A Third Gallery to Close at Minnesota Street Project

The initial roster of Minnesota Street Project galleries included a number of downtown expats fleeing those 2010s rent hikes, including Anglim Gilbert Gallery (Anglim/Trimble’s predecessor), Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Rena Bransten and Themes + Projects.

“What’s happened now is that the galleries have a cost problem, but it’s not really related to their space,” Rappaport says. “People aren’t buying art from galleries.”

Trimble says that after a post-pandemic boost, sales started to drop off in 2023. “Then we came into January with this new administration and right off the bat the market dropped,” he explains. “It reached the point where I was only selling to museums for a while, and you can’t make a living just selling to museums.” For the past few months, he has been Anglim/Trimble’s sole employee.

Trimble doesn’t want this closure to overshadow the gallery’s long history and the artists it championed. He took over as owner-director in 2020, following the death of Ed Gilbert. Gilbert had assumed the same role just five years earlier, after the 2015 death of legendary dealer Paule Anglim, who founded the eponymous gallery in the 1970s.

Anglim/Trimble still represents a number of significant Bay Area artists and their estates, including Jerome Caja, Enrique Chagoya, Mildred Howard, Paul Kos, Rigo 23 and Richard Shaw.

“Holding Paula and Ed’s gallery together, really doing excellent shows, getting reviews, placing works in museums — all of that has been a success,” Trimble says. “But it wasn’t enough to support the overall program in the bigger picture if I didn’t have income.”

In this week’s announcement of the upcoming closure, he framed it as “a new beginning on the path to a better work-life balance.”

Rappaport points to international art fairs as the place where art sales happen these days, but fairs are an expensive and risky proposition for most small to mid-size galleries. Claudia Altman-Siegel has been transparent about the current state of the art market in interviews she’s given since her own closure announcement in October.

“It just felt like I would either have to be like a traveling salesperson at fairs all the time, or I would have to be a much more aggressive person, which is not my nature, or I would have to be way more commercial,” she told Artnet. “And I just don’t want to do any of those things.”

Trimble never even budgeted to bring the gallery to fairs outside of San Francisco. Trish Bransten, director of Rena Bransten gallery, explained their closure to SF Standard as “definitely a consequence of not quite enough visitors or sales.”

Rappaport says that even as people seem less inclined to buy work out of galleries, Minnesota Street Project has seen bigger crowds turn out for in-person events at the complex, like this year’s San Francisco Art Book Fair, which the Minnesota Street Project Foundation estimates had around 35,000 attendees.

The challenge facing them now, Rappaport says, is turning some of their event attendees into art collectors. On this front, the project’s next gambit will be Atrium, a free-to-attend art fair to be held at 1275 Minnesota Street during SF Art Week (and the FOG Design+Art fair). Participants will mostly be Bay Area galleries, plus a few out-of-towners — an inverse of the FOG ratio. An assortment of artist-run projects organized under the moniker “Skylight Above” will occupy the old Rena Bransten space.

The hope is that efforts like these can stave off more closures. For each gallery that closes its doors, dozens of artists on their roster lose a venue for exhibition and potential sales. The effects ripple out through the Bay Area art ecosystem, sending a chill down everyone’s spine.

“It’s a red flag,” Trimble admits. “I do not have an answer for what the next steps are as far as this location. I want to see it vital and growing and have a whole community around it that’s engaged. That would be my dream.”

The current Anglim/Trimble show, ‘&,’ with work by Paul Kos and Isabelle Sorrel will be on view through Dec. 20, with an open house on Dec. 6, 3–7 p.m.