I recently visited The Drawing Room gallery on Valencia Street, housed in a huge space half walled with windows and floored with slats of walnut brown wood. To the right of the entrance is a large stage and to the left, a long wall spanning maybe 70 feet(I can’t imagine the rent on this space). In the corner are crannies made from stacked white wooden boxes where sculptures, ceramics, and resident books are randomly placed and the art wraps around the corner, glowing off a short third wall are some TVs displaying art films, and finally the exhibit takes a sharp turn to a mahogany cabinet where yet more art pieces are on display, until the floor lifts up to a stage.

This is a community space. It doesn’t hide being a community space. It is humble, welcoming, and unpretentious. The work is hung salon style as to fit as much relevant work in to each themed show as possible(presumably). Each piece is nicely labelled with a paragraph explaining the artist, their work, or both. There is also a QR code. Type A organization, type B vibe.

The theme HOME seems a solid foot to start off on at the Drawing Room. It is at once a safe space to air grievances, a warm room for filling with sentiments, and a refuge for artists and their art outside of whatever the fuck walls have been erected to make us all feel like shit about ourselves and our work.

This show was interesting for me as an outsider in some regard, that regard being as perhaps, some might say, a gentrifier; some have said, in fact. I like to shudder myself under an iron umbrella of Public Servant (teacher). I get a lot of small discounts and free coffees this way. But when I talk to old timers, city born and bred types, a gentrifier is a gentrifier, and I have waltzed my way in come hell or high rent, desperate not to return to the conservative art desert from whence I came. The neighborhood I currently live in, the Fillmore, is a historically black neighborhood with a number of famous jazz clubs still in business. To the southeast is the posh Hayes Valley and its small, beautiful park complete with an installation of burning man sculptures. It used to be a place where, my long time city dwelling friends have said, I wouldn’t have been okay to walk at night. Biker bars and garages abounded where there are now French restaurants and expensive boutiques full of designer outdoor gear.

Sometimes I think with envy about how people describe New York in the 70s: dirty, gritty, ugly, and unforgivingly cold between February to April when the snow melted and grew slick, hard and was spotted with trash and pee. Artists made beautiful art as a respite from it all. I can’t imagine needing to fill that need for the city, and I can’t imagine rent so cheap that I could do it with a group of friends, and with rent within double digit number. That sort of thing is so out of reach now. What does that leave us with?

In a community space, art has to be good enough to pay the rent. But it has to be authentic enough to be allowed in(read:serious). It should be made with enough skill to validate its space on the wall, but enough ease to suggest some serious studio time spent on a rickety old stool with five sweaters on. It has to be made with care, or devil-may-care, and when you have that many people playing jazz in the same room it just becomes noise. You need at least one solid lead to maintain the thread. One strong personality. that seems like it was what carried the little guys through back in the day; people rallied around Andy Warhol, basquiat, Keith haring, and nan goldin, and the community was balanced by familial love and star struck fandom that created the vibe of a star and its entourage. the MO now is uncentering leadership, but isn’t there subconsciously always someone in charge? what happens when we dismantle that…star power is like a kind of currency in that way.

Not to say that there’s not a glut of galleries with solid work. In the tenderloin, there are about 10 galleries with stellar shows every month. Also in the Tenderloin, it feels a lot like gritty New York in 1971.

Democratic art spaces are governed by grants, and those grants are governed by what sometimes feels groveling. Calling attention to all that is wrong with late stage capitalism and the exploitation that necessitates it is important, of course, but artists are put in a position of exploiting themselves constantly in the grant world, and then identities get irreversibly tangled with plight, and that is NOT good.

It would be nice to see a lot of work made just because. Work about free will, work that is having a conversation about music, work that is about an obsessive period of drawing dolphins. Work that is just what it is, and isn’t TRYING so hard to be ABOUT SOMETHING IMPORTANT. Is that okay to say? I already know that it isn’t.

Anyway, back to the art. I actually was pleasantly surprised by how many artists showed about two decades of serious study with a healthy dose of childish intuition(surprised because the art community I recently came from was disappointing in this regard) . Ambitious, painstaking meaning making was present in many works, but a lot had a confidence all their own. The Bay Area offers some artists who have self confidence. They have a sense of belonging in the cacophony of talent, passion, and intelligence of the artists community here. Also pertaining to the theme, this show didn’t particularly make me feel occluded, while it did tackle the idea of gentrification. I thought it contained work that made for a far ranging conversation, that the viewpoints expressed were nuanced and sentimental and sincere. From odes to home, to calls for peace in the outer reaches of the global south, the work was political in the most personal sense. My one complaint? There was just too much of it. The exhibit may have been impactful if it had been curated more selectively…but I get the sense that’s not what this gallery is all about.

Community space, or alienating high art? Is this the dichotomy? Mmmmm, I would say that the identity of the Bay Area is too resilient for that. Too firmly rooted. Too historically scarred and predetermined by layers of seedy history from pirates to politics.

However, I have this residual thought… Can community art spaces reach beyond politics? Is there space there for inflatables, big epoxy dolphins, quilts of tarot cards? I will have to keep checking back to see. If not though, it’s still a cool place.

I inspected each piece as long as my attention allowed in a show with perhaps 250 pieces, give or take 50. It was sort of like a mini De Young Open. Here were some of my favorites:

1.Glenn Caley Bachman

the western subtraction

diorama/assemblage

10″x7″x13″

2.Amy Ahlstrom

Wig Palace

silk and cotton quilt

15″x30″

3. Phoebe deutsch

Our Home, Earth

mixed media

20″x20″

4. Luis Garcia

Broken Down

Acrylic, canvas

14×14

2021

5. mike ritch

inside/out

gouache and watercolor on paper

2021

6.Christian Rothenhagen a.k.a. deerBLN

SF-SVN 2

Drawing, Marker and Pencil on Packing Paper, mounted on MDF panel

12″x18″

6. Paul Colcord

Portola during quarantine

oil on paper

10″x23.5″

2020

7.Phillipe Ferrari

Urban regression

29″x29″

2023

8.Jenny Wantuch

underpass (south San Francisco)

oil on panel

24″x30″

2022

9.Jung Sun Lee

Angel Island

Mixed Media on Paper

24″x20″

2023

10. Siana Smith

Home

Oil on Canvas

18″x24″ 2023