Bryan Cunningham install at Red Truck Gallery
A city with more headlines about the tech industry than the art scene, San Francisco once had three spring time art fairs: Art Market (formerly, artMRKT), Art Pad and SF Fine Art Fair. Last year it narrowed down two. This year, there was only one art fair left standing: Art Market San Francisco, which ran May 15 through May 18. The closure of the other two fairs did not seem to be a bad omen for Art Market, however, which featured a diverse assortment of national galleries that offered many different flavors of contemporary, from Pop-inspired to dark to abstract. San Francisco art fairs tend to be home-grown productions, with Bay Area galleries dominating the landscape, but this year’s Art Market welcomed many exhibitors from other cities.
Tucked away in the back of the Fort Mason exhibition hall, Red Truck Gallery from New Orleans seemed to have the party booth of the fair. The teal-colored walls of their unabashedly kitschy display area were lined floor-to-ceiling with tongue-in-cheek assemblages by Bryan Cunningham and hilarious, comic book-like tapestries by Chris Roberts-Antieau. Julie Nester Gallery’s booth from Salt Lake City featured a delicate, realist portrait of a lonely woman in an icy, desolate landscape by Jennifer Nehrbass that, though small, left a strong impression with its haunting moodiness.
Chandran Gallery, a San Francisco-based organization that has only been seen at art fairs and pop-up shows and doesn’t yet have a permanent space, focused their booth on mixed-media collaborative portraits by Swoon and Monica Canilao, whose work incorporated drawings and found objects on antiquated-looking paper. Brand-new San Francisco gallery CULT showed embroidered, sculptural speakers by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, which the artist created by sewing pleather into ornate, floral-like shapes that conceal an audio system within. She currently has a similar sound installation on view at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
A breath of fresh air from previous years’ fairs (which many complained began to feel a bit stale), perhaps this new iteration of Art Market San Francisco is a good sign for the San Francisco art market after all.
Collaboration by Swoon and Monica Canilao at Chandran Gallery
Fair goers at New Image Art’s booth next to Cleon Peterson and Retna’s works
Andrew Schoultz at Mark Moore Gallery
Detail: Andrew Schoultz at Mark Moore Gallery
Brian Dettmer at Toomey Tourell
Detail: Brian Dettmer at Toomey Tourell
Brett Amory installation at Hashimoto Contemporary
Erik Jones at Hashimoto Contemporary
Alexis Anne MacKenzie and Kirk Maxson at Eleanor Harwood Gallery
Donald Edwards at Jordan Faye Contemporary
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon at CULT
Jennifer Nehrbass at Julie Nester Gallery
Julie Heffernan at Gail Severn Gallery
Lynn Aldridge at Edward Cella Art + Architecture
Mark Mulroney at Ever Gold Gallery
Sculptures by Miya Ando and painting by Kevin Earl Taylor at K. Imperial Fine Art
Randy Colosky sculpture at Chandra Cerrito Gallery
Roger Shimomura at Greg Kucera Gallery
A collaboration between curators Alix Sloan of 
Tonight, New York will welcome a new gallery into the art world with a name that should be familiar to most: Rumney Guggenheim is the great-grandson of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and the son of art dealer Sandro Rumney and Ralph Rumney, co-founder of the avante-garde organization, The Situationist International. The gallery's first show, "Some Place Like Home" follows in the footsteps of his family members in its choice of young artists known for their use of experimental materials: Olivia Steele, Boxhead, Swoon, Moral Turgeman, Olek, in collaboration with Integrated Vision's Michelle P. Dodson. Notably, all of them are women. Give the concept of "Home", their works express interpretations of domestic bliss and one's private space.
Acrobatic bodies, dismembered heads and elongated limbs stack, twist, and slide among one another to create complex human compositions. The new paintings by