The house at 65 Capp Street looks unremarkable from the outside -- a Victorian in San Francisco's Mission District, indistinguishable from a hundred others on the block. But inside, the artist David Ireland had transformed it into a work of art itself, stripping walls to bare plaster and treating every surface as a canvas. In 1983, Ann Hatch acquired the house and did something no one in the American art world had done before: she established a residency program dedicated entirely to installation art and conceptual work. The Capp Street Project became the first of its kind in the United States, a place where artists were invited not to paint or sculpt but to reimagine space itself.
David Ireland's transformation of 65 Capp Street was the foundation on which the residency was built. Ireland, a San Francisco artist known for his philosophical approach to everyday materials, had turned the Victorian interior into an ongoing meditation on surfaces, materials, and the nature of domestic space. When Hatch purchased the building, she recognized that Ireland's work had created an environment uniquely suited to artists who worked at the intersection of architecture and concept. The house was not a neutral gallery but an active collaborator, a space that challenged each visiting artist to respond to its particular qualities.
Over three decades, the Capp Street Project hosted artists whose names became landmarks in contemporary art. Maryanne Amacher brought her sound installations in 1985. The Art Guys, a collaborative duo from Texas, arrived in 1995. Hundreds of artists passed through -- each given time, space, and the expectation that they would create something that could exist nowhere else. The residency's focus on site-specific work meant that each project was inherently temporary, existing for the duration of the installation and then vanishing. What remained was the cumulative effect: a house on a Mission District side street that had hosted one of the most important experimental art programs in the country.
In 1998, the Capp Street Project merged with the California College of the Arts' Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, bringing its residency model into a larger institutional framework. The merger preserved the program's essential character -- artists continued to be invited to create new, site-specific installations -- while providing the financial stability that an independent program on a single residential street could not sustain. In 2014, the Wattis Institute celebrated 30 years of the Capp Street Project, a milestone that affirmed the enduring influence of Hatch's original vision: that artists need not a studio but a context, not materials but a provocation.
Located at 37.7658°N, 122.418°W in San Francisco's Mission District, on Capp Street between 18th and 19th Streets. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 feet AGL. Nearest airports: KSFO (11 nm south), KOAK (10 nm east). The Mission District grid is identifiable between Dolores Park and the BART corridor along Mission Street.