or four years, Lisa Rybovich Crallé called the number on a vacant storefront just a few blocks from her home in Vallejo. While out on daily dog walks, she sometimes slipped paper notes into the building’s mailbox, lined by yellow and maroon tiles. This May, after years of one-way phone tag, she finally got a call back.
Initially more curious about the building than intent on starting a gallery, the space’s interior quickly shifted Crallé’s intentions. Originally built as a barbershop by the current owner’s grandfather, the building has had a myriad of subsequent identities, including a cafe and a tax preparer’s office. The building’s large front room, defined by its impressive storefront window, suggested the possibility of an exhibition space. A tucked-away nook, down a long hallway, could become a small shop, where friends and local artists could sell their work, and in the back room Crallé envisioned a new home for her own art studio.
Personal Space, currently the only contemporary art space in Vallejo, opened its first show, Salad Days, on July 30. Quite by chance, it was the 20th anniversary of Crallé’s first experiment with curation. Back in an almost mythological San Francisco, the artist and a friend, Albert Herter, were given a soon-to-be-demolished grocery store in Hayes Valley for a year — rent-free.
“It was a giant space with a turquoise-and-white checkerboard tile floor and huge ceilings … we turned it into a gallery and a performance space,” Crallé remembers. While open, they hosted a number of group shows and performances, including a packed set by Johnathan Richman.
As an artist, Crallé has exhibited her work with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, UC Davis’s Manetti Shrem Museum and galleries both near and far. With this experience comes a learned awareness that the blue-chip gallery system is, in her words, “fucked and it doesn’t need to be.” Commercial galleries are notoriously vague when it comes to money, creating a culture in which it’s crass to be straight forward.
At Personal Space, artists keep 70% of sales and the gallery covers all shipping expenses for non-local artists. With more external funding, Crallé is hoping to adopt a model in which artists get 100% of sales. It’s just one of the many ways that the artist is drawing on her own experience to create a gallery that offers an alternative to hierarchical or exclusionary conventions in the art world.
‘Some of the best art in the Bay Area’
The gallery is small, with the distinctions of a living room — curved archways and a hallway that pulls the eye deep into the space’s interior. It feels smaller with the crowd that showed up to see Salad Days on its opening. Constantly pressed against others, I couldn’t help but overhear two college-aged women discussing Maria Guzmán Capron’s sculpture, Eat Me, a languorous figure leaned back to peacock a gingerly affixed fabric crotch.
“Do you think it means, like, you know,” one young woman shyly asked. The other shrugged and pointed across the room at the cartoonish spread legs of an anthropomorphic frog caught in the act of showering a second laid-out, cigarette-sucking amphibian in piss (a painting by Keith Boadwee). My eyes drifted to the side, towards Cliff Hengst’s delicate watercolor, which shrouds the words “Help Me Make it Through the Night” in an oceanic blue. All of a sudden, it was achingly sexual.
Karen May, an artist at NIAD Art Center in nearby Richmond, arrived at Personal Space early, favorably checking out her piece in the show. In it, a gingerly rendered face covers an advertisement for a Steven Shearer show on a page cut from an art magazine. The porous quality of the painting is at odds with the intensity of the figure’s stare, which communicates something between horror and omnipotence. Crallé used to work at Creativity Explored in the early 2000s and has frequently collaborated with Creative Growth and NIAD.
“Honestly,” she says, “I feel like some of the best art in the Bay Area, and maybe the world, is coming out of those centers.”
For a brief time during the opening, the party was out of water, but well stocked in natural rosé. People happily crammed into the hot cement outdoor space advised thirsty friends, “Why not just have wine?” Village Vallejo, the pop-up wine project supplying the pours, hopes to open a brick-and-mortar store soon. In fact, they put in a rental application to move in next door.
At the opening, my conversation with musicians Geoff Saba and Jennifer Williams, who together form the Oakland band Gossimer, was interrupted by the arrival of an impressive plate of shrimp. Saba told me about past visits to Vallejo, where he used to go to parties with his cousins and meet “lots of creative, artistic folk that didn’t seem like they had a public outlet.” With Personal Space, which plans to highlight Vallejo-based artists, Saba is hopeful that the gallery will amplify the voices of local artistic communities during what he characterizes as “a recent influx of out-of-town interest.”
Ambient computer music began to ink into the backyard, as Chaz Bear and Anthony Ferrero from the band Toro y Moi turned nobs by the space’s red wooden fence. Cole Pulice, in what seemed like an improvisational set, blew the saxophone alongside. I snuck back inside during the set. With the gallery emptied out, I found myself pulled towards Abel Rodriguez’s photo-realistic charcoal and conte drawing of two women, one in shades, the other staring directly at me. Their forms are outlined by the recognizable white border of a polaroid, marked decisively with the artist’s handwriting, communicating a reflexive authority in defining the composition’s narrative. Rendering a photograph by hand is tender, materially intimate — one imagines the care the artist took to represent their likeness.
The two women, Rodriguez later shared with me, are his younger sisters, and the photograph was taken in the ’90s, a time when he and the people he knew were trying to define their own identities. “After the photograph is pulled out from the Polaroid,” he says, “when you take your marker and sign it, marking that point of ‘I’m here, and this is who I am, and this is who I’m with, and this is the date.’ That point of ‘I’m here, I lived.’”
Vallejo’s ebbs and flows
Despite growing up in San Francisco, living in Oakland, and frequently visiting relatives in Martinez, I’d previously only been to the Six Flags in Vallejo and had very little knowledge of the city’s history — or for that matter, its present. Speaking with Crallé and Rodriguez, I learned that in 2008, Vallejo became the largest municipality in the country to declare bankruptcy, and subsequently has suffered quick bouts of financial recovery and collapse.
Downtown was devastated by the pandemic, Rodriguez tells me. “We saw a peak, and then a huge decline. It’s an ebb and flow that happens with these small cities, especially without funding or city support for cultural engagements,” he says.
Rodriguez felt this personally. In 2015, he opened El Comalito Collective in downtown Vallejo with his partner Edgar-Arturo Camacho-Gonzalez. Together, they turned it into a community resource with art supplies, free workshops and visiting artists. The project is currently on hiatus, a result of the pandemic and a rent increase on their building.
“Just in the 12 years I’ve lived here,” Crallé reflects, “the place has changed quite a bit.” Vallejo has always been a city where artists live: the reclusive conceptual practitioner Howard Fried has long called the city home, Re:Sound has run an experimental music and film series on Mare Island since 2015; and, most famously, Vallejo is the hometown of many extremely famous musicians, such as E-40, H.E.R. and SOB X RBE. But the pandemic saw an uptick of artists relocating from San Francisco and Oakland to the “Up Bay.”
Everyone I spoke with who’s made the move is acutely aware of the thin line between contemporary art and gentrification, of the relationship between “revitalization” and towering condos. Artists in the Bay Area, especially those who do public programming, seem to be hardened experts, experienced with counteracting the unintended effects of opening art spaces. Kim Frazar-Blantz, who recently started Winslow House Project in Vallejo, an artist residency in a storied Victorian farmhouse, is reticent to claim any definitive knowledge of the place. Instead she’s curious, but respectful and conscientious. As a long-time resident of the Bay Area, and someone who previously had a gallery in West Oakland, she seems all too familiar with the relationship between the arts and gentrification.
At the same time, it is a genuine joy to see new art spaces opening in Vallejo. Winslow House offers an incredible resource to artists, inviting them to meditate on the site-specificity of its locale and make work inspired by the physical environment. Village Vallejo has ambitious ideas for event programming and aims to create an inviting scene, where people can find temporary reprieve with a glass of wine. And Personal Space seems well positioned to become a vital artistic hub, as it dismantles false hierarchies between hyperlocal and international contemporary art.
At the opening, it was impossible not to feel the importance of the gallery. I watched neighbors run into each other, teachers and community activists meet and people from all kinds of scenes intermingle; I even met former students of Crallé’s excited to volunteer and support the burgeoning space.
Perhaps I’m biased, but I’m convinced the Bay’s particularity germinates exceptionally good artist-run spaces. There’s an impermanent quality that invites experimentation, not because of bold and prestigious ambition, but because the pressure is low and because it’s transient — both immediate and always precarious. There’s no easy path to institutionalization, wealthy people here don’t particularly support the arts, and many of the artists eschew pretension. It’s a region of perpetual salad days.
I shared this half-formed thought with Crallé. “I feel like what you are criticizing in terms of the careerist, capitalist, commercial end of things comes from a scarcity mentality,” she says, “that there is only so much money, only so much fame available for people to squabble over, and that is such a limiting perspective. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not helpful to live with as a driving force. Artist-run projects are flipping that on its head, and being like, well what if there’s plenty?”
That’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s much more interesting to ask than, “How do I take the most?”
‘Salad Days’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Sept. 10. The gallery is open Sundays 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and by appointment.