By Malcolm Ryder
By any reasonable measures, Bill Weber is one of the Bay Area’s most established artists, celebrated repeatedly over many years and phases of work. His astonishing family history, spanning Germany, Missouri and California, parks the listener in locales as diverse as Hearst Castle and Brentwood, and weaves among people with names like Peralta, Dali, and Benny Goodman. At the drop of a hat, he’s opening one of many albums of memorabilia, unreeling the story.
Most well-known himself as the surrealist artist El Gallo, his own far wider range of skills coalesces in one of the most interesting and unsurprising things about him, the ability to render images of spectacular realism, accompanying his powerful imagination for things people have never seen before.
Sitting alone at his gallery in the quiet afternoon before a hoped-for First Fridays storm, he had easily escaped my attention entirely, his demeanor almost entirely lacking drama. The space one enters to find him, though, is one that radiates with his energetic attachment to a vast array of works (including his own) and to the artists behind them.
The Grand Gallery, at 560 2nd Street, looks out over Oakland’s Jack London Square towards Alameda. And inside, Weber looks out over an excited community of over 30 artists, most long-termers and some being hosted more month-to-month.
Weber’s inner architect has come out and has organized the space in a way that simultaneously creates numerous distinct areas perfect for two or three viewers, while leaving each of the areas feeling open to all of the others. Generous daylight from Oakland’s open sky pours into the gallery’s large front glass facade and somehow manages to reach nearly all of the spaces despite the separating walls.
The variety of works is intensified by the artists wanting to use the available space to the maximum extent possible, and to offer more for sale. But those close quarters work out well because of the sheer variety of ways that the work is interesting. A very seasoned curator, Weber instinctively masters the wall allotments as easily as he does the floor plan. This is not about himself, however. The key is that his own presence in the gallery is clearly more about what he does for the artists then what they do for him.
Grand Gallery is itself his latest work. Attached to Studios 11 Oakland, which is already a “family” of its own, Weber seamlessly extends that vibe into the larger street front space, being a combination of artists’ self-curated exhibits and an excellent hybrid presence as a gallery made of multiple open studios, not open studios trying to be galleries. Further strengthening support of the artists, the setup makes it clear to visitors that they are invited to look for the artists’ works in sizes and formats that make purchasing easy.
No less important is seeing that the artists inspire each other’s quality and even use their works to show their awareness of each other. Works may clearly echo each other’s style; more literally, one artist will have a piece done in homage to another artist, such as with Ron Norman’s drawing honoring Bill Sala showing on an opposite wall.
Meanwhile, there are many ways to appeal to visitors. Photography spans views of history, celebrity, and places.
Paintings and prints explore the medium for its potential with materials, content, and ways of having impact as objects to live with. Books for sale wed background and narratives to the artists’ curation.
The location is potentially brilliant. Access by foot, bike or car is completely unrestricted; and being minutes from Jack London’s other offerings make a gallery visit an easy choice to make when putting together a multi-activity solo, date, or group outing. Being at a good gallery is a special event, but getting to a good gallery is that much better when it is uncomplicated. This makes Grand Gallery a very interesting point of reference in the East Bay arts ecosystem.
Numerous arts organizations, academics, city government departments, small business
entrepreneurs, and dozens of arts venues are working on learning what each other knows, to try to crack the code of revving up post-COVID arts engagement with affordability, safety and sustainability. And not surprisingly, artists themselves are leading much of the resilience and revival effort in tough times. They are finding or creating spaces and events, learning to target probable attendees, and networking socially to develop a more constant anticipation, across communities, of new things in the works and of new works within a comfort zone of reach. Like Weber himself, artists bring a blend of realism and imagination to their efforts. But the key issue is longevity. On a case-by-case basis, some will make a discovery that has staying power, some will be too site-specific to reproduce elsewhere, and some will have the stamina to keep trying new things as conditions continue to change around them.
Among all that, Grand Gallery strikes me as being a business development environment. Yes it already has some special practical advantages. But taking note of that is not meant to single it out and separate it from other organizations, rather, to invite similar ones to see themselves this way and look into what they, with the rest of the art community, can together do to support being that way.
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All images by Malcolm Ryder; In the photos, all works shown or excerpted are property of their original artists.
Malcolm Ryder is an Oakland-based photographer and Bay Area art critic, publishing frequently at Art About Town and Artdotdot.com. The designer and former manager of the Visual Artists Fellowships Grants process at the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently sits on the Boards of Oakland Art Murmur and the East Bay Photo Collective. His work is on exhibit at several satellite galleries in this year’s African Diaspora event.