I’m exhausted. The last ten days have been a blur of art, socializing, and more art. That’s nothing new – any given week, I see plenty of art in San Francisco. But not every week is Art Week.
FOG Design+Art, the City’s premier art and design fair always kicks the community into gear post-holidays, but this year the initiative felt particularly city-wide. In 2024, SF Art Week – which locals had colloquially deemed the third week of January for the last decade – launched as an official directory for the week’s openings and events.
This year, even more arts organization got on board. I went to as many possible. Though, for every show or friend I saw, there were a dozen that I missed.
Standout was the inaugural Karl art exhibition, which opened Friday in a cavernous commercial space in Levi’s Plaza. A joint effort by seven commercial galleries and arts non-profits – COL Gallery, Creativity Explored, Glass Rice, Jonathan Carver Moore, NIAD, Root Division, and Schlomer Haus – Karl is a mini art fair in its own right. Think Felix (LA) or NADA (Miami). The opening felt like a celebration for and by a community that has worked tirelessly to support and grow itself in recent years.
Saturday night, the ICA SF hosted an SF Art Week kick-off party at its new Downtown location. It was a full house, though I didn’t see many people I knew. A lot of them looked confused. But that’s okay. You have to start somewhere.
In anticipation of the Tuesday evening open house at Minnesota Street Project, Theodore Barrow and I spent the afternoon gallery-hopping in the Dogpatch. We began our excursions at a show of Bruce Conner’s marker drawings at Hosfelt Gallery – unwittingly seeing the best show first. Or, as Ted put it, “dropping acid before watching a seven-hour movie.” Everything else we saw that night was laced with the afterimage of Conner’s obsessive mark-making, concentric mandala-like meditations and TV static. You don’t easily unsee vision like that.
Next door, there was a group response to the work of Frederic Remingtonat Catharine Clark (ceramic horse balls!) and, down the street, a duo show of sculpture and drawings by Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs at the Wattis Institute. Minnesota Street was packed, with people and art openings. Memorably, there was a museum-caliber exhibition of seminal Black photographers at Jenkins Johnson, a series of delightfully Darger-esque watercolor harpies at re.riddle, and a roomful of fauxtina artifacts from a fictional art school at Municipal Bonds.
On Wednesday night, I attended the FOG preview gala – mostly a who’s who for socialites who I don’t know. A lap through the big top confirmed the main presentation boasting strong but safe showings from galleries in the Bay and beyond. The expanded second edition of FOG FOCUS was more exciting, including presentations by locals House of Seiko, Johansson Projects, Jonathan Carver Moore, Municipal Bonds, and Rebecca Camacho Presents.
FOG is always spectacular, the necessary tentpole Art Week organizes itself around. And while it dazzles, it’s far from the most exciting thing the week has to offer. At least for those of us for whom the thrill of the sale is not the main attraction of art.
Thursday evening, running on fumes, I slid by a gathering of arts professionals at Strike Slip, a new-ish gallery on the corner of Guerrero and 14th Streets, where there’s currently a great group show curated by Josefin Lundahl. Everyone was a little frayed from a week of art and socializing. The topic du jour was why and how this year’s Art Week had been so buzzing.
There was a dual consensus. San Francisco’s scene has finally reached a tipping point. And we have to keep the energy going year-round.
I got the chance to delve deeper into these ideas on Saturday evening. Back at Karl – fittingly ending my week where it began – I moderated a panel discussion with the exhibitors, “Welcome to the San Francisco Arts Renaissance.” We talked about how we’ve gotten here and where things could go next.
“Art is easy,” said PJ Policarpio, curator at Root Division. “It’s about finding ways to support what’s already going on here.”
Art Week was nothing if not a testament to just how much is going on in the Bay Area. Gone are the days of the doom spiral – if they were ever even here. Those of us who have been around a while know that the creative community has certainly been negatively impacted by the high cost of living and the scarcity of resources in the Bay Area. But we also know that we’ve never stopped building and sustaining our community. And those efforts are becoming visible.
I remember feeling this kind of energy circa 2014, when gallery openings regularly spilled onto Sutter Street, artists living in communal houseboats staged gallery-level exhibitions, 49 Geary was the commercial pulse, and the San Francisco Art Institute was a central hub of culture and community. That was just before the second tech boom delivered its final blow and COVID-19 turned the world upside down and antisocial. Then, San Francisco was, marginally, still a city for artists. But the margins seem to be moving back into the center. It’s a great time to be in the middle of everything.