A Guide to America’s Next Great Art Neighborhood — The New York Times (2017)

While its name conjures images of roving canines, the only wild things you’re likely to find in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood are the gang of intrepid young art dealers who have set up shop in the formerly forgotten bayside section of the city. San Francisco is an important market for collectors and institutions — all the more so since SFMOMA’s splashy, Snohetta-led reopening last spring — but despite East Coast attempts to colonize, the city’s market has yet to be totally conquered. “We have a lot of creative freedom,” explains Claudia Altman Siegel, among the city’s pre-eminent gallerists, who’s boosted hot artists including Josh Smith and Trevor Paglen and who recently relocated to the Dogpatch. “Right now, there’s a lot of attention on S.F., but we’re not in a Chelsea-like environment with 100 galleries and hundreds of critics all watching what you’re doing. Here, you just do whatever you want.”

The city’s oldest intact historic district, the Dogpatch has been a neighborhood of the future since the 1860s; it’s steeped in industry, with a mix of residential and manufacturing space. (The true origin of its name is a mystery; prevailing theories reference the dogfennel flower, the setting of the “Li’l Abner” comic strip and the onetime presence of roaming street dogs stashing meat scavenged from nearby Butchertown.) Since last spring, a slew of galleries have decamped from cushy downtown or Tenderloin outposts — and even, frequently, from New York — to the industrial lots around the 22nd and 3rd Streets corridor. Many have landed at the Minnesota Street Project (MSP), a 100,000-plus-square-foot complex of warehouses founded by the arts patrons and real estate investors Deborah and Andy Rappaport, housing galleries, nonprofits, artists’ studios and, soon, a restaurant and bar by Daniel Patterson of San Francisco’s beloved Coi.

This week, the fourth edition of FOG Design+Art, the heavy-hitter fair benefiting SFMOMA, will open; and plenty of art-circuit regulars will head five miles southeast to the Dogpatch. Untitled, Art — a Miami Beach staple since 2012 — is concurrently hosting the inaugural edition of its satellite fair there, in an effort to promote “curatorial balance and integrity,” as the fair puts it. Here are some other destinations not to be missed.

Within Minnesota Street Project’s first building and central hub located on its namesake avenue are about a dozen other galleries, including the last gallery to sign in that space, Ever Gold [Projects] — run by a San Francisco native, Andrew McClintock, who grew up riding his bike in the Dogpatch. When Ever Gold’s previous lease became unaffordable in the Tenderloin, just under a year ago, McClintock relocated. “Conceptually, there is much more space out in the Dogpatch — space to think and breathe in this ever-encroaching city,” he says. “I saw my sales more than double last year, and our shows are being seen by thousands of people.” This Saturday, McClintock will open a show that puts Kazuo Shiraga, a master of the Gutai group, and the current market darling Kour Pour in dialogue. 1275 Minnesota St., Suite 105, evergoldprojects.com.