Gallery 16 Fifteenth Anniversary Group Show: These Are The People In Your Neighborhood through November 7, 2008; Opening reception on Friday September 12 from 6 - 9pm with live band "Or, The Whale"; 501 3rd St (at Bryant); San Francisco; Mon-Fri 9-5 Sat 11-5; (415) 626-7495; www.gallery16.com

Numerologists have yet to opine but there must have been something auspicious about 1616 16th Street when Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color opened there in 1993. Back then, the neighborhood was so isolated (before California College of the Arts established its Potrero campus and the blocks around the Design Center were built up) that principal Griff Williams thought for sure they'd be shuttered within a year.

Griff Williams founded Gallery 16 at a time when the outlook for publicly funded art in America was dim.  Williams was intimately familiar with the political drama playing out in D.C., not only because he was a newly minted San Francisco Art Institute MFA grad but because his father, Senator Pat Williams (D Montana), was leading the fight against Senator Jesse Helms’s crusade to eviscerate the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Helms, who died on July 4 this year, rallied against NEA-funded indecency for years, sometimes passing out mimeographed copies of incendiary fine art photographs like Richard Mapplethorpe’s infamous "Bullwhip" and Andre Serrano’s "Piss Christ."  In 1994, along with Nayland Blake and Philip Horvitz, Griff organized a congressional hearing on the future of the NEA that took place at then nascent Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.           

Helms’s relentlessness was effective.  In 1996 the NEA budget dropped to $99M from a high of $174 in 1996 and has never recovered.  Last year the NEA received just $125M in funding.  Griff credits his father’s efforts with helping keep the NEA alive.

Determined not to be dependent on grant money in this gloomy climate, Wiliams’s gallery had a unique business model. Gallery 16 was funded by Urban Digital Color, a state-of-the-art printmaking facility.  Williams took out loans from banks, friends, and family to buy three $125,000 digital printers (the forerunner to what you use in your home office today), over half a million in today’s dollars. 

In the mid-nineties these printers completely changed the art of photography because a photographer no longer had to work with fixed-size glossy paper.  Suddenly, there were no rules.  Photographers like Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky rose to prominence, mastering the new medium with their oversized prints.  UDC was one of only three shops in the country that owned this equipment.  Artists from around the country lined up to work with them and the business took off. 

Like many directors of start-up galleries, Williams invited his talented peers from grad school to show their work.  The gallery’s immense size (an L shaped comprising two 1,200 sq. ft. rooms) worked in Gallery 16’s favor, allowing for massive installations, video, and sculpture that was “unsalable” but thrilling in its experimentality.  Collaborations by artists such as Margaret Killgallen, Arturo Herrera, Gedi Sibony, and William Kentridge took place often.  Since 1993, the per cent contribution of the sister businesses have inverted, and now it’s Gallery 16 that pays the bills. 

For the first five years of Gallery 16, Williams let his own art practice lie dormant.  Balancing a struggling new business, teaching undergraduate printmaking at SFAI, and being a new dad made painting a luxury of time that Williams just did not have.  Those start-up days are over and in the past decade his work has shown at California museums (San Diego Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento).  This year Williams developed a new relationship with Steven Wirtz Gallery and had his first solo show in that space last spring.

Williams’s recent work is inspired by his son’s paint-by-numbers set.  Far from seeing the toy as anathema, Williams was inspired by the freedom of the concept, and, when he first starting working in this vein, found it refreshing to see no trace of the "hand of the artist" in his work (an art term for visible brush strokes and other evidence).

Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color moved to the corner of 3^rd and Bryant in 2006. Since 2004, the  publishing arm of Gallery 16 has administered a robust artist’s book program.  Printed in limited editions, each title is a work of art in itself.

In 2006, Williams was nominated for the SECA Award but was happy to see the prize go to good friend and Gallery 16’s very first employee, Amy Franceschini, for her retro and profoundly comforting social practice work reviving the WWI Victory Gardens.  Last year Franceschini and Williams collaborated on a Gallery 16 Editions book project published in July titled “Victory Gardens 2007+”. It documents Amy’s highly original "art as activism" project from the pilot program in San Francisco's Sunset neighborhood to the groundbreaking of the Victory Garden in front of City Hall.

A book about the history of Gallery 16’s collaborations entitled “These Are The People In Your Neighborhood” is scheduled for Spring 2009. They are also currently working on new editions with Shaun O’dell, Sara Cain and Darren Waterston.

At the Fifteenth Anniversary Show, many of the artists the gallery has collaborated with over the years created special print series to commemorate the milestone.  Deborah Oropallo, Jim Isermann, Arturo Herrera, Libby Black, Rebecca Bollinger, Michelle Grabner, Rex Ray, Gay Outlaw, Lynn Hershman, William Kentridge, Xylor Jane, Kara Maria, Shaun Odell, and the late Margaret Kilgallen are some of the artists whose work is included in this exhibition.