Cole Solinger, co-owner with Nicolas Torres of the gallery House of Seiko, has a few plans for his first weekend at to FOG Design+Art, one of San Francisco’s biggest art fairs, spread over two piers at Fort Mason from January 23 -26.
“Make connections, make sales, have a good time and enjoy the weather,” he said, adding mysteriously that two of those things had already happened, but not saying which.
House of Seiko, in a former Mission watch and jewelry repair shop, opened in 2023 after Solinger, who previously managed another Mission gallery, Delaplane, met Torres, the founder and beverage director of restaurant True Laurel and wine bar Buddy. The two talked and Solinger told Torres he wanted another gallery in the Mission. Torres knew of a space a few doors down from Buddy, which became the gallery.
They scored an invitation to apply at FOG and decided on a presentation of Cross Lypka, aka Oakland artists Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka. An exhibition of their work at the gallery in the fall was well received.
“I’m an enormous fan of what they’re doing with ceramics. It’s incredibly impressive to see them challenge the medium. They’re creating things that people are really emotionally connecting to,” he said. “It’s not like anything they’ve seen before. People don’t know what it is. Then when they discover what it is through explaining, it’s a really beautiful moment of discovery.”
House of Seiko is one of 13 galleries at FOG FOCUS, where newer galleries and mostly underrepresented artists are shown in the former San Francisco Art Institute building.
Another is Municipal Bonds, located in Dogpatch’s Minnesota Street Project. Michiel de Boer who’s with the gallery said they were flattered to be asked to submit an application to the invitation-only fair, and focused on a local artist.
“We saw that as a recognition of our programming,” he said. “We tried to put our best foot forward with Yvonne Mouser and this solo show by her.”
De Boer is excited about what the fair can do for Mouser along with the gallery.
“It logically elevates, literally on every level, our presence,” he said. “And in this case, it elevates Yvonne, which is fantastic. I think we were invited to participate because Yvonne is totally on point with the theme of FOCUS, which is ‘elevating.'” Elevating talented artists like Mouser who haven’t gotten tons of attention, is what a fair like FOG is good at, de Boer thinks.
“I think it works beautifully,” he said. “I mean, we’re a couple hours in, and I can literally already see it working.”
Artist Nimah Gobir whose work is being shown at Oakland’s Johansson Projects’ booth along with Andrew Catanese, feels the elevation from being part of FOG.
“It’s been a huge milestone. This is my first art fair, and so to have this many eyeballs on my work has been really, really cool,” Gobir said. “It still feels new. If I think about, getting my first residency, my first gallery presentation, this is definitely a great first to have.”
Gobir, currently an artist in residence at Recology and formerly an Emerging Artist at the Museum of the African Diaspora, is showing works at the fair based on family photos her dad took in the ’90s. She tried something new and is happy with the way it turned out.
“What I’ve been experimenting with this year is I’m showing the works of photo transfers in them. So I’ll have photo reference material, and I’ll make kind of a composite painting image,” she said. “Before I would just put the photo source material away, but now I’ve been actually adding it back into the canvas. My goal was to make a series of work that reference each other, almost like a photo album does. Also, these works are meant to kind of collapse time and space. You’ll have kind of a moment, but then you’ll also have references to other moments, and they’re all existing in one spot.”
This is Jonathan Carver Moore’s second year at FOCUS. The founder of a gallery of the same name on Market Street, he is showing five paintings Anoushka Mirchandani created during Moore’s second artist-in-residence program (the first was Aplerh-Doku Borlabi), where she worked in the empty 2,600-square-foot retail space next door to the gallery.
A recent open house for the work which “examines her experience as an Indian, Immigrant, Other, Woman” was packed, Moore says, and already a few hours into the preview gala, four of the five pieces had been sold.
“It’s been so great her being an artist that’s here and seeing Bay Area individuals supporting an artist that’s here, created in a huge space that’s here—I love it,” said the enthusiastic Moore. “I just feel like it’s so unlimited what we could do if we were to be able to tell stories this way.”
The exhibitors at FOCUS aren’t all local. First time exhibitor Charles Moffet has a gallery based in New York, but has ties to this area, having been born here and gone to the California College of the Arts for grad school.
Moffet had planned a solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles artist Alec Egan, but horrifically, like so many others, Egan lost his home and studio in the Pacific Palisades fire. All the work that was planned to show at FOG was in the studio.
Moffet went ahead with the show anyway, displaying watercolors that were removed from Egan’s studio in the fall. Also, a limited edition print hanging on the wall, Night Setting, is being sold for $500 with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the artist.
Moffet said he’s been working with Egan for five years and wanted to do something to help.
“We feel a deep level of commitment to supporting our artists’ careers. When he lost his home in the studio, we wanted to do everything in our power to give him a foundation to help him rebuild,” Moffet said. “It became clear that we had enough material between us and [gallerist] Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles who helped us get some of this work from her inventory, in addition to the print to benefit Alec made it feel we could still have a solo presentation, which came together rather elegantly.”
FOG DESIGN AND ART FAIR runs through Sun/26 at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Piers 2 and 3, in San Francisco. More information here.
