San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery, known for championing BIPOC and female artists since 1975, will close on November 22, along with its current Oliver Lee Jackson exhibition. The operation will shift its focus to remote programming and collaborative exhibitions at various venues. “The economics of running a brick and mortar gallery once supported by a steady flow of sales, institutional partnerships, and walk-in engagement has shifted, asking us to consider new models,” wrote gallery owners Rena and Trish Bransten in a press release. “As John Waters observed when told we were closing our space, ‘It is the end of an era.’”
The gallery over the years represented a mix of emerging and established artists, including Viola Frey, known for her monumental figurative sculptures. Among the artists on its current roster are Jackson and Waters, as well as Dawoud Bey, Vik Muniz, and Wendel A. White. “It is not about [Rena and Trish Bransten], it’s about the artists,” Jackson, who joined the gallery in 1982, told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “They work hard and compete, use their contacts and institutional reach.”
Rena Bransten founded her namesake gallery at 75 Geary Street, two blocks from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was joined by her daughter, Trish Bransten, in 1989. In 2015, a tech company offered Bransten’s landlords triple the rent the gallery had been paying, and the gallery moved on from its airy, 3,400 square foot digs first to a tiny storefront on Market Street owned by a plumbers’ union, then to its current home at the Minnesota Street Project, a gallery warehouse complex in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood.
“We have been a welcoming place for all: Visitors could walk in without cost, encounter serious art, and speak with people deeply committed to the work,” wrote the gallerists. “We have proudly celebrated artists who were, and sometimes still are, overlooked by mainstream institutions.”
In closing, the gallery joins a wave of others that have shuttered on both coasts in recent months as the art economy contends with changing tastes and buying patterns, steep US tariffs, and global financial, political, and social instability. Among those that have called it quits in recent months are the bicoastal Clearing; LA’s Blum, which also closed its Tokyo outpost; and, in New York, Venus over Manhattan, the decades old Tilton Gallery, and the nonprofit Canal Projects.
