The logic was fair and sound: Cultural institutions and events help attract visitors. Those visitors pay hotel taxes. So, the people agreed, some of that hotel-tax revenue should go back into maintaining the cultural ecosystem that helps bring those visitors and that money.
Projected as a five-year plan, the measure was supposed to increase funding to $17.9 million by 2017.
It never did. The penny was never guaranteed, so each year the city used part of it for other priorities. By 2023, the money going to arts and culture was up to about a half a penny. Even as TOT revenue has gone up significantly.
In 2019, TOT revenue was $245 million.
In 2025: $325 million.
One fix would be to guarantee the penny. Not simple, given San Diego’s financial woes. But the alternative—eroding the culture that makes San Diego San Diego, give it its identity—also doesn’t feel wise. Plus, even a locked percentage still rises and falls with tourism, which is why culture advocates want a guaranteed floor on top of it.
Another solution would be to give the arts commission actual authority.
“It’s an advisory body,” says arts commissioner Kamaal Martin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who takes our advice.”
He described the commissioners debating real, consequential questions this year, like whether and how to divide the cuts between funding pools. But those conversations “don’t connect to whoever’s actually deciding,” Martin says. “We haven’t been entrusted with decision-making about relevant things nearly enough.”
Christine Martinez is building political infrastructure through her organization Arts+Culture:San Diego—which is starting a 501(c)(4) lobbying structure not unlike police and fire unions. Martinez is also keeping her community actively engaged. “We won’t be caught off guard next year like we were this year,” she tells me.
Then there’s the evergreen issue of affordability and accessibility. Kiplinger’s most recent report ranks San Diego as the 11th most expensive city in the US, based on cost of living. The average home value is $980,700 (the US median is $540,000), but San Diego’s median household income is only one-third greater than the national level. Rent is also 66 percent higher than the national average ($2,716 vs. $1,636).
This is why San Diego has long suffered from the creative brain drain—creatives leaving for more affordable cities. “Artists are free to live wherever they want, and they will go where the rent is affordable,” says Jennifer de Poyen of Space 4 Art. “When they leave, they take their gifts with them, and their contributions, and their economic impact.”
One saving grace is the presence of Tijuana, where the cost of living is about 60 percent lower than San Diego, per Numbeo. Tijuana has long functioned as an affordable neighborhood for many in San Diego’s creative culture. It’s part of the reason why the binational identity is such a constant in our galleries, music, theater, murals, and culture. While that cross-border blood flow is one of San Diego’s most compelling attributes, few artists living that life would call it convenient or easy. A city is at a disadvantage when its culture creators have to cross a border to go home at night, and cross again the next morning to work.
In May, San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a $2.75 million arts initiative of its own. It includes an Artist Space Grant Program aimed directly at the affordability crisis, as well as an artist-in-residence program, a dedicated Binational Creative Economy Investment, and a one-time investment in the Black Arts and Culture District in Encanto.
Bob Lehman of San Diego Art Matters has been doing county-level, binational organizing for years; in 2023, he helped get the county’s arts commission reestablished after 30 years of defunctness. That’s important because it gives arts and culture an official seat in county government, advising the County Board of Supervisors on arts and culture policy. He also brought in consultant Laura Zucker, who ran LA County’s arts program for three decades, to build a real regional plan.
“I really believe we’ll have something set up here that other communities come and look at,” he told me. “A national template other cities come to learn from.”
When asked who decides which artists will get the new grant money, county arts commissioner and executive director of the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center Monica Delgadillo Hernandez doesn’t hedge.
“That’s part of the infrastructure we’re going to be building,” she says. “What should a panel of reviewers look like? Should it be the commissioners? Should it be other folks? A supervisor?” She was just as candid that the commission itself doesn’t reflect San Diego’s population—Chicano communities are roughly a third of the city, she tells me, “and that’s not represented at the table yet.”
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
What Other Cities Prove Is Possible
The great news is that none of these solutions have to be invented from scratch. Numerous cities serve as examples of what’s possible—if we have the will.
Jonathon Glus—Prebys Foundation Senior Fellow for Art & Design, the Executive Director of the Art + Design District, and board president for California for the Arts—worked in Houston before coming to San Diego. The Texas city dedicates 74.5 percent of its hotel tax to arts grants by formula, and that support is guaranteed. Washington, DC locked in dedicated arts funding in 2019. Salt Lake City, my hometown, has run a voter-approved arts tax for almost 30 years, most recently reauthorized through 2034. And just this summer, New York City pushed cultural funding to a record $323.8 million, even incorporating an emergency fund.
Denver’s model is interesting because instead of a city-dependent funding model, theirs is a 0.1 percent regional sales tax. In place since 1988 and renewed by voters three times, their Scientific & Cultural Facilities District has distributed between $54 million and $85 million to arts, culture, and scientific orgs—each of the last 12 years.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.
None of these cities got there by accident. They decided, on purpose, that arts and culture were worth protecting from politics—and, in some cases, worth building an entire identity around.
“That’s how Miami has flipped the switch,” says Glus. “People go to Miami for culture as much as they do the beach.”
San Diego has spent decades selling itself backward: Beach and weather first, culture as an afterthought you might stumble into. Glus would love to see the strategy flipped: Visitors should come for the art, “and then, by the way, you’re on the beach.”
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
So What Happens From Here?
“I do think it was a wake-up call for the community,” de Poyen says of the budget fight. “People understand that our funding is vulnerable. It was a lesson in how much power people have when they coalesce. But wow, is it painful.”
Glus says he’s genuinely optimistic. “The players have all changed seats, but the work is moving forward.”
“I believe optimism is a moral duty,” says Martin, who’s both power-fist and polite.
In eight months, there will be another budget fight. Everyone I talked to expects it will be worse. But something happened this spring that can’t be undone.
“I hope this rupture has brought us together in a moment of self-realization,” says Leticia Gomez Franco of the Balboa Art Conservation Center. “I hope we stop being so transactional; we begin to see ourselves and each other as partners in this work.”
That’s the whole ask, really. And it’s on all of us.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.
Without concrete, wildflowers are just weeds. Any honest history of San Diego art and culture is tension and its reckonings. It begins before the name existed, with the Kumeyaay. It must pass through the Panama-California Exposition, one hell of a county fair that conjured Balboa Park as our grand cultural stage. It pays tribute to the lights of La Jolla, where the donor pool helped realize unrealizable things. It should mention names like Marston, Scripps, Ochoa, DeWitt, Lopez, Klauber, Baldessari, Torres… so many.
In short spaces like this, long histories like that become roll calls. So this is more of a walk through pressure points, notes on recurring forces and regional oddities.
Border life is key to understanding the here of here. Art without dialogue is just decoration. At its best, that dialogue should be a tad muddy, emotionally gassed. In other words, it should be in need of art—to widen perspective, parse meaning, see the unseen.
San Diego’s central dialogue—the magic and the stressor—is being flatmates with Mexico’s second-largest city by population. That makes San Diego a swing-gate of shared and vastly different perspectives, both its own place and something larger. And in no other major city in the US do the fresh flow of ideas from two countries—different governments, laws, mores, expressions, arts, cultures, traditions, economies, loves, and resentments—mingle at such a constant daily rate (due respect to El Paso).
That binational steam created Chicano Park, one of the most uniquely San Diegan contributions to national and international culture. When construction of the I-5 and Coronado Bridge divided Logan Heights, neighbors protested by transmuting prejudicial concrete into redwoods of Chicano art. Turning a civic wound into a beautiful and enduring landmark that expressed and preserved a core identity—like East Side Gallery in Berlin or Constitution Hill in Johannesburg—is damn near the core of what art is supposed to do.
Like any city, the underground-overground friction is crucial in San Diego. Our culture is headlined by institutions that lift creative work onto national and international stages: MCASD, The Nat, SDMA, Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Symphony, WorldBeat Center, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, Mingei, Museum of Us, Stuart Collection, Timken, ICA, Comic-Con, etc. The next mutations grow in the seams: street murals, music dives, tattoo shops, wheatpasted walls, graffiti, lowriders, surf and skate art (though in San Diego, this is mainstream), pop-up shows, backyard shows, beach raves, any place with room for people and a loose relationship with regulations.
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
Both art and culture get their power from power. They’re fundamentally a conversation with and retort against dominant structures. San Diego’s most pervasive structure is arguably the most rigid form: the military. Its presence is heavy in the southern tip (Border Patrol), the middle (Navy and MCAS Miramar), and northern edge (Camp Pendleton). The military is San Diego’s largest employer, by a long shot.
Within this plus-sized environment of order and hierarchy, it’s understandable that Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY” posters in the late ’90s struck such a potent chord. The most compelling punk rock is often outside a strong governor’s window. (The “OBEY” series featured an ominous, propaganda-style André the Giant wheatpasted on random ugly surfaces across San Diego—launching Fairey’s style that he eventually used for Obama’s “HOPE” poster.)
Armed forces are often viewed as the absence of creative culture—understandably so, since rogue individual expression feels like a pretty sure way to sink a war effort.
But in San Diego, the Navy’s unsuspecting role as art creator—directly or indirectly—is hard to ignore. Tattoos are a dawn-of-time practice of many early cultures, including the Kumeyaay. But Polynesia was a core realm. Sailors were exposed to it on deployment in the Pacific Rim, inking their arms with the names of loved ones and unit insignia. Back in San Diego, they’d flaunt those tats in the beaches and bars of Mission Beach or PB (Marines did the same in Oceanside.) Enlistees were the muscular flesh galleries that helped turn skin art into one of the city’s most widespread modern art forms.
During WWII, the military also trained huge legions of San Diego laborers how to build war machines. Those mechanics, engineers, machinists, welders, painters, and metal fabricators used those skills for creative good in their neighborhoods—especially in custom car culture, which took off in the post-war ’50s and ’60s. Mexican-American vets helped develop the lowrider scene, a deeply rooted part of San Diego creative expression. Galleries on slow-moving wheels.
Tourism is the other mainstream force ripe for creating against. It is both critical to San Diego’s economy, and one of the greatest barriers to deeper, more nuanced expressions of what and who San Diego is. The industry of selling our city to passers-through creates a gigantic tarp of cultural tropes. It reinforces the most obvious charms—cute zoo animal takes in an epic sunset with a giant margarita—and doesn’t yield much airspace to the thrilling micro-cultures that live and breathe where locals live and breathe. Nothing against watercolors of dolphins, but much against the hegemony of watercolors of dolphins.
Maybe because of these dominant forces, San Diegans especially tend to force underground and institutional art into a needless cage match. It’s human instinct to champion the underdog as more worthy, but that has always felt like a form of articide.
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
It’s like saying the only good food is made by gritty upstarts who crafted their own whisks from discarded shopping carts. Most of those plucky whisk-makers would love to eventually be paid properly, would love a stage, a grant, a building, a donor, a lighting rig, health insurance, maybe even one chair that doesn’t threaten the spine.
That’s what the major institutions do. Both stages—the duct-taped and the donored—serve vital roles and deserve commensurate support if we care about the entire lifespan of creative expression and not just its first exciting steps. Championing the starving artist exclusively just secures an enduring poverty for the creative class at large.
I’ve often theorized it’s harder to create great art and culture in cities like San Diego, where the climate is supernaturally pleasant. In colder/hotter/rainier/less beautiful cities, people are forced indoors to fabricate their own beauty (the grunge music of Seattle, the obscene creative output of Reykjavík). San Diego’s eternally mild sunshine tends to make the human body our art medium of choice. But scratch the surface of that surf poster (and I’ve only scratched a miniscule percent here), and this city’s far from the cultural shallows it gets accused of being.
Addendum: A Personal Agenda. In scouting the route of art and culture across San Diego county through history, two areas come up again and again: La Jolla and Barrio Logan. So I propose a collaboration between two icons of artful concrete—Chicano Park and Salk Institute (one of the world’s great examples of brutalism architecture). Let Barrio Logan’s muralists go nuts on that coastal science fortress, unite the realms for a moment in time.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
San Diego Restored Arts Funding—But the Crisis Isn’t Over
The city’s cultural sector regained millions after a proposed 85 percent cut, yet nonprofits, youth programs and major institutions still face painful losses
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.
Every spring, Christine Martinez reaches out to the arts community to explain what’s on the line, hoping they’ll engage with the city’s budget process. Cultural funding, she constantly reminds, is almost always strapped to the guillotine. Especially in a city strapped for cash.
“It’s not an easy ask,” says Martinez, manager of Arts+Culture:San Diego. “Showing up is a real cost for small, volunteer-run groups that can’t spare half a day at City Council without possibly having to close their doors.”
Then, last April—with one day’s notice to arts leaders—Mayor Todd Gloria proposed a budget that didn’t trim arts funding; it eviscerated it, from $13.8 million to $2 million. An 85 percent slash. Other city departments faced cuts of about 7 percent.
The scheduled date of the cuts was just three months away (beginning of the fiscal year). Organizational leaders have to plan months if not years ahead to run their organizations. They had made hires, dedicated spending, and programmed their seasons based on a reasonable expectation that support for the arts would be somewhat in line with previous years. (The City has allotted at least $7 million a year to arts every year for the last 20 years, and the last four years have ranged between $13.8 and $18.2 million.)
The day felt even more existential given the national and international climate around the arts: namely, the federal government’s repeated proposal to eliminate the country’s two biggest cultural foundations (NEA and NEH), and the global trend of AI replacing more costly human creatives.
“It shocked everybody,” says Kamaal Martin, arts commissioner and co-founder of Art Power Equity. “If the message had been, ‘Times are tough, everybody tighten their belts a little,’ it would have landed differently. But there was no vision offered for the future, no parity in the cut. It was just, essentially, ‘Fuck you.’”
Among things I’m good at—sleeping late, low bidding for expensive shoes on Poshmark, parallel parking on either side of the street—budget analysis isn’t among them. In trying to understand how bad the finances were for San Diego to propose this drastic cut, I found myself drowning in numbers, pie charts, and politi-speak.
In his April 27 newsletter, Gloria explained that balancing the budget means “asking hard questions about every single dollar this city spends: Is this a core responsibility of city government, or is it something we do when we can afford to?”
Fair enough—if he were to ask those hard questions about every single dollar this city spends. It also makes his conclusion clear: The City of San Diego does not view supporting arts and culture as a core responsibility.
Which begs more than a few questions: Should the City be responsible? If not, then who? How crucial are arts and culture to a city? And since this is a budget discussion, how much revenue does the arts and culture industry generate for San Diego? What’s the ROI?
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
The Impact of Arts & Culture
$1.2 billion.
That’s how much economic activity San Diego’s arts and culture nonprofits generated in 2022, according to the City’s latest Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 report. The industry created nearly 17,000 jobs and generated $878 million of personal income for local residents. About 15 percent of the people showing up to arts events in San Diego are tourists, so money was raised through TOT (Transit Occupancy Tax). The activity generated $275.7 million in tax revenue to the city.
In other words, the ROI seems to be ROI-ing.
Still, there have been signs that cuts were coming. In 2025, the City demoted the Department of Cultural Affairs to a division, folding it into the Economic Development Department (EDD). That meant Cultural Affairs no longer had independence, nor its own leader sitting at the same organizational level as departments like parks and recreation, library, police, and fire. It lost institutional leverage and would now have to compete with other EDD priorities—real estate, airport operations, business development, etc.—for budget allocation.
To be clear, few arts administrators and leaders I spoke with are interested in the either/or false choice of funding law enforcement or after-school programs; the fire departments or libraries. They’re sincere in looking for solutions that don’t leave any single group with a greater burden of righting a long-out-of-balance budget.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
San Diego is full of people who deserve a few thousand words on what they make, who they bring together, and how their work changes the city around them. The artists, makers, advocates, and behind-the-scenes talent below are a small part of that larger ecosystem.
To help us narrow our list, we looked for names that kept coming up, work that reflects the diversity of our region, and people building something bigger than themselves.
Jackie is a long-time freelance journalist covering cannabis, food/restaurants, travel, labor, wine, spirits, arts & culture, design, and other topics. Her work has been selected twice for Best American Travel Writing, and she has won a variety of national and local awards for her writing and reporting.
Isabella Dallas is a freelance writer for San Diego Magazine and the Arts and Culture Editor at The Daily Aztec in her final year at San Diego State University. She previously worked as an editorial intern for SDM, but when she’s not writing, you can find her trying the best coffee spots in SD, devouring the latest rom-coms, and indulging in anything and everything pop culture.
Matt Eisenberg is an award-winning writer and photographer based in San Diego. A former ESPN editor, his work has also been published by CNN, Bleacher Report and the New York Daily News.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
Lili Kim is a content coordinator and writer for San Diego Magazine, with experience highlighting local businesses and communities. When not writing or shooting film, she is likely brewing her seventh cup of tea of the day or strolling along Sunset Cliffs.
Emma Veidt is an editor at San Diego Magazine. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the Missouri School of Journalism. She loves running, hiking, and rock climbing, but really, she mostly loves encounters with the street cats around North Park.
Gail Czyszczon is owner/copywriter at Z3 Writing and best-selling author of a children’s book series. As a strategic communications professional and editorialist, she's passionate about discovering untold stories and themes that ignite fresh conversation and true change in communities.
The Best Gym in San Diego Isn’t Really a Gym Anymore
Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped "athletic" from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
There’s a version of San Diego that lives in two extremes. On one side, the 5 a.m. crowd: biohackers, marathoners, people who’ve already logged a cold plunge before your alarm goes off. On the other, the after-dark crowd, the ones chasing sunset happy hours and late dinners with friends. Everyone seems to be either optimizing or unwinding, and most of us feel like we’re failing at both.
Fit, San Diego’s reigning Best Gym for the third year running, has built its entire identity around erasing that divide.
Walk into one of Fit’s three San Diego locations on a Tuesday afternoon and the lines blur fast. Someone’s mid-set on the squat rack. Someone else has a laptop open at a café table a few feet away, half-working, half-people-watching. A group is trading plans for the weekend’s event by the recovery lounge. Nobody’s in a rush to leave.
“We’re not competing for the same people,” says Emily Waybright, Public Relations Manager at Fit, addressing the arrival of a national luxury gym chain in San Diego this year. “We don’t really feel like we’re in the gym category. It’s this unique thing.”
That unique thing has a name now. Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped “athletic” from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
It’s a small wording change with a bigger idea behind it. Fit was never built around escaping the workday. It was built around the people who genuinely like what they do, and who want workouts, work, and friendships to happen in the same place instead of three separate ones. Because sometimes red light therapy with a stranger turns into weekend plans.
Fit’s philosophy traces back to its founder, who started the brand nearly two decades ago after failing to find a gym he actually wanted to belong to. He looked instead to the old-school country club, where people came for a shared interest and stayed for the community. His version was made for a younger generation, minus the golf, plus the loud music.
Which makes it a little ironic that the very award putting Fit back in the spotlight this year is Best Gym.
What does the best traditional gym look like when the definition of a gym is becoming less traditional? It’s a fair question, and Fit’s answer is that the fitness industry itself is shifting. The 45-minutes-in, 45-minutes-out model is giving way to something closer to a genuine third space, the kind of role the office and the bar used to play before remote work and changing nightlife habits rearranged how people spend their time
For Fit, community isn’t a marketing add-on to fitness. It’s the through-line. Members aren’t just paying for a treadmill; they’re paying for an entire day of social wellness that’s built on performance, recovery, connection, and a plan for the next event on the calendar. That’s a much harder membership to walk away from.
Ambition and ease aren’t opposites here, they exist side by side, where passion and play share the same morning. On September 12, Fit is hosting Sol, a full day wellness festival at Fit Social. The morning focuses on wellness classes and vendors and then the evening is a full party with multiple DJ sets and an open bar. Think of it as a kick-off to locals’ summer in San Diego.
Ready to see what a social wellness club actually looks like? Visit fitclubs.com, or follow along at @thefitclubs on Instagram.
Big feelings hit us all. Younger populations—or those who haven’t yet developed their own language of expression—outsource angst through external means. That’s where homemade haircuts, studded belts, and musicians like The Cure, Elliott Smith, or Phoebe Bridgers come around. In San Diego, though, there’s a nonprofit that gives youth a way to feel not only heard, but also understood, through photography and digital storytelling.
Outside The Lens’ mission is to amplify the voices of systemically marginalized young people and help them develop the confidence (and artistry) to tell their stories and shape their communities. OTL just celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year with dual exhibitions of student work at San Diego Central Library and Museum of Contemporary of Art San Diego. Since 2001, more than 30,000 students have completed programs at OTL, getting their hands on industry-respected DSLR cameras (no shade to iPhone photographers), editing files and images with Adobe Creative Suite, and recording podcasts. Participants explore their worlds through the lens and on the mic.
“Our biggest opportunity, and what’s really needed, is to bridge the understanding between the youth and their communities and how people are seeing what youth are going through right now,” says OTL Executive Director Sarah Beckman.
OTL’s participants, Beckman explains, are young people navigating systems that never gave them access to the tools and mentorship that inspire creative expression, financial mobility, and civic engagement. The nonprofit offers support—in the form of meals, transportation, and healing-centered educators—and a creative outlet for exploring and coping with those challenges.
OTL’s in-school programs meet California core standards for arts and partners with at least 37 schools and community sites throughout San Diego, including the Monarch School in Barrio Logan, East County Community School in El Cajon, and Creative Performing and Media Arts School in Clairemont Mesa. The nonprofit doesn’t just work within the school system. Its Media Makers program invites young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities to express their place and purpose in the world through film, photography, animation, design, and entrepreneurship.
“We’re always asking the question, and we’re engaging youth in our civic discussions [of], ‘How can we make this city somewhere youth want to be?’” Beckman says. “‘How can we make San Diego somewhere for young people to build a future?’”
This year OTL’s annual Voice Out celebration event spotlighted student work that hung on gallery walls beside “Giants,” the Dean Collection at MCASD. The Voice Out contest is open to all San Diego youth ages 8 to 25; all submissions are published in a catalogue and displayed in a public exhibition. These are some of the students’ works, and their words, from the past three years of Voice Out.
Lines and Light Within Structure
“I wonder how the architect decided to connect the beams [at Del Norte High School] by creating repetition. Without color [in the photo], the structure becomes the focus of the image.” –Monroe S., 15
The Quiet In Between
“Every day, time slips forward, whether we notice it or not, and life can feel overwhelming in its constant motion. In this long-exposure photograph, the blurred train rushes past, symbolizing the speed of life, while the still subject remains grounded and aware. It’s easy to become tangled in society’s expectations: what to wear, what grades to earn, what future to chase. In that rush, we forget to pause. The stillness in this image becomes a breath, a moment of reflection. Through it, I hope to show that wonder lives in slowing down, in watching the world blur while choosing, even briefly, to stand still.” –Leo N., 15
Enough
“Teenagers constantly wonder if they will ever be enough. I wrote words on the mirror that might represent what a teenager thinks about when it comes to being ‘enough’ for the people around them. They might wonder if they are pretty, smart, or good enough. I wanted to bring attention to what thoughts teenagers struggle with in everyday life.” –Illiana I., 16
Go Skate Day
“I took this picture during Go Skate Day in 2023 or 2024 I think … but who cares? It’s sick! Keep riding!” –Danny I., 18
Never Let Go
“This was taken at an all-women’s retreat in the mountains to heal inner trauma, at the end of the trip where we all hugged each other and healed. My mother is the one being hugged and one of her friends is embracing her. Place is somewhere you belong, somewhere you feel comfortable in, and somewhere you can be yourself. I believe womanhood and friendship is not only a place but home.” –Michelle G., 16
If magazines are like the adultier eldest daughters who know exactly how much anarchy they can get away with, zines are the far less predictable younger siblings going on whim and instinct. Those who draw on the walls around the house, DIY their own piercings, and experiment with different emo/straight-edge/back to emo phases (or not-phases). Boundaries and routines are what zines were created to rail against.
Walk into Verbatim Books’ zine corner, and this rebellion is immediately clear. Zines have no singular form, no clean category or definition. Vintage magazine scraps are collaged into new meaning alongside mini fandom zines. Single sheets of plain white printer paper are covered in nothing but black ballpoint pen. Repurposed hardback book covers are folded into something entirely new. Some are duct-taped together, others stapled. Some glossy, others matte. There are guides to anything and everything, comic panels, photography, hand-drawn cartoons, poetry, recipes, diaries, and ramblings that only make sense to the person who made them—and that’s on purpose.
Zines are creative magic. And with no rules, they’re incredibly accessible. Anyone can zine and have a voice, regardless of artistic training or work life experience.
You are your own Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Ruth Whitney.
San Diego–based zine creator Lyssette Williams specializes in mini zines—often limited to eight pages, they’re meditations in abbreviation. Outlining, thumbnailing, and revision all move quickly from idea to page. Larger projects, including Williams’ long-form graphic novel thesis, move at a slower pace. For those, she often returns to pen and ink, a choice that resists the over-editability of digital work.
Raised by a single mother and navigating mixed-race identity in a predominantly white town, she finds a home for processing it all in zines. Her work deals in identity, belonging, self-definition, and punk-rock childhood. But it isn’t always heavy; Williams creates a mini duck-themed zine called Backyard Duck Propaganda that’s hard not to love. “When I create, I think about what would have helped me find the words back then, what my younger self would’ve needed,” Williams says. “[Zines] put the tools in your hands and democratize art. They’re translations of memories and identities.”
Courtesy of Lyssette Williams
For Williams, a big reason she keeps creating is being surrounded by other creatives—a scene that extends across the border. She points to Verbatim and Comicbook Artists of San Diego, plus events like Zine Fest (October 17–18 this year at Woo in Barrio Logan) and Black Comix Day at the WorldBeat Cultural Center.
Zines have always been a road for subcultures. During the Harlem Renaissance, Black creatives like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston self-published one issue of Fire!!, which inspired other Black authors. In the 1930s, zines (then called fanzines) were hubs for sci-fi nerds to write fanfiction, address the fandom, and create new characters. Superman actually made his public debut in a fanzine called Science Fiction (he was originally cast as a villain with a fully receded hairline). A couple decades later, zines about feminism and riot grrrl became subculture de rigueur.
The internet nearly killed zines, of course. But now, people tired of the algorithm’s firehose are finding comfort and renewed inspiration in analog. Zines, a salve for digital fatigue.
Courtesy of Duophobia
A giant figure in San Diego zine culture is Burn All Books. Founded by Amanda and Nick Bernal, BAB started as a risograph (digital screen printing) studio and turned into one of those places that keeps expanding the whole scene around it, even forming its own archive group, SCANNNERS. Since opening in January 2023, it has published over 35 works and collaborated with more than 100 artists, writers, and zinesters.
For Duophobia, the pseudonym for local twin sisters Alora and Kiani Dotson (affectionately known as the “possum twins”), zines make room for experimentation and play that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Room for eclectic cartoons and dirty jokes. For sticker-covered sketchbooks.
It’s that same brand of nostalgia you might feel when, say, you walk past the carcass of an abandoned mall and see a faded cartoon mural. Their work lives somewhere between childhood and adulthood, where being unserious is taken very, very seriously.
“We’re born and raised in San Diego, and the community of artists here is a main reason we started publishing,” Kiani Dotson says. “There are people here like Trixxie Land who run open art gatherings. Show up, and you’re part of it.”
Land, a zinester herself (she made 250 single-page zines during 2020’s lockdown), is all about storytelling over hierarchy. Art shouldn’t be about gatekeeping or intimidation, she says. So she holds open-invite arts shows at Subterranean Coffee.
Courtesy of Lyssette Williams
Duophobia regularly share their work at local galleries like Subterranean, filling that lowbrow space with pieces that answer: “What would’ve made us laugh as kids?” Children are often the first to pick up their zines, unfolding them in every direction while parents briefly panic at the impulsive destruction. The twins always step in. “No, no, it’s okay,” they say, before showing how one sheet of paper folds into an entire little book. “It’s like magic.” More often than not, the kids leave with a tiny zine tucked under a tiny arm, future San Diego zinesters in the making.
When asked what a zine really is, Alora Dotson’s response was simple: “It’s anything. Literally anything. The more genuine you are, the more people are going to hear what you have to say. Your voice matters, even if it’s just a silly joke or story. People want to hear about it.”
Not a perfect definition? Exactly. Zines inherently resist categories. Want to turn a single playing card into a storybook? Do it. What about your favorite graffiti artist’s signature tag at Prince Memorial Skatepark? Turn it into a zine.
Isabella Dallas is a freelance writer for San Diego Magazine and the Arts and Culture Editor at The Daily Aztec in her final year at San Diego State University. She previously worked as an editorial intern for SDM, but when she’s not writing, you can find her trying the best coffee spots in SD, devouring the latest rom-coms, and indulging in anything and everything pop culture.
Growing up, Laika Nur, MD, Scripps Clinic sports medicine specialist, loved watching beach volleyball when the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to her hometown of Chicago. A talented volleyball player herself, she remembers sitting in the stands all day, and once, even got a couple autographs. Years later, Dr. Nur was attending a professional event focused on women’s sports, and the discussion turned to a new professional women’s volleyball league. The general manager and coaching staff for San Diego’s team, the Mojo, happened to be in attendance, and Dr. Nur took the opportunity to ask them if they needed a team doctor. Flash forward to the Mojo’s inaugural 2024 season, when Dr. Nur officially became the team physician. Click here to read more about Dr. Nur and how she incorporates lessons she learned on the court into her practice.
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