Looking back on the nearly three years the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was closed for construction, what Catharine Clark remembers most is the psychic burden on gallery owners like herself.
“I think there was this sense that there was nothing to come to San Francisco for,” she says, “given that the ‘symbol’ of contemporary art was not open, galleries were closing, and artists were leaving the city. And that was a perception outside of the city, but it was something that we also internalized.”
While the city’s largest art museum shut its doors to add 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, the San Francisco gallery scene went through a period of wild instability, shifting from one reliable Union Square hub to several disparate destinations. It suffered, as Clark points out, an identity crisis of sorts. Between 2013 and 2016, galleries throughout the city abandoned traditional structures, rebranded as project spaces, closed and (only sometimes) reopened.
The past decade has been a markedly volatile one in the Bay Area visual arts scene, with artists leaving in droves for more affordable and roomier cities. Galleries joined the exodus, moving operations into homes, online or, in one case, Bozeman, Montana. Amid skyrocketing commercial rents, an aging collector base and shifting audience priorities in the Instagram age, the three-year absence of SFMOMA gave galleries ample time to reflect on a question they’re still asking: Is it time for a new model?
In 2013, Catharine Clark Gallery occupied a prime location on Minna Street: a street-level space with a roll-up door facing SFMOMA. And while the street wouldn’t be closed during the museum’s expansion project, she knew construction would be disruptive. She also faced an imminent rent hike, so Clark began looking for a new location.
“There were already starting to be murmurs that the art world was about to collapse in San Francisco under this impossibility of renewing leases,” Clark remembers. “In most cases, it wasn’t that leases weren’t being offered, it’s just that they just weren’t being offered at prices galleries could afford.”
Eventually, Clark found a raw Potrero Hill space, the zoning of which saved her from competing with tech companies searching for office space. Now she wonders if another move is on the horizon. “When my lease is up here I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she says. After four locations and 29 years, the gallery has grown, ushering its artists from emerging to mid-career status. If she were starting out today, Clark says, she’d never be able to follow a similar path.
What this ultimately means, she says, is that younger, less established artists aren’t getting as many opportunities to show their work—price points have to be high enough to cover a gallery’s rent.
Commercial galleries of all levels are a crucial part of a healthy arts ecosystem, along with collectors who buy locally and invest in the trajectory of an artist’s career. Galleries willing to take a gamble on emerging artists provide them with the stepping stones between scrappy project spaces and museum shows. These galleries contextualize an artist’s work, provide opportunities for formal presentations and open their doors for viewing hours that extend beyond the length of a casual studio visit. And, most importantly, galleries can make artists money (usually, 50 percent of every sale).
While SFMOMA’s doors were closed, the museum vehemently resisted hibernation. Its permanent collection popped up in shows organized with fellow Bay Area institutions; the museum’s semi-biennial (the SECA Award) took place in four different locations—all of them non-art spaces. SFMOMA even staged a large-scale group show in the sleepy South Bay city of Los Gatos. All of this was part of a coordinated effort called On the Go, which maintained the museum’s momentum and public presence while demonstrating a previously unknown agility.
Amid evictions and extreme rent hikes, it’s not surprising that many San Francisco galleries followed SFMOMA’s lead.
Guerrero Gallery, faced with a new lease in 2013 that would double the rent on its Mission District location, opted instead to stage pop-up exhibitions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and even owner Andres Guerrero’s home. Running lean and getting lucky, Guerrero says, he was able to accumulate enough capital over those three years to open a new space in 2016.
Rena Bransten Gallery, evicted in 2014 after 27 years in its Geary Street building (the tech company MuleSoft, now owned by Salesforce, wanted to expand its square footage), opened a project space on Market Street, proclaiming a shift to “site-specific installations and explorations of non-traditional exhibition models.”
Now located in Minnesota Street Project, the compound of 13 galleries, artist studios and art storage founded in 2016, the gallery has returned to a more traditional model and schedule. Director Trish Bransten says they took from their experience on Market Street a greater appreciation of pushing artists to adapt to a new space and think beyond what Bransten calls “an object-driven format.”
As galleries scrambled for space, the conversations among artists centered around news of recent Ellis Act evictions, impending moves to Los Angeles and whose studio was turning into condos. Somewhat belatedly, the San Francisco Arts Commission issued a survey of Bay Area artists in 2015, finding over 70 percent of the nearly 600 respondents had been or were being displaced from their workplace, home or both. In partial response to this, in January 2019, the city identified four priority areas the newly established Arts Impact Endowment will support—just 10 percent is earmarked for individual artist support, and none for establishing either affordable artist housing or studio space.
When Gregory Lind closed his 20-year-old gallery in August of this year, the decision wasn’t about rent, but about changing demographics and behaviors in the art-viewing public—indicative, perhaps, of larger population shifts in the Bay Area. As Lind explains it, while older collectors withdrew from purchasing art and visiting galleries, younger generations seemed to lean towards impersonal, faster interactions rather than wandering through a carefully staged exhibition.
“I don’t want to generalize, because there are always exceptions,” he prefaces, “but the overall feeling was less interesting conversations, more sales online and, of course, the necessity to do even more art fairs. … I didn’t feel like I wanted another five-year lease to continue this and be disappointed that people were more interested in Instagram than coming to the gallery.”
For those who believe in primary interactions with artwork, in placement and curation—and face-to-face conversations about all of the above—it remains to be seen how an industry that requires space will continue to adapt in this unaffordable city. Without special protections from local government, or new Minnesota Street Project-style spaces emerging, rent remains an overarching concern. In June 2019, commercial real estate in San Francisco averaged a record high of over $84 per square foot.
“I’ve thought about this over the years as I’ve watched the slow decline of the art scene in the Bay Area,” says Et al. gallery co-director Aaron Harbour, who opened his first space in Chinatown in 2013. “The only monster is the rent, the price of real estate. Everything else is survivable.”