Gallery sights in San Francisco
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77 Geary
The most intriguing art usually appears in what looks like the wrong place, and 77 Geary’s unmarked entryway is no exception. Get seduced on the mezzanine by the minimalism of Patricia Sweetow Gallery (www.patriciasweetowgallery.com) and shaken up on the 2nd floor by the political art of Togonon Gallery (www.togonongallery.com). For beauty with brains, see Marx & Zavattero (www.marxzav.com) next door for David Hevel’s neo-baroque, middle-America-meets-Hollywood taxidermy sculptures and Paul Mullins’ tragic-comic exploration of rural contentment. Sensitive meets sensational at Rena Bransten Gallery (www.renabranstengallery.com), featuring shows such as Hung Liu’s mir…
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Clarion Alley
Trial by fire is nothing compared to Clarion Alley’s street-art test: unless a piece is truly inspired, it’s going to get peed on or painted over. Very few pieces survive for years – Andrew Schoultz’s mural of gentrifying elephants displacing scraggly birds, a silhouette of kung-fu-fighting female anarchists that makes Charlie’s Angels look like chumps, and a trompe l’oeil escalator. Incontinent art critics seem to have taken over the east end of the alley – pee-eew! – so the less aromatic, more intricate murals are on the west.
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49 Geary
Pity collectors silently nibbling endive in austere Chelsea galleries – at 49 Geary, openings mean unexpected art, goldfish-shaped crackers and outspoken crowds. Four floors of galleries feature standout international and local works including eclectic, eye-popping photography ranging from the 19th to 21st centuries at Fraenkel Gallery to sculptor Seth Koen’s crocheted minimalist pieces at Gregory Lind. Beat the crowds on weekdays for quieter contemplation.
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Chinese Culture Center
You can see all the way to China on the 3rd floor of the Hilton inside this cultural center, which hosts exhibits of traditional Chinese arts and such breakthrough contemporary shows as the Present Tense Biennial. For this show, held in odd-numbered years, 30-plus artists from across the Bay Area give their personal takes on Chinese culture, from Cui Fei’s Chinese calligraphy that’s painstakingly sculpted from bent twigs to Thomas Chang’s monumental photographs of a miniaturized Great Wall at a Florida theme park. Kid-friendly, docent-led Chinese Heritage Walks guide visitors through the living history and mythology of Chinatown in two hours; tours are available by reserv…
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Luggage Store Gallery
A dandelion pushing through cracks in the sidewalk, this plucky nonprofit gallery has brought signs of life to one of the toughest blocks in the Tenderloin for more than 20 years. The art that sprawls out across the spacious 2nd-floor gallery rises above the street without losing sight of it – this space was the launching pad for renowned graffiti satirists. Two Luggage Store regulars you might recognize around town are Rigo, who did the ‘One Tree’ mural that looks like a one-way sign by the 101 Fwy on-ramp in SoMa, and Brazilian duo Ogemeos, who did the mural of a defiant kid holding a lit firecracker atop the gallery building. With such oddly touching works, poetry nigh…
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Crown Point Press
Bet you didn’t think anyone could capture Chuck Close’s giant portraits, Wayne Thiebaud’s Pop Art pastries, or Australian Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi’s dreamings on paper. Yet here they are: color woodcut portraits produced by carving and printing 51 separate blocks of wood; cream-pie tinged pale-blue within glass pastry cases, captured in a color gravure; and salt tracings of Mina Mina in mesmerizing sugar-lift etchings. Such are the mysterious powers of Crown Point Press printmakers, who work with artists to turn singular visions into large-scale paper multiples.
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Ratio 3
Art-fair buzz begins in San Francisco exactly where it should, down a back alley with a dog barking bloody murder as you wait anxiously to be buzzed into an unfinished loft space with raw wood floors and pristine white walls. Artists here are regularly covered in Artforum and wind up at Miami Basel, and a recent show featured graduates of the Mission School moving into abstraction: a geometric panel assemblage by graffiti auteur Barry McGee looked like a super-flat Frank Stella, and Jose Alvarez’ square of blue feathers mounted on black mica was a dazzling Aztec Rothko.
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Diego Rivera Gallery
No, you’re not seeing double: Diego Rivera’s 1931 The Making of a Fresco Showing a Building of a City is a trompe l’oeil fresco within a fresco, showing the artist himself as he pauses to admire his work, as well as the work in progress that is San Francisco. The fresco takes up an entire wall in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, on your left through the entryway courtyard. For a memorable 3-D San Francisco vista, head down the corridor to the terrace cafe for espresso and panoramic bay views.
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Lisa Dent Gallery
The smart old money is on Lisa Dent Gallery, purveyor of cosmopolitan sophistication and meticulous attention to craft. Dent is a bona fide curatorial star, who ditched the Whitney and the New Museum to return to her hometown, and take risks on international and local talent. Look here for major intrigue in minor details: Marcia Kure's spindly figures painted with kola-nut pigment, Jason Middlebrook's mirror-mosaic car parts, Jeong Im-yi's fastidious trompe l'oeil recreations of her studio walls.
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New Langton Arts
Strange is the norm at New Langton, where artists have done odd and occasionally unprintable things since 1975. This nonprofit is where Tony Labat stepped into the boxing ring with his critics and Harrell Fletcher distributed newspapers by teen reporters he’d commissioned to collect good news from their neighbors. Don’t miss the Musée d’Honneur Minuscule, a window box in the entryway featuring small, ambitious works, such as Jill Sylvia’s tiny cityscape made from accountants’ ledger paper.
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Ampersand International Arts
Curator Bruno Mauro really takes his work home with him: since 1999, his live/work Dogpatch loft studio has doubled as an installation space for Bay Area and international galleries (there’s a sister space in Paris). Recent shows have featured Ellen Babcock’s mysterious melting glacier caves made of salvaged Styrofoam, and Andrew Vogt’s wall-mounted found-wood sculptures that look like old-fashioned contraptions and are carefully crafted to appear as though they’re falling apart.
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Eleanor Harwood Gallery
Hidden on a residential Mission side street is this treasure-box showcase for Bay Area talents, from emerging sensations like James Chronister’s oil portraits painted dot by dot, tattoo-style with a tiny brush, to breakthrough stars like US Venice Biennale artist Emily Prince, whose daily drawings form poignantly personal catalogs: all the hats in her house, say, or all the US soldiers killed in Iraq.
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Electric Works
In the gallery/printmaking studio that calls itself ‘The Land of Yes, ’ anything is possible – including Marcel Dzama’s gangs of vampire toddlers and Sandow Birk’s modern take on Dante’s Inferno, starring traffic-jammed LA as hell and San Francisco as a foggy purgatory. Also, it’s an affordable alternative to museum stores, and sales from some print editions benefit nonprofits.
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Gallery Paule Anglim
Here you’ll find marquee names like Tony Oursler, whose video projections of distorted faces grumble and squeak in the corner. But works by local upstarts threaten to steal the show, including Ala Ebtekar’s paintings of soldiers and storm clouds gathering on ancient Iranian prayer scriptures, and Bull Miletic’s video views of San Francisco from the perspective of a flitting butterfly.
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SF Arts Commission Gallery
Get in on the next art movement at this lobby-level public gallery featuring international perspectives and local talents. You never know what you might find. As well as hanging shows and hosting receptions in its gallery, the commission also sponsors wide-ranging works, such as a recent sound sculpture in the rotunda of City Hall. Very cool. Drop by to hear what’s doing now.
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Creativity Explored
Brave new worlds are captured in celebrated artworks that have appeared in museum retrospectives, major collections, even on Marc Jacobs clutches – all by local developmentally disabled artists. Intriguing themed shows reveal fresh perspectives on themes ranging from jazz to alien life forms, and openings are joyous celebrations with the artists and their families.
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Xanadu Gallery: Folk Art International
Shrink the Guggenheim and plop it inside a brick box with a sunken Romanesque archway, and there you have Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1949 Circle Gallery Building, which since 1979 has been the home of Xanadu Gallery. The nautilus shell ramp in the atrium leads you on a world tour of high-end folk art, from Fijian war clubs to mounted nose ornaments from the Andes.
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Hosfelt Gallery
Trancelike states are often induced by Hosfelt, where visitors step from gritty SoMa sidewalks into dreamy, meticulously detailed interior worlds. Close inspection of Russell Crotty’s giant orbs reveals nocturnal landscapes painstakingly sketched with a Bic pen, and Marco Maggi’s minutely carved stacks of office paper make paperwork seem sublime.
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The Lab
Escape from the drab certainties of laundry and airport hassles to the wild what-ifs of the Lab. Since 1984 this experimental art space has offered outrageous flights of fancy: Corey Hitchcock's attempt to engineer desire with a machine and fashion shows where one-off designs are sold right off the models' backs.
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Anthony Meier Fine Arts
The toast of international art fairs, Anthony Meier specializes in abstract thinking from major museum artists and emerging talents, from Richard Tuttle’s shape-shifting abstract assemblages to lacy, ethereal collages made of transparent office tape by San Francisco’s own Rosana Castrillo Diaz.
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California College of the Arts
A generous endowment and big-name curators allow the Wattis Institute to take on ambitious, sweeping shows like ‘Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions, ’ which runs through 2012 in a high-concept road trip from Alabama to Wyoming.
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Asian Art Museum
Imaginations race from ancient Persian miniatures to cutting-edge Japanese fashion at the Asian Art Museum.
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Jack Hanley
SF skate-graffiti art became an international hit through such galleries as Jack Hanley.
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Catharine Clark Gallery
catch art while it's hot and controversial at the Catharine Clark Gallery.
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Galería de la Raza
Latino artists take on politics and pop culture at Galería de la Raza.
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