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 it 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 far wider range of skills coalesces in one of the most interesting yet unsurprising things about him: the ability to render images of spectacular realism, which accompanies his powerful imagination for things people have never seen before.
Sitting alone at his gallery in the quiet afternoon before a First Fridays storm, he at first escaped my attention entirely, his demeanor lacking drama almost entirely. The space we enter to find him, though, 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 2rd 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 of them long-termers with some hosted more on a month-to-month basis.
Weber’s inner architect has come out: he 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 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 seasoned curator, Weber instinctively manages the wall allotments as easily as he does the floor plan. This is not about himself. His own presence in the gallery is clearly more about what he does for the artists than 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 area. It’s a combination of artists’ self-curated exhibits in a space that is more like a gallery made of multiple open studios, not of 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.
There are many ways to appeal to visitors, of course. 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 easily makes the visit an especially attractive special event.
This makes Grand Gallery a significant point of reference in the East Bay arts ecosystem. Numerous arts organizations, city government departments, entrepreneurs, and arts venues are working on learning what each other knows, to crack the code of revving up post-COVID arts engagement. They need affordability, safety, and sustainability in addition to compelling work. And not surprisingly, in these tough times, artists themselves are leading much of the resilience and revival. They are finding spaces, creating events, targeting probable attendees, and networking socially to develop a more constant anticipation, across communities, of new things in the works and of new works within 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.
Facing all that, Grand Gallery readily strikes me as a cooperative business development environment. For that, it already has some special practical advantages, but taking note of it is not meant to suggest that other organizations are not serving that purpose as well. Rather, the current environment of the art community suggests an increasing importance of galleries seeing artists as development partners. Grand Gallery is one way that galleries can model their effort.
Story and photography, including the portrait of Bill Weber: by Malcolm Ryder, In the photos, all works shown or excerpted are property of their original artists. https://thegrandgalleryoakland.com/artists/ Disclosure: I have exhibited work at the location covered in this article. - M. Ryder
East Bay resident and artist Malcolm Ryder is a photographer and writer creating and critiquing visual art as well as managing organizations for visual artists. He is the principal arts writer of Art About Town from Oakland Art Murmur. He exhibits across the Bay Area, publishes images online at www.malcolmryder.com, and runs the multi-year collaborative art project Oaktown Pictures, at https://www.oaktown.pictures .
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