Can Oakland art galleries achieve both critical and financial success?

The art scene along Telegraph Ave is exciting but ever changing. Sometimes it seems like a new gallery is born monthly and every first Friday large crowds from Oakland's Art Murmur descend on the intersection of 23rd St and Telegraph Ave. swarming around Johannson Projects and the surrounding spaces. But for all the buzz this area has received, financial rewards have never quite matched the high quality art.

Now the unwieldy, almost labyrinthine space at 480 23rd St., which has seen several art incarnations in the last few years, is reopening with two new galleries hoping to make much more lasting creative and economic impressions.

The new kids on the block are Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (a commercial space specializing in emerging and mid–career minimalist and conceptual art) and Krowswork (photography and video art). The first is a reopening of a popular gallery that moved from around the corner while the latter fills a longstanding need for spaces that showcase video. And with the recent eviction of Front Gallery, it also becomes the sole gallery to feature photography prominently.

According to Jasmine Moorhead, owner of Krowswork, their next show opens in February and "will be about language and its integration into photography and video.” For future shows Ms. Moorhead is in talks to host live events with a number of well known video artists, an intriguing exhibit of photo portraits of Oakland rappers and perhaps even a show from family friend and world-renowned photographer William Eggleston. 

February also serves as Chandra Cerrito Contemporary’s official opening, following a short hiatus after their “soft opening” this last December. Ms. Cerrito says her next show will feature works from prolific sculptor and installation artist Sheila Ghidini – based in San Francisco – and fellow multidisciplinary artist Mari Andrews who also works as a sculptor and installation artist. 

Both galleries have strong, distinct visions that were quickly apparent from their showings at December’s Art Murmur. Chandra Cerrito maintains its acute focus on minimal and otherwise conceptual work while aiming for the sort of commercialism that serves the art on display. She tells of a pronounced tendency towards “minimal or post minimal” and of a yearning to do shows that are more experimental and perhaps less commercial, like her current show of work made by artists and engineers from San Mateo's Maker Faire, that would easily be at home at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum.

“I think having two galleries sharing this property will make having shows here more manageable. In the past it was too cavernous and a mess to curate for” says Cerrito, who also has several years experience as an art consultant in the Bay Area. The connections she has made in that role have also aided her efforts as a gallerist, like meeting The Maker Show’s curator Ginny Robinson who is a fellow art consultant for civic and corporate clients.

Due to the upcoming departure of Mercury 20 from a space the two galleries had shared on Grand Ave. for the last two years, Chandra Cerrito moved into the front room of it's new building on 23rd next to critical darling Hatch Gallery. At a loss for a tenant to fill its large back section, landlord Haig Mardikian made an unusual move for a commercial property owner and suggested an interested potential gallerist: Ms. Moorhead. As she expands, “…he and I had been in contact over a year before when it had come available then. Then when I knew it was empty again after Fort, (gallery recently closed) I had enquired about it also. He passed my number on to Chandra. I still have the voice message saved on my phone!”

Accessible via a somewhat awkward side entrance, Krowswork takes up the back three rooms of what had at various times served as gallery space, offices and a lounge area. Ms. Moorhead says she wants the space “to be a very experiential environment. I don’t want this space to fit too rigidly into any category.”

The daughter of a photographer steeped in love for images, Moorhead has pursued a career in art as an editor and worked for the New York Museum of Modern Art and now with Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. Her wealth of experience as a curator shows in smart decisions like utilizing one room for installations, another for rotating shows of photography and installations, a third filled with 100 year old church pews-reclaimed from the First Church of Christian Scientists-dedicated to showing video work and a fourth room featuring expanded space for rotating shows and a small office.

And while both galleries are promising, smart decisions will be necessary across the board in order to be successful. But while galleries felt the economic slump last year, 2008 was a banner year for local galleries, with Johannson Projects scoring sales numbers usually unseen in the Oakland art world.

In recent years, Kimberly Johansson’s eponymously named space, along with Svea Lin Soll’s Swarm Gallery have established a presence at satellite art fairs near the most prominent of American art fairs, Miami Art Basel. In 2008, one piece by Yvette Molina was sold by Ms. Johansson at her gallery for $40,000. 

In 2009 Johannson Projects was the sole gallery representing Oakland, but still managed to sell over 100 affordably priced pieces by Jennie Ottinger “…between her Oakland show and NADA Art Fair in Miami.” As Ms. Johansson says, “affordable work is still selling well.” But in this market, everything else can be a tough sell. 

Sales have always been an issue in the Bay Area art world. The area on a whole has a mostly untapped collector base and the addition of new art spaces in Oakland that place any sort of appreciable premiums on sales is inevitable. That these galleries are woman run spaces that veer toward adventurous programming could be just the sort of shakeup that helps to build a new community.

As far as commercialism and plans go, Moorhead provides a fine last word: "If selling more art can help me do bigger art projects and ‘push’ a number of artists I am interested in so be it or on the other hand it could the opposite way and I can just go on cycling through artists that I love sustaining my vision.”

About Theo Konrad Auer