After Downturns and Disruptions, San Francisco’s Art Scene Is Thriving
Exterior view of FOG Design + Art, 2023. Photo by Nikki Ritcher. Courtesy of FOG Design + Art
After an uneven few years for the city, San Francisco’s art scene is experiencing something of a renaissance. The cost of living skyrocketed during the first and second tech booms in the 1980s and the 2000s, making the city feel inhospitable to many working artists. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city is revitalizing its legacy as a cultural hub.
“San Francisco is one of the most culturally enriched cities in the world,” said Sarah Wendell Sherrill, former president of Berggruen Gallery and co-founder of Lobus, a technology platform for art ownership. “This area has produced some of the most important, iconic cultures throughout much of the 20th century, from the Beat Generation to Pixar.”
It’s a legacy that local artists, thinkers, and activists have created while weathering its many economic ups and downs.
“San Francisco is such an interesting city in terms of its art scene because it’s a boom and bust town,” said Steffan Schlarb, co-founder, with his husband Brandon Romer, of Schlomer Haus Gallery, in the city’s Castro neighborhood. “It can also be difficult during those boom times for artists to live and work here.”
Mask Miki ,“New Mythologies” at CULT Aimee Friberg, 2021. Courtesy of the CULT Aimee Friberg.
Recent economic downturns in San Francisco may have garnered bad national press, but those narratives simply represent “a lack of understanding,” according to Aimee Friberg, founder and director of CULT Aimee Friberg, an Oakland- and San Francisco–based gallery that opened in 2013. “If you don’t understand something you dismiss it,” she said.
“The pandemic was devastating to the city,” Schlarb admitted. “But when artists are able to afford to live here, it’s a flourishing time and it seems like that was happening again with this latest [downturn]. The local art scene is burgeoning.”
That’s also thanks to a familial network of galleries and artists who have worked hard to continue calling the Bay Area home, as well as newcomers making a place for themselves. Still, recent blows within the community, like the closure of the venerable San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), shortly after its 150th anniversary, have worried some locals.
“There was a risk that we would lose some of the energy that makes us enjoy being here,” said Aaron Harbour, co-founder, with his wife Jackie Im, of San Francisco gallery Et al., also celebrating its 10th anniversary. “But there are a lot of new galleries that have recently opened in the Bay Area that have kept us excited about being here.”
Adana Tillman, installation view of “I am Everyday People” at Jonathan Carver Moore, 2023. Courtesy of Jonathan Carver Moore.
Some recent wins for San Francisco have also come at the institutional level. In 2020, the de Young Museum established The de Young Open, a triennial exhibition inviting artists living in any of the nine Bay Area counties to submit work to a salon-style presentation. In 2023, the show featured 883 artists chosen from 7,766 submissions. Also last year, both the de Young Museum and the Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) staged exhibitions focusing on the work of local artists. MCD’s show examined how artists maintain a place for themselves in the Bay Area, while the de Young’s celebrated its acquisition of over 40 works by 30 local artists. Also, 2022 saw the opening of the 11,000-square-foot Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco.
Jonathan Carver Moore, whose gallery opened in San Francisco’s Transgender District in 2023, said that while “the local art scene is thriving, it can be hard for those who aren’t local to recognize what’s happening in the Bay Area. I want to show artists who are marginalized or underrepresented and I feel like San Francisco’s arts community itself is often regarded that way.”
Exterior view of Schlomer Haus Gallery. Courtesy of Schlomer Haus Gallery.
But the local scene is also getting some long-overdue attention.
Each year during San Francisco’s Art Week—the third week in January—the community comes together around FOG Design+Art, the city’s premier art fair. The fair’s 10th edition runs from January 17th through 21st at Fort Mason Center, featuring 46 fine art and design galleries, about a third of which are international.
This year, the fair is celebrating the local community in return with a brand-new initiative, FOG FOCUS. It will take place in the former SFAI campus next to the main FOG pavilion, and will offer a presentation of nine additional galleries, most of which are emerging. Five of the participants are local to the Bay Area, including CULT, Et al., Jonathan Carver Moore, and Schlomer Haus, as well as Oakland-based Johansson Projects. True to the title, each gallery in FOG FOCUS will present the work of just one or two emerging or underrepresented artists.
“Because FOCUS is artist-centric, we are really hoping that it acts as a platform for discovery,” said Wendell Sherrill, who serves on FOG’s Steering Committee.
This can be an opportunity for visitors who might otherwise feel excluded from the art world, as well as for young collectors, who can become invested emotionally or financially in a welcoming artistic environment.
Interior view of FOG Design + Art, 2023. Photo by Nikki Ritcher. Courtesy of FOG Design + Art
“So much of the contemporary art world is international now and you don’t necessarily have to be in a specific location to acquire work,” added Schlarb, for whom FOG FOCUS will be his and Romer’s first time presenting at an art fair. “What gets lost is the fact that artists are products of their communities and their work reflects the communities they come from. Highlighting emerging artists within local scenes is a way of making that connection again.”
Schlomer Haus will present photographs by Chloe Sherman, a version of one of the gallery’s earliest exhibitions. The work documents San Francisco’s queer community in the 1990s, when Sherman was herself a student at SFAI. It’s a vibrant portrait of an artistic community and, if the past is prologue, perhaps offers a glimpse into what the scene in the Bay Area might look like again before long.
CULT is offering paintings and sculptures by Masako Miki, a Berkeley-based artist who uses shapeshifter characters from indigenous folklore to explore how mythology might apply in the modern context.
The idea of creating new narratives is “an optimistic way of facing the world” that Friberg hopes FOCUS, on the whole, can reflect. It’s also an opportunity to create a new narrative for San Francisco’s art world. “This is just a touch of the gallery scene in the Bay Area that people may not be familiar with,” added Carver Moore.
