For Justin Giarla, owner of San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, opening up an art space in a once-dicey neighborhood was inevitable — especially considering that his captivation with the West Coast’s lowbrow scene started when he was in high school.
“I really got hooked on art, and I would cut history, math, and English to go to my other art classes and stay there all day long,” Giarla says. “After a while, my teachers figured it out, but they never really did anything or said anything because they were just kind of like, ‘Well, at least he’s still in school.'”
At 23, Giarla started supporting other up-and-coming artists by collecting their works, and by 2003, he decided that it was time to start a gallery space of his own.
“Right around my early 30s, I stopped working in nightclubs for a little while and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do,” he says, “and it just came to me out of the blue. ‘I’m going to open that art gallery that I thought about a few years back.’ Literally the very next day, I was driving around The Tenderloin looking for lease signs when I saw that what is now the Shooting Gallery was available. So I called the landlord, and two weeks later I had a lease.”
Giarla felt that the Tenderloin, a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, completely personified the kind of gritty atmosphere that he was looking to create in a gallery that showcased California’s more subversive side.
“The Tenderloin has always been a neighborhood that [is] so diverse and interesting and colorful,” Giarla says. “I love living in the big city, and the Tenderloin, for me back then, was the epitome of living in the big city. It kind of had everything. It was just insane and nuts, and it was always vibrating and really intense.”
Giarla also decided to open the Shooting Gallery in the Tenderloin because he knew that the rest of the area’s creative community would embrace his brand of art that celebrated graffiti art, tattoo culture, and pop surrealism.
“If I opened up a gallery in the Tenderloin,” he says, “no one was going to sweat me about it. But if I opened up a gallery and showed the kind of artwork that I did on Union Street, they would burn me at the stake.”
The Shooting Gallery has built long-standing relationships with numerous artists, including Ferris Plock, Greg Gossel, and Antistrot. Currently on display is We’re Not As Colorful As We Think We Are, a collection of paintings by Joshua Petker, whose work has been featured in Giarla’s galleries for the past five years.
“If a graffiti writer and Gustav Klimt did artwork together, that’s what this would look like,” Giarla says. “When I first saw his work, the way that he paints a woman’s face and the colors that he uses, I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”
Over the past seven years, Giarla has staked his claim in the Tenderloin. Aside from the Shooting Gallery, he has founded White Walls Gallery and 941 Geary, which opened earlier this month. The crowd that can be found in Giarla’s galleries has evolved as well — even including a few of the more traditional art collectors.
“They have been coming around more and more and are starting to get interested in and collect the artwork that I’ve shown,” he says. “Their art-collecting habits have evolved and transitioned into the more contemporary work that I’m doing right now.”