Window exhibition closes city gallery
Martin Venezky’s photography installation at 155 Grove St. is a montage of discarded items — machines, appliances, paper. Add to that pile 155 Grove St.
The gallery building, operated by the San Francisco Arts Commission, is being vacated after more than four decades. It will mark the closing with a ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 26, with the opening of Venezky’s exhibit, titled “Every Corner Vibrates Like Art.”
This simultaneous opening and closing may be a first, made possible because the gallery consists only of the picture window that faces the south flank of City Hall. It can be viewed from the sidewalk and will remain as long as it takes for a developer’s wrecking ball to find its way to 155 Grove St., which has long been condemned and vacant.
“We love it,” says the commission’s Galleries Director Meg Shiffler, in describing the opening/closing. “It’s exciting to have a final installation that
is going to remain even though we are shutting down the program.”
The Main Gallery operated by the commission has moved to the renovated War Memorial Veterans Building, and the hope is that this final exhibit of photography in the old gallery will draw eyeballs to the new gallery around the corner.
“We could have papered over the windows,” Shiffler says. “But this has been an arts space for 47 years.”
Occupying a singlestory brick shoebox that once was an auto shop called Harry’s, it was the first municipal art gallery in the city when it opened in 1970 next door to the arts commission offices.
Called Capricorn Asunder, it offered 3,000 square feet of space. Exhibitions ranged from a series of Honor Award Shows that featured the likes of Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, to a 1978 St. Patrick’s Day show that featured a 350-pound ice carving of a naked green leprechaun.
In 1981, Capricorn Asunder was renamed the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and the lettering on the facade was abridged to “S.F. Art (sic) Commission Gallery.”
Shifflin estimates that 1,500 artists have shown there and that who knows how many members of the public have walked through the free exhibits.
The building stood its ground when the commission’s office building next door burned and had to be demolished, and it did not shed one brick during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
But in 1994, 155 Grove St. was declared a seismic hazard and was closed to await its demolition in favor of a parking garage. The funds for the garage never materialized, and neither did funds to retrofit the
“We could have papered over the windows. But this has been an arts space for 47 years.” Meg Shiffler, galleries director, S.F. Arts Commission
building, torpedoed by a failed bond measure.
Since then, the twin 4-by-8-foot windows in front have amounted to the entire exhibition space under the unwieldy name S.F. Arts Commission Galleries’ Window Installation Site at 155 Grove St. Only artists are allowed inside, and only to utilize a small room behind the windows to build and stage their artwork.
The city owns the building and the overgrown lot next to it. After the fire, it became a sculpture garden called “Exploration: City Site.” In 1998, the 50-foot Burning Man wooden mannequin was raised up by ropes there, its skeleton lit in neon for a week before it was dragged up to the Black Rock Desert and torched.
“Exploration: City Site” was converted to “Please Touch Community Garden,” but it won’t last. “Eventually a new building will stand here,” says Shiffler.
When the old gallery building was first deemed unsafe, a Seismic Farewell Party was held on Aug. 26, 1994. To mark that anniversary, an Official Closing of 155 Grove St. will be held Saturday.
The master of ceremonies is performance artist Cliff Hengst, who will wear a handmade musical suit. Those in attendance will be given signs bearing titles and phrases from exhibitions at 155 Grove St. From there, they will march to the Veterans Building a block away for a performance and reception at the Main Gallery.
“We’re just shifting all of our efforts into this new space,” says Shiffler, who hopes that artists who showed at the old space will turn out to pay their respects.
Meanwhile, in goes Venezky’s effort in taking thousands of pictures of discarded things. He’s spent two weeks alone inside 155 Grove St. with the ghosts of all its previous artists. Some of his pictures are of remnants of earlier exhibits, and some are of the exposed truss ceiling. The photos overlap on four wooden easels that will be pressed up against the windows.
“None of the individual pictures matter that much,” he says. “It’s how they come together.”