Rebecca Camacho Presents, an enterprise of the Bay Area art dealer Rebecca Camacho, will commemorate its fifth anniversary this autumn with a sizable expansion, relocating from its 928 sq. ft boutique space to a 2,000 sq. ft storefront in downtown San Francisco.
A seasoned art dealer with nearly three decades of experience, Camacho first opened her eponymous space at 794 Sutter Street and will move to a historic building nearer to the San Francisco waterfront at 526 Washington Street in Jackson Square, where neighbours include galleries like Wendi Norris and Scott Richards Contemporary Art, both of whom opened shop in the area within the last two years.
“It’s one of the few neighbourhoods in San Francisco where people still spend some time out and about,” Camacho tells The Art Newspaper. “We’re at the nexus of the Financial District, Chinatown and North Beach, and walkable to the Embarcadero, so there’s a draw beyond the people who happen to live or work in the area.”
The forthcoming space is sited in a building dating to the 1850s that was constructed on San Francisco’s original shoreline, before it was extended with landfill. Some of the original features remain, like its brick façade and some pillars made from ship masts.
“It’s important that artists walk into the space and imagine what it’s like to work in San Francisco, versus places like New York or Los Angeles,” Camacho says. “Because several of the artists I work with do work with other galleries, I want this space to make them think about what it means to work in this community.”
Before opening Rebecca Camacho Presents, Camacho served as the public art project manager of the San Francisco Arts Commission and was previously a director at Anthony Meier Gallery from 1998 to 2018. Transitioning from a blue-chip space, Camacho shifted her focus to centre her programme on emerging artists from the region.
“I wanted to carve out my own piece of the conversation,” Camacho says. “Even though the inner workings of any gallery are very similar, and the work I’m doing now is the same work I’ve always done, my focus has changed dramatically.”
In her own approach as an art dealer, Camacho says that she wants to “help artists build stepping stones”, and that she has been “incredibly lucky in that process”. Camacho inaugurated her space in 2019 with an exhibition by the Oakland-based artist Sahar Khoury, who has had a presence in the Bay Area since the mid-1990s but did not have gallery representation. Later that year, Khoury received the SECA Art Award and showed at SFMoMA. Since then, she has joined Canada gallery in New York, has had work acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and currently has a traveling solo exhibition organised by the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Camacho began establishing a permanent roster around three years after the gallery opened, enlisting Khoury (who will have a solo presentation with Camacho at The Armory Show in September) and other inaugural-year artists like Max Jansons, who has since gained representation with Harper’s Gallery and shown at Louise Alexander Gallery.
Some artists who joined later, like ektor garcia, who came on in 2022, have also had meteoric rises, with Garcia participating in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Others did not join the roster but similarly went on to have measurable success, like Leilah Babirye, who currently has a solo exhibition at the de Young Museum.
“The long arc of a conversation with an artist over their career is something that’s important to me,” Camacho says. “I want to create and seize opportunities for them.” She adds that the artist-and-dealer relationship should be akin to a “marriage”.
“Once we’ve gotten to that point and we’ve made that commitment, there could be highs and lows but there’s also honesty and there’s trust,” Camacho says. “Not everyone’s definition of success is the same. Some want representation, sales, museum shows and curatorial recognition, but others want something else. There’s no standard trajectory.”
Anne Buckwalter, Night Chores, 2024 Courtesy the artist, Rebecca Camacho Presents
Camacho will open her new space in September with an exhibition by Ann Buckwalter titled I Will Clean the Closet, I Will Climb the Stairs. In November, she will present an exhibition by Andy Mister in the main space and Maryam Yousif in the project room, concurrent with the latter’s first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco.
Downtown San Francisco has struggled to bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic and the area is at the forefront of California’s homelessness crisis, although Camacho argues that, while there’s no doubt that commerce has slowed, the same isn’t true for the arts sector. Within the last two years, several galleries have taken the leap to establish brick-and-mortar spaces around the city, like COL in Ghirardelli Square, Jonathan Carver Moore on Market Street, and House of Seiko in the Mission—all of which opened in 2023.
“It’s undeniable that the economics of living in San Francisco have changed and it’s unsustainable for many artists and really anyone without that six-figure threshold,” Camacho says. “But it’s not all a doom spiral. The arts community is so essential because it plants the seeds for regrowth. At least here, we’re all boats that rise or fall together.”