PIER 24: San Francisco is on the Map

03Aug10

San Francisco is now home to two art collections that are promising to change our standing among the world’s serious art cities. Following the Fisher endowment to SFMOMA, Pier 24, a 28,000 square foot gallery space housing the permanent contemporary photography collection of the Pilara Foundation, has opened with little to no fanfare in a beautifully restored Embarcadero pier. It houses one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary photography in rotating exhibitions from the collection as well as outside shows such as the upcoming collection of Bob Fisher, son of The Gap founder Don Fisher.

Andy Pilara, a San Francisco investment banker, started collecting photography in 2003 and in the time since has amassed a collection of more than 2,000 works of contemporary photography including Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand (The Animals series), Edward Burtynsky, Larry Clark, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dorothea Lange, Richard Misrach, and the list goes on.

Admission is free and open to the public by appointment only. Space is limited as appointments are 2-hours long and only 15 guests are admitted during each time slot. Tickets for the show opening in September will be available in the next few weeks. To be added to the notification list, click here.

With an absence of wall text and vast galleries practically to oneself, the space invites a quiet and contemplative experience, and one that summons a deeper involvement with looking than I am generally used to. Visitors are asked to walk through once without the gallery guide. I found the experience unexpectedly freeing and just incredibly special to spend two hours with these photographs in the spacious and quiet galleries of Pier 24.

On the day we visited, we were also very fortunate to have as our unofficial guide a knowledgeable and passionate recent graduate of the Chicago Art Insititute who seemed to appear every time we had a question or felt to have a deeper discussion about some of the work.

And in the spirit of the Pilara Foundation, here are some gallery shots sans captions.