Justin Giarla: visionary Bay Area curator on the future of street art

Here’s a curator with a resume you don’t come across every day: owner and curator of one of North America’s leading lowbrow art galleries, co-curator of Shepard Fairey’s first solo retrospective (the much-lauded street artist responsible for Obama’s iconic HOPE poster), curator of an exhibit at the 2009 Grammy Awards and, oh yeah, a 2004 arrest on drug charges. No, Nathalie Bondil, this is clearly not.

San Francisco’s Justin Giarla spent a decade immersed in the city’s thriving nightlife circuit before making the leap to the precarious business of gallery owning. “I learned how to get people to show up somewhere,” Giarla tells me on the phone from his Shooting Gallery in SF. “When you’re running a nightclub, you’re putting on a show, and the same goes for an art gallery. Instead of a dark, loud nightclub where the focus is on the music, it’s a well-lit, not so loud club where the focus is on the art.”

 

"Dial Tone" by Greg Gossel; "Lush" by Aaron Nagel; "Late Light" by Michael Page

 

FEEDING HIS LOWBROW FIX
Breaking into the oft-elitist and intimidating art world, Giarla’s aim was forthright: to fill what he saw as a glaring dearth in the city’s art scene. The West Coast curator set about showcasing a variety of DIY-oriented lowbrow artists he had always fancied – people inspired namely by cartoon art, rockabilly music, tattoos, the punk rock aesthetic, erotic art and skater culture. He boldly set up shop in the city’s infamously dodgy Tenderloin district, a wildly unpredictable hood where junkies, tranny hookers and crack dealer sightings are common currency. (Hence the “shooting” in Shooting Gallery.) “At first, it was definitely hard to get people to come down to the neighbourhood”, acknowledges Giarla, who’d curb people’s fears by individually escorting them in and out of the gallery!

That was back in 2003; the impact Giarla has had on street art in its many permutations is now an undisputed fact. Lucky for us, the Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art has invited the Bay Area’s premier art provocateur to present Looking East – his first-ever Canadian show – to officially usher in the gallery’s ever-so spacious new digs in the Mile End.

 

"Good Manners" by Greg Gossel; "Pop Princess" by Ron English; "Solicitors Welcome" by Clayton Brothers

 

ABSTRACTING CONVENTIONS
Giarla’s exhibit offers a window into the dynamic and continually evolving art movements defined as urban contemporary and pop surrealism. “The lowbrow art scene evolved into what we would call pop surrealism, and graffiti art into urban contemporary,” he specifies. “In the ‘80s and ‘90s, lowbrow opened up a lot of people’s eyes to a new group of artists whose work visually wasn’t the stuff they teach you in school – the figurative, abstract stuff – but more representational. You could look at a painting and know exactly what the work was about; you didn’t need documentation on a museum wall to get it. That led the way for things like skate art to become more popular and accepted.”

Looking East’s bill of featured artists includes both promising up-and-comers and veritable pioneers like Clayton Brothers, Ron English and Shepard Fairey. When I ask Giarla if he believes the global art world has warmed up to urban contemporary of late and embraced some its talent, he’s quick to point to artists like Fairey for bringing attention to the genre. “That HOPE poster gave Shepard and what he does legitimacy in the eyes of American culture. It took a presidential candidate to show people that not all street art is vandalism or graffiti, and that somebody associated with the movement can make something beautiful and powerful, to the point where it played a part in getting Obama elected.”

 

Looking East | June 9 to 23
Opening night on Wednesday, June 9, 6-9 p.m. with performances by Jacob + Francis and Le Matos

Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art | 6355, St-Laurent
yveslaroche.com | shootinggallerysf.com