{"id":413588,"date":"2026-07-27T07:40:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T07:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/413588\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T07:40:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T07:40:30","slug":"whos-haunting-the-san-francisco-art-book-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/413588\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s Haunting the San Francisco Art Book Fair?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artists, book dealers, and publishers travel from all over the world to sell their wares to the thousands of attendees who come to the San Francisco Art Book Fair every summer. The fair, which is free to attend and now in its tenth year, brought in over 30,000 people across four days this weekend, according to its director Gaelan McKeown.<\/p>\n

This year, said McKeown, the fair got over 400 applications from would-be booksellers, but could only squeeze in about 130. They got close to 200 applications to host events at the fair \u2014\u00a0book talks, art talks, and workshops \u2014\u00a0but could only choose a few dozen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Art Book Fair turned down a proposal to be haunted \u2014\u00a0even if the would-be haunt-er, Aaron Wojack, works at the Minnesota Street Project (which hosts and curates the fair\u2019s programming) and, also, really wanted to get in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was upset,\u201d said Wojack, the impresario behind Bat Witch Ghost<\/a>, a local arts organization that specializes in haunted houses, like last year\u2019s Halloween \u201cHaunt\u201d<\/a> at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. \u201cI was hurt. I felt like I was not appreciated by my own community.\u201d Wojack had proposed a (haunted) installation, with (haunted) smoke machines, where he would make a (haunted) zine, and host a (haunted) prop-making workshop.<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, Wojack got over it. His proposal was pretty \u201chaphazard,\u201d he admitted, and it didn\u2019t do much in the way of catering to the \u201cbook\u201d element of the Art Book Fair.<\/p>\n

In the course of those realizations came another: \u201cFuck it.\u201d Wojack recalled thinking. \u201cI don\u2019t need permission.\u201d All you need to haunt someplace, he added, is a good outfit. In fact, he\u2019d dabbled in a bit of freelance haunting in the past, handing out Bat Witch Ghost fliers by himself draped in a ghillie suit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, Wojack got a small crew of ghosts and monsters to haunt the fair anyway. Each day of the fair, a costumed actor would roam around the tables, perusing risograph prints and walking through the galleries upstairs, which served as overflow rooms for fair attendees to take a break from looking at art books and look at just art.<\/p>\n

In preparation for this weekend, Wojack gave his hired actors specific haunting personas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe personality that I\u2019m looking for here,\u201d Wojack recalled telling one actor, \u201cis this a friendly ghost. It\u2019s got good manners, but also, it just can\u2019t help scaring people from time to time. It\u2019s mischievous, and funny. It loves to dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGreat,\u201d Wojack\u00a0 recalled the actor saying, \u201cthat sounds like me.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy to scare throngs of people walking shoulder-to-shoulder inside cavernous warehouse-turned-gallery buildings with relatively open lines of sight \u2014\u00a0in fact, a true jumpscare is nearly impossible, and possibly a vibe-killer at this high holy day for all hipsterdom. But a person wearing a Halloween costume in late July on the sunniest weekend in recent memory was, apparently, startling enough.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, as one actor, draped in fabric and wearing a green foam mask with drooping yellow eyes, approached two fair attendees, the pair jumped, less out of fear than surprise. The ghost offered them each fliers advertising Bat Witch Ghost\u2019s haunting services.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should go to this haunted house,\u201d said one to the other, as the ghost drifted away. Halloween was just a few months away.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A costumed ghost actor beguiles publisher V. Vale at the San Francisco Art Book fair on July 26 2026. Video by Nicholas David.<\/p>\n

As Wojack sees it, the crafts associated with the haunted house \u2014 costuming, prop-making, sculpture \u2014 are aligned with the art world. And he sees analogues between a good haunting and\u00a0 contemporary fine art in the works of Cameron Jamie and Thomas Hirschhorn. (Wojack was particularly inspired by a 2008 labyrinthian collaborative work by Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and Alexandre Singh called \u201cHello Meth Lab in the Sun<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The ghost continued to work the mezzanine level, where there was a temporary breakdown in the friendly ghost vibe. A small child yelped at the sight and ran off to clutch the nearest (hopefully familiar) leg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fair\u2019s organizers appeared happy with the rogue haunting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBat Witch Ghost is exceptional and so extremely San Francisco,\u201d said McKeown, as people buzzed around the fair\u2019s main building on its final day. Behind, vendors like Special Effects<\/a> peddled Vaillancourt Fountain<\/a> posters, and The Last Straw<\/a> gallery-store sold the last of its supply of shirts that read \u201cToo dumb for NY, too ugly for LA, just right for SF.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI took my kid back to their installation at Yerba Buena three times,\u201d McKeown added. \u201cIt was her favorite thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fair\u2019s programming is curated by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, which schedules artist workshops, and by SFMOMA library director David Senior, who plans lectures and talks.<\/p>\n

The official programs listed on Sunday included a billboard-painting workshop with artist and sign-painter Rose D\u2019Amato<\/a> \u2014\u00a0and a talk on \u201cBack-to-the-land architecture in Northern California.\u201d Also programmed was a talk with the fair\u2019s founders, who, McKeown said, share Wojack\u2019s do-it-yourself ambition.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe love the San Francisco ethos of just showing up and making it happen,\u201d McKeown said, \u201cbecause that\u2019s what this was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PersonA costumed actor for Bat Witch Ghost haunts the San Francisco Art Book Fair\u2019s zinemaking room on July 26 2026. Photo by Nicholas David.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artists, book dealers, and publishers travel from all over the world to sell their wares to the thousands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2308,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-413588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-art","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}