Underground art galleries serve a special niche - SFGate
In addition to warehouse live-work art venues, such as the Mission District's Million Fishes and Oakland's Lobot, people like photographer Chris McCaw, artist Chris Sollars (667 Shotwell), curator Christian L. Frock (Invisible Venue), artist Chris Fallon (Partisan Gallery) and others have opened their homes as art venues. "Here in the Bay Area, the big limitations are money and space," says Frock, who began Invisible Venue as an online project three years ago before creating a physical space for it in a West Oakland Victorian. Frock has worked extensively in both nonprofit and commercial art galleries around the Bay Area, and says Invisible Venue allows her to "show artwork without much overhead, and without the commitment of a commercial gallery." Justin Hoover moved back home to his family's house in Pacific Heights after college, and couldn't help but notice that the place was huge. "We just know so many people who are making amazing things who don't have gallery representation, or a more formal way of showing art," says Lauren Anderson, who is one-third of the collective, along with Erin McElroy and Greg Bartlett. Ventures like the Garage and Invisible Venue focus on more ephemeral, performative and emphatically non-salable work, while places like the Partisan Gallery have stuck to traditional art-on-the-wall presentation. "MO David Gallery, run out of a garage in the Mission in the late '70s, was amazing," Labat says, also mentioning Anastasia Hagerstrom's '90s project called the Living Room as a forebear of the current crop. Maintaining an art gallery in your living room requires the perfect balance between openness and secrecy. 667 Shotwell's Sollars, for instance, learned the hard way about veering too far toward the public. McCaw, a photographer, prints up flyers and posts online, but prefers not to publicly associate his name with his gallery space (which, like 667 Shotwell, is his address.) Still, it's not a secret from his landlord.
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Underground-art-galleries-serve-a-special-niche-3270638.php
