Quite a lot of art as guerrilla gallery fills parking spaces

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Before sunrise Saturday, Joey Enos was driving on the Bay Bridge with a 4-foot orange pyramid on his roof and a traffic sign reading, “We Are All Going to Die.” Enos is not a doomsayer but an artist determined to get the front spot at the Parking Lot Art Fair, a guerrilla happening that took over the free public pavement at the harbor across from the Marina Safeway.

The fair opened at 6, and by 10 Enos had no offers. “Business is slow,” he said cheerfully, “partially because people are told they aren’t supposed to sell anything.”

The Parking Lot Art Fair allowed no sales because it had no permits. The police cannot bust you just for getting there when the lot opens and setting up in adjacent stalls on two facing rows of white stripes. Nobody could set up the night before because the location was not revealed until 10 p.m. Friday. But it wasn’t too hard to figure out, because the Parking Lot Art Fair was a renegade answer to the commercial fair Art Market San Francisco, taking place at the same time inside adjacent Fort Mason. Art Market charged $26 at the door, and an alternative spinoff fair, the stARTup Art Fair at Hotel Del Sol nearby, charged $10.

As an alternative to the alternative, the Parking Lot Art Fair was free to anyone who walked through or drove their cars through, since the parking lot was not blocked off. It was free to the exhibitors, too, and to keep costs down, the promoters,Jenny Sharaf, 30, and Emily Reynolds, 27, didn’t put money into organizing or promoting the event, other than to set up a website and send the word online. There was no curation or judging.

“It is totally democratic,” Reynolds said. “We didn’t say no to anyone.”

Staking out spots

The spaces were first come, first served. Artists came from both sides of the bay and as far as Walnut Creek and Santa Cruz, and they were waiting in their cars when Sharaf and Reynolds arrived at 5:45 am. Once an artist staked out a spot, the organizers came along to tape his or her nameplate on the pavement in front of it. That went for advertising.

“The artists know each other from the Internet but not in real life, so it’s nice to put a face on it,” said Sharaf, as she patrolled among the exhibitors on white roller skates. The cops had already been through twice, but she was told that as long as nobody set up a table or served alcohol, everything was cool.

“It’s like art tailgating with no beer,” she said. Some arrived in U-haul trucks, which they fashioned into mobile galleries. One of these, called Kunst-Haul, had been parked at a meter on Folsom Street overnight. The 17-foot truck cost $75 for a 24-hour rental, which might be the answer to the rent squeeze on permanent gallery space in San Francisco.

“I should just buy a box truck,” said David Kaprzak, operator of Kunst-Haul. “It would be so much easier. Rotating artists in and out. Cheap rent.”

Among the first in line was Scheffer Ely, in a 1969 Dodge van that had been remodeled into a gallery and mobile DJ booth. He’d come wheezing over from Emeryville, topping out at 45 mph, and secured a prime spot just down from Enos, who secured an island for his pyramid and “We are All Going to Die” sign. Ely set up and had his music going, a light show turning on the pop-up roof, when the Dodge’s battery died and killed the whole operation.

Luckily, his wife, Susan Donaldson, brought the jumper cables, along with handout art, a watercolor on one side and a site-specific poem on the other.

“O, sweet parking lot, sweet concrete spot,” it began. “It all came together like magic,” said Ely, who was ever hopeful for some more magic for his caravan charters, which he calls Club House. “These artists are all about exposure, just getting it out there. One of these people walking through will work for Google and remember us.”

Facilitating improvisation

Many of the installations incorporated the cars they came in. The back seat of a Lexus was refashioned as a two-person screening room for “Tech Orcism,” by a collective called Bonanza. The 16-minute video played on a loop on a laptop with soundtrack coming through the car stereo. One viewer climbed in one rear door and another from the other side. Then the doors were closed for the duration of the film.

“We wanted it to be intimate so strangers go in and share a space,” said artist Lindsay Tully. “It’s a make-out place.” Tully estimated that 40 strangers had gotten in the car and closed the doors, but it was early still.

A few spots over, Shaghayegh Cyrous draped her car in a long Persian carpet runner and sat on one end of it. She was busy putting red dots on a globe with a marking pen.

“These are the places my rug has traveled all over the world,” said Cyrous, who looked serene sitting on the hard asphalt. “I really like the concept of the parking lot,” she said. “It’s easy for the artists to improvise.”

At the far end of the lot, just before it made a hard right into a side lot reserved for shy artists, Jacqueline Norheim was working an installation called “Tools for Looking at the Sky.”

Among the tools was an umbrella with holes in it and a 9-foot cardboard tube fashioned as a telescope. People were invited to look through it, and she recorded their observations for an upcoming video project. “I see more blue than I thought I would,” said one woman, aware of the fog already coming in on the water. Nearby, a panel discussion was getting under way in one of the parking slots.

“This is an event that isn’t guided by the art market. It has its own motivations,” said Norheim, a master’s of fine art student at Mills. For her, the motivations were “to meet new people and engage in the community in playful and surprising ways.”

'We’re the little fish’

Most playful and surprising were the live fish in the hull of a 1969 cabin cruiser that had been trailered up from Santa Cruz. The piece was called “'Fish Market,’ as a pun on Art Market (San Francisco),” said artist Will Pierce. “We’re the little fish.”

But at this moment the little fish seemed to be winning, because climbing the ladder to have a look, with his young daughter, was Jason Linetzky, director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, a new museum to display the modern and contemporary art collection of Hunk and Moo Anderson. Linetzky had come to this little fair before hitting the big one in Fort Mason.

“It shows the spirit of the bay is alive,” Linetzky said. “I appreciate the level of accessibility they are facilitating.”

The visit by Linetzky alone made the Parking Lot Art Fair a success. Before the morning was over, founder Sharaf was plotting as she skated up and down the lot.

“Maybe a Parking Lot Art Fair in L.A.,” she said, “Or Paris, New York, Berlin, and Tokyo simultaneously. The flattening of the art world.”