San Francisco’s Independent Spirit
November 2006
Glancing through the contemporary art that fills collector Robin Wright’s cozy Pacific Heights home, a visitor might lose all sense of being in San Francisco. “The common thread is me,” Wright says of a collection that omits the usual Bay Area suspects (painters Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Tchakalian and photographer Richard Misrach). A small Mark di Suvero steel sculpture eventually obtrudes itself, but the cool, conceptual work that Wright favors almost makes the di Suvero’s gnarly introversion look like a squirm of discomfort.
Wright moved to San Francisco 22 years ago from her native Seattle, where she watched her parents form one of that city’s finest private collections. She knows one of her adopted city’s
cultural secrets: A strain of recent conceptual art runs as strong and deep here today as did the mildly expressionist regional painting style that won the name Bay Area Figuration in the 1950s and ’60s.
“I know [out-of-town] collectors go around to the mainstream galleries,” Wright says, thinking of downtown mainstays such as the John Berggruen, Stephen Wirtz, Paule Anglim, Haines and Hackett-Freedman galleries. Wirtz, Haines and two of the West Coast’s foremost photography galleries, Fraenkel and Robert Koch, share an address with half-a-dozen other showplaces at 49 Geary Street.
But Wright also would recommend that visiting collectors “would enjoy getting on a route South of Market,” meaning Market Street, which bisects downtown. “It’s another San Francisco for people interested in art. There you have the experience of seeing new artists for the first time, which is kind of fun. The fact that they aren’t totally evolved or totally figured out is kind of interesting.”
She mentions a string of art venues on the south side—generally considered the hip side—of town: LINCART, Ratio 3, Triple Base and Queen’s Nails Annex, as well as established alternative spaces such as New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure and The Lab. Most of these places persist or began life as part of a San Francisco phenomenon that goes back at least half a century—the artist-run gallery.
Wright moved to San Francisco 22 years ago from her native Seattle, where she watched her parents form one of that city’s finest private collections. She knows one of her adopted city’s
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Interior of LINCART. |
“I know [out-of-town] collectors go around to the mainstream galleries,” Wright says, thinking of downtown mainstays such as the John Berggruen, Stephen Wirtz, Paule Anglim, Haines and Hackett-Freedman galleries. Wirtz, Haines and two of the West Coast’s foremost photography galleries, Fraenkel and Robert Koch, share an address with half-a-dozen other showplaces at 49 Geary Street.
But Wright also would recommend that visiting collectors “would enjoy getting on a route South of Market,” meaning Market Street, which bisects downtown. “It’s another San Francisco for people interested in art. There you have the experience of seeing new artists for the first time, which is kind of fun. The fact that they aren’t totally evolved or totally figured out is kind of interesting.”
She mentions a string of art venues on the south side—generally considered the hip side—of town: LINCART, Ratio 3, Triple Base and Queen’s Nails Annex, as well as established alternative spaces such as New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure and The Lab. Most of these places persist or began life as part of a San Francisco phenomenon that goes back at least half a century—the artist-run gallery.
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