San Francisco has long been shaped by those who have been drawn by its promises, from the Gold Rush to the tech boom. The city’s cycles of boom and bust have required its art galleries to embody a particular spirit of tenacity and collaboration. Since the emergence in the 1950s and ’60s of idiosyncratic, visionary, and financially scrappy art spaces such as Dilexi, Six, and Batman galleries, the Bay Area has forged its own path for contemporary art, supporting the many kinds of artists who thrive here while connecting the city to other centers of dialogue around the world.
Slice of the Pie brings together fourteen of the Bay Area’s most dynamic commercial galleries, from those with more than sixty years of history to others founded in recent years. Spanning painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, and video, these works reveal a shared commitment to experimentation and expression across strikingly divergent approaches. Together, they illuminate the range, resilience, and ongoing evolution of the Bay Area’s art ecosystem. We take a closer look at each gallery and some of the artists they feature.
CROWN POINT PRESS (Founded 1962) started as a print workshop, and in 1965 began a publishing program with etching portfolios by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Since then they’ve worked with more than 120 artists, including key Minimalists and members of the Conceptual Art movement.
Rupy C. Tut creates densely colorful figurative works influenced by her training in traditional Indian painting techniques, reflecting contemporary issues of feminism, identity, and the environment. A print from her 2024 series with the press explores the relationship “between the human form and the environment around her and how both influence, inform, and identify with one another,” Tut has noted.
BERGGRUEN GALLERY (Founded 1970) has been a cornerstone of the West Coast art scene for over five decades. The gallery has played a significant role in introducing New York and international artists to West Coast collectors, and has long been an advocate for California artists, including Barry McGee.
McGee’s drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations address the struggles of contemporary urban life. A prominent member of the Mission School, McGee is part of a group of artists that emerged from San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1990s, known for a handmade aesthetic that contrasted with the dot-com gentrification of the time.
FRAENKEL GALLERY (Founded 1979) has presented almost 400 exhibitions exploring photography and its relation to other media, exhibiting and publishing significant works of art in a variety of media spanning two centuries. The gallery represents the work of important 20th and 21st century photographers and their estates, as well as multidisciplinary artists.
Wardell Milan often imagines spaces where the marginalized body moves freely, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. In this multimedia work, he builds figures with fragments cut from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book and other sources, layering them over his own photograph of a tropical scene.
ANTHONY MEIER (Founded 1984) specializes in post-World War II contemporary masters, and exhibits emerging, mid-career, and established artists. First serving as a private dealer in the secondary market, in 1996 Anthony Meier opened a public gallery space in San Francisco, and in 2023, the gallery opened a new location in Mill Valley.
Erica Deeman’s work explores the intersections of race, gender, and the hybridity of Black identity. Picturing women of the African diaspora, her Silhouette series employs a portrait technique that references the 18th-century pseudoscience of physiognomy, creating a complicated expression of identity that suggests her subjects’ power and strength of character.
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY (Founded 1991) serves as the primary representative for an acclaimed roster of international artists. In 2016, the gallery founded BOXBLUR, with the mission to produce and support performance and ephemeral projects in response to visual artists’ work. Each of the gallery’s exhibitions incorporate time-based media or video work.
Marie Watt’s interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, and Iroquois proto-feminism. In Telegraph (Kin), she incorporates tin jingles, which were historically created from the rolled tops of tobacco cans. Grounded in Indigenous histories, the cones “acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance, which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe during the 1918 influenza pandemic,” she has noted.
HOSFELT GALLERY Founded in 1996 by Todd Hosfelt, Hosfelt Gallery’s program ranges from the scholarly examination of Bay Area post-war artists to the introduction of exceptional contemporary artists from around the world.
An early practitioner of found-object assemblage, Bruce Conner often scavenged his materials, incorporating detritus left in the wake of the redevelopment of San Francisco’s Western Addition into artworks that questioned the values of mid-century America. Despite the recognition he received for his assemblages, Conner refused to be constrained to a single approach, working over the course of his life in filmmaking, photography, collage, drawing, printmaking, performance, and conceptual projects.
JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY (Founded 1996) With locations in San Francisco and Brooklyn, Jenkins Johnson Gallery represents international contemporary artists working across disciplines, including established, mid-career, and emerging artists. The Black-owned gallery works to expand the art canon to include overlooked and under-represented artists of the African Diaspora.
Dewey Crumpler is a Bay Area artist who merges traditional painting techniques with video, mixed media, and sculpture. His work examines themes of race, capitalism, and the history of oppression. For more than three decades, Crumpler has explored the energetic power of the tulip, inspired by the singularity and resilience of the flower.
GALLERY WENDI NORRIS (Founded 2002) champions visionary artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, representing artists whose nomadic, intuitive, and intellectually rigorous practices interrogate the aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical movements of their time.
Exhibiting with the gallery since 2011, Julio César Morales employs a range of visual strategies to explore issues of migration, underground economies, and labor, on personal and global scales. In Morales’s video, vibrantly colorful geometric shapes give way to an ephemeral x-ray image of a boy in a suitcase, referencing the true story of a boy from Ivory Coast who was caught being smuggled inside a suitcase into Spain.
JESSICA SILVERMAN (Founded 2008) An international art gallery known for building artists’ careers, collaborating with collectors, and partnering with museums on innovative exhibitions, Jessica Silverman represents emerging, mid-career, and established artists.
Clare Rojas is a magic realist artist whose visual language is rooted in Peruvian folklore and Californian ecofeminism. Inspired by wildlife, climate, and literature, she moves freely between dense figurative scenes and minimal, abstract compositions infused with animistic themes. Revealing a deep engagement with the mythology of her Peruvian ancestry, her enchanted tableaux often feature birds, witches, and the forces of nature.
CASEMORE GALLERY was founded in San Francisco in 2015 with a specific interest in promoting contemporary photography and elevating the visibility of historically under-recognized work from Bay Area artists and other domestic and international artists. Originally founded with a program emphasizing contemporary photography, Casemore Gallery has expanded to include representation of artists working in all media.
Larry Sultan’s work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological and physical landscape of suburban family life. In his series Swimmers, Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Saturated with color and framed by chance abstractions, the images create an uncertain feeling of sensory immersion.
EUQINOM GALLERY (Founded 2015) specializes in representing emerging and mid-career artists, with a particular emphasis on women. Dedicated to showcasing multidisciplinary works that push the boundaries of art history and photo-based practices, the gallery promotes artists working across mediums including contemporary photography, painting, sculpture, and media-based art.
Known for her innovative use of light-sensitive materials, Klea McKenna takes a hybrid approach to image making. In her series Rainbow Bruise, McKenna creates embossed silver gelatin photograms, which she then develops and paints. Using shapes derived from everyday materials including consumer packaging, the series draws from a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms.
MICKI MENG (Founded 2018) Growing out of a non-profit publication, Micki Meng began Friends Indeed in an experimental vitrine, before moving to a much larger warehouse. Other spaces have included a guerrilla apartment gallery in New York, and a location in Paris. In 2021, Friends Indeed became Micki Meng.
Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft’s Voynich Botanical Studies are based on illustrations from a mysterious manuscript, written in an unknown language and depicting unidentifiable plant species. Using imaging software, they construct three-dimensional visualizations of the plants, from which they create negatives to print in the darkroom, transforming the original into an odd and fantastic artifact.
REBECCA CAMACHO PRESENTS (Founded 2019) Rooted in Rebecca Camacho’s decades of experience working with emerging artists, Rebecca Camacho Presents nurtures the development of rising artistic practices of regional, national, and international artists. Headquartered in Lower Nob Hill for five years, the gallery doubled its footprint in Fall 2024 and expanded into the historic Eclipse Champagne Building in elegant Jackson Square.
Sahar Khoury’s off-kilter works are layered with social, political and cultural signifiers. Her piece is part of a series of mixed media sculptural crowns. Worn by monarchs, crowns symbolize power throughout the world, asserting the privileged position of the wearer. Khoury’s crowns, intentionally stripped of their functionality, instead prompt questions about the symbols that delineate authority.
JONATHAN CARVER MOORE (Founded 2023) specializes in emerging and established artists who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and women. As the only openly gay Black male owned gallery in San Francisco, Jonathan Carver Moore is committed to amplifying the voices of often underrepresented artists through a Black queer lens.
Featured in the gallery’s 2023 exhibition Black as an Experience, Not as a Color, self-taught artist Glenn Hardy Jr. focuses on the positives of everyday Black life and culture, often depicting moments of comfort and enjoyment. His painting of a busy barbershop captures a vibrant social space that serves as a place of congregation and respite.
