Mute”, 1974), videos (“Mouth to Mouth”, 1975) and video installations ("Passages Paysages", 1978). Cha moved to New York in 1980 but was raped and killed two years later, at the age of 31, shortly after the publication of her book "Dictee" (a collage of images and texts dedicated to nine modern "muses").

Whether feminist or not, the wave of conceptual art led to a wave of alternative art spaces and events.

In October and November 1974 a series of performances and installations called "South of the Slot" was organized (in what is now South of Market) by a group of artists including Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, Terry Fox, Jim Melchert, Simone Forti, Alan Scarritt, Paul DeMarinis, Jim Pomeroy and Richard Alpert. Artists had to self-organize and self-curate the show. It was a signal that alternative spaces were needed for the new community of interdisciplinary performance, installation and multimedia artists that were being shunned by commercial galleries and museums.

And so between 1974 and 1975 alternative spaces popped up everywhere in San Francisco. Spaces that opened in 1974 include: Creative Growth (founded by Florence Ludins-Katz and her husband Elias in their Berkeley garage), Kala (founded in Berkeley by Archana Horsting and Yuzo Nakano), and Southern Exposure (originally called American Can Collective Gallery), which took over Project Artaud, a formerly abandoned factory in the Mission District that artists led by Joseph Krysiak had transformed into a hive of live-and-work studios. In July 1975 Jock Reynolds (UC Davis class of 1972) with help from Jim Pomeroy opened 80 Langton Street on the site of a former coffin factory in the South of Market neighborhood (1979 the gallery became New Langton Arts, directed by Renny Pritikin and his wife Judy Moran). In 1975 Alan Scarritt co-founded Site (later renamed Site/Cite/Sight), and Lynn Hershman established the mobile Floating Museum, which sponsored the "San Quentin Mural Project", produced by inmates.

La Mamelle Magazine (later renamed Art Contemporary and then Art Com) was launched in 1975 by Carl Loeffler to document performance, video and photographic art, and in 1976 the same Loeffler opened an artist-run exhibition space for performance art, La Mamelle.

The community was further cemented when in 1975 the San Francisco Art Institute began the tradition of annual exhibitions of emerging artists. Alternative art spaces popped up mainly in the Mission and South of Mission Area (SOMA) districts, outside the main financial area.

At the same time, an impressive number of traditional galleries opened throughout the city: in North Beach (Charles Campbell's Cole Gallery in 1972, Paule Anglim's gallery in 1976), downtown around Union Square (John Berggruen in 1970, Martin Lawrence in 1975, Bettie Mitchell's Gallery 444 in 1980), in a multi-story building at 49 Geary Street (Don Soker in 1971, Stephen Wirtz in 1976, Robert Koch in 1979, Jeffrey Fraenkel in 1979), and in a multi-story building at 77 Geary Street (James Willis in 1971, Rena Bransten in 1974).

In November 1978 Mark Pauline created the Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a collective of artists and engineers that staged guerrilla performances of custom-built machines in abandoned spaces, very much in line with the punk ethos and the situationist ideology, such as "Mysteries of the Reactionary Mind" (1981) at Fort Mason. It was the dawn of the "machine art" movement.

San Francisco, an old port city, was transitioning from a shipping economy to a financial and tourism economy. This was leaving many old buildings empty. The Survival Research Laboratories were one of the groups taking advantage of those abandoned building for staging unorthodox (and mildly illegal) events. The Suicide Club, founded in 1977 by Adrienne Burk, Gary Warne and Nancy Prussia, staged a broad range of provocative events: costumed street pranks, sewer walks, a vampyre party in an abandoned funeral home, riding naked in a cable car, and especially bridge climbing. Also in 1977 Jack Napier, a teenage member of the Suicide Club, and a middle-aged Irving Glikk started the Billboard Liberation Front, that coordinated graffiti artists (including the young Shepard Fairey) devoted to "improving" the commercial billboards, an entertaining form of anti-capitalistic warfare. If SRL was about machine exploration, the Suicide Club was about urban exploration. Both had something in common: an unusual degree of intensity (paralleled in music by the local punk-rock scene).

Arthur Evans, a member of New York's Gay Liberation Front who had created a gay commune east of Seattle, moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in 1974 and in 1976 created a "Faery Circle" inspired to a bacchanalian pagan-influenced philosophy ("fairy" was a derogatory term for gay men). In the same year, the Berkeley psychologist Mitch Walker published "Visionary Love - The Magickal Gay Spirit Power". Meanwhile, in Los Angeles a charismatic 67-year-old gay activist, Harry Hay, who over the years had formed the Mattachine Society (1951) and the Circle of Loving Friends (1965), organized a "Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries" in September 1979 in Arizona, an event that launched an international movement of "Radical Faeries" that mixed gay activism and hippie-style spirituality.

The gay community created its own rituals. In 1979 some gay men started dressing up like Catholic nuns and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were born. With no particular mission, the idea spread to other cities.