When Claudia Altman-Siegel arrived in San Francisco in 2007, she was a 35-year-old leaving behind a senior director role at a blue-chip gallery in New York City for an air mattress in her sister’s Mission apartment.
Burned out from New York, she didn’t intend to settle down here, much less start one of the region’s most venerated galleries. But San Francisco came to offer much-needed respite from the grind of New York and a fertile ground to grow the kind of art gallery she dreamed of.
Over the last 16 years, her gallery has become one of the most important in the Bay Area. She prioritized work that made her think, rather than work that was the easiest to sell. She championed high-concept art across more than 200 exhibitions and international art fairs, highlighting both international voices and local artists like Trevor Paglen and Lynn Hershman Leeson.
But now she is closing down her trailblazing gallery at Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch. The contraction within the art market — both locally and internationally — has become untenable, she said, adding that the last year had been especially slow.
The Standard visited the Dogpatch gallery on Thursday to speak with the curator and gallerist on her decision to close, the state of San Francisco arts, and what lies next for her.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was San Francisco’s art scene like when you arrived in 2007, and how has that changed?
In New York, the busier you are, the cooler you are. Here, the busier you are, the more everyone feels sorry for you. You’re like, “I’m so busy,” and they say, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m going to Bolinas to go surfing.”
There, all anyone did was talk about money or auction prices. I didn’t feel like people were talking about art or ideas. I remember going to this exclusive party and sitting next to Diane von Fürstenberg. I thought, “I got invited to this party, I’m sitting next to a celebrity. Is this what people here want?” But I just felt really lonely.
When I got here, there were interesting artists, good museums, and a lot of really good collectors. And in San Francisco, there were very few galleries, so opening my own just seemed doable.
‘I think the arts here is really, really, really threadbare and in serious trouble.’
Coming from New York, I had a big ego, so it was easy for me to be like, “I know what’s cool and I’m going to do it.” Of course, it was way harder than I thought, but sometimes you have to have that kind of naiveté to jump into something new.
When I opened in 2009, it was after the huge mortgage crisis, so everyone was struggling. I didn’t expect to make money in my first year anyway. When I opened, everyone was excited because no one was doing anything. I was calling all these artists in New York, and everyone said yes, because it was a quiet moment and I had a lot of opportunity.
When I opened, Ratio Three (opens in new tab) and Jessica Silverman had just opened, but there was still this old guard — these cool women like Paule Anglim (opens in new tab) and Ruth Braunstein (opens in new tab), who had galleries for like 50 years. That doesn’t exist anymore.
After 16 years, what prompted the closure?
I love art, and I love artists. I think artists can teach us to think differently and push us intellectually. That was my guiding light for this project. But in the past couple years, the market has slowed down, not just in San Francisco but internationally.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the gallery sustainable financially. Last year, we opened a pop-up space in Presidio Heights for six months. We tried doing all of these different art fairs. We tried to show new artists. I was working hard to think outside the box and keep things going, and then the summer was very slow sales-wise.
I had this existential crisis of “How do I make this work?” I came up against two things: I have to be a much more aggressive dealer, which is not really my personality, or I have to be much more commercial and make it more like fast fashion. But I don’t want to do either of those things.
Bigger galleries can afford to play the long game and wait the market out. In terms of financial issues, it’s not that I’m declaring bankruptcy, but I don’t have a big enough cushion to wait it out.
Even up to 2022-23, things were good. This art world contraction has really been in the last two years. For us, the Silicon Valley Bank crash was kind of the beginning of things slowing down a little bit, and they’ve been slowing down more and more since then. The economy of the Bay Area was affected by that, and it has rippled out over time here.
I thought, “Maybe I’ve taken this as far as I can take it, and I would rather leave it intact and move on to the next thing.”
Were there specific aspects of the business model that just weren’t working?
It was always important for me to show local artists and give them a platform to be part of the international conversation, because I don’t think there’s a lot of opportunity for that in San Francisco, and one way to do that is to participate in art fairs.
Still, I think as art fairs became more ingrained in the business model of a gallery, it got harder to compete because they’re really expensive to participate in. The galleries that are successful at that kind of model are multinational corporations with staffs of over 100 people. And so they can afford to have new people going to all of these fairs and they can work that cost into their model. But for a small gallery like mine, it’s just the same three or four people going to every single one over and over again.
Also, I think for those bigger galleries, their goal is to sell things that are six or seven figures. Whereas for me, most of the work I have is under $100,000, so we have to do tremendous volume to pay for the fairs. I have five employees, so it’s not only taxing financially, but also physically for us to do that. I think that model is really unsustainable for a small business.
Altman Siegel is now the third San Francisco gallery to announce its closure since July. What do these closures signify for the Bay Area’s art scene?
I don’t know how to comment on what they signify in a larger sense, but I think the arts here are really, really, really threadbare and in serious trouble. So many organizations lost their grants this year under the Trump administration.
There’s a lot of instability in the market, and people are nervous about the future. That kind of environment does not make people feel comfortable making big purchases or buying art. All the galleries are suffering; all of the nonprofits are suffering. We’re in a real crisis. I don’t know what to do about that or whose responsibility it is to fix it.
I feel bad. I feel like I built something important here. And of course, I feel sad about closing it. But I feel like I want to just put the word out that everyone needs to support the galleries here. You have to buy things for them to stay open.
Is collecting in San Francisco down in the last decade?
When I started, there was a generation of collectors who are now all in their 80s, and they were very big and very robust collectors. A lot of them supported me early on, and a lot of them bought from every show. Now they’re moving on to the next phase of their life, where they’re estate planning and giving things away to their children. It’s completely understandable, but I just feel like that was a golden age of collectors. That generation took collecting really seriously, but I’m not sure the younger generation is.
There’s a narrative in San Francisco’s art world that our region’s wealthy tech elite have failed to support the arts on a deep level. What is your take on this?
That is not true. Most people don’t care about art. If you’re going to take the whole population, only a small percentage of people care about art, and I think that in New York, people work in finance, and the people who work in finance are the collectors. Here, people work in tech, and the people who are the collectors here work in tech. It’s really unfair to make that generalization. I have tons of collectors who work in tech.
What advice would you give new gallerists and artists in San Francisco?
It’s a tricky business, but the people who do it, they do it because they can’t do anything else. So if you have the passion for it, just try. One of the things I say to artists a lot is that no one is going to make you famous — you have to do it for yourself.
When we’re looking at local artists here, there are certain artists who make themselves busy. They put on shows with their friends, they find weird places to do shows in. So when you’re looking across the landscape of new artists, certain people pop because they are making it happen for themselves. You really have to do that. No one’s going to come and say “You’re a genius!” You have to work it.
What’s next for you?
I intend to stay here and I intend to do something art-related.
Altman Siegel’s final show, “It is not far to the sea,” featuring new works by Japanese painter Shinpei Kusanagi, will run through Nov. 15.