Altman Siegel joins the gallery migration south

Altman Siegel, a prestigious gallery for conceptual art and large-scale painting, will announce Monday that it has joined the great San Francisco dealer exodus from downtown to Dogpatch.

Owner Claudia Altman-Siegel is trading the cachet of the fourth floor at 49 Geary St. for a tin-sided warehouse in the Minnesota Street Project, a three-building cluster that is transforming the visual arts landscape.

Formerly the parking garage for an electric company, it is one short block from 1275 Minnesota St., cornerstone of the project.

[...] it will be divided into only three galleries, each with 40-foot ceilings and multiple skylights.

“There is so much natural light and so much huge dimension that it is easy to imagine doing super-ambitious art projects here,” said Altman-Siegel, who arrived seven years ago from New York, where she had been the senior director of Luhring Augustine, a blue-chip Chelsea gallery dealing in contemporary art.

The freight elevators could not carry the huge works she wanted to exhibit, and the stairway was too narrow.

With her five-year lease at 49 Geary coming due, Altman-Siegel was just starting to look around when she was approached by arts benefactors and real estate investors Andy and Deborah Rappaport, who have put together the Minnesota Street Project by buying or leasing buildings between 23rd and 25th streets.

When finished, in the fall, the complex will contain a warehouse chopped into 35 artists’ studios and two warehouses for galleries, one of which is attached to an office building with space to lease to arts organizations.

The fundamental aim of the Minnesota Street Project is to keep the visual arts in the city by keeping rents below market value, and there have been more applicants to this deal than the project can handle.

The floor will be left concrete, and the double-wide roll-up doors will be left in place.

In an effort to draw this audience, gallerists have banded together to form the DoReMi Arts District (Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, the Mission.) A free glossy giveaway map has just been printed, marking 62 locations, with the Minnesota Street Project as its southern anchor.