Top image: University Avenue, downtown Palo Alto. Photo: Brian Sterling / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
For decades, collectors in Silicon Valley who wanted blue-chip art had to go to New York, Los Angeles, or Basel. Now a major gallery has come to them. Hauser & Wirth, the international gallery group Palo Alto Online called a “heavy hitter in the art community,” opened its Palo Alto location on Oct. 3 at 201 Hamilton Ave. with “Calder | O’Keeffe,” a show that makes a clear statement about what kind of art scene it wants to build here.
The opening show
The exhibition looks at the work of, and the long acquaintance between, Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe, Palo Alto Online reported. “There are probably not two more well-known artists in the 20th century in the United States than Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe,” Hauser & Wirth Senior Curatorial Director Alexis Lowry said at an Oct. 2 media preview. “Yet there’s never been a project that looks at the fact that they had a friendship or acquaintance over many decades.”
The installation brings the work unusually close to visitors. Alexander S.C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and president of the Calder Foundation, said several mobiles were hung nearly at eye level. “That’s how Calder wants it to be. … In a museum you never get to do that,” he said. The show runs through Jan. 24.
Why Palo Alto
According to Palo Alto Online, the Palo Alto gallery joins a network of 18 Hauser & Wirth locations across Europe, Asia, and North America, and includes a bookshop. Co-founder and president Iwan Wirth explained the choice by recalling the painter George Condo’s reaction: “Oh, I would be so excited to show paintings in the place that is the birthplace of new technology.” “So that’s why we’re here,” Wirth said, “because we go where the artist wants us to go.”
The Oct. 3 opening was free and included walkthroughs with Rower, Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and Stanford’s Alexander Nemerov, along with performances by Stanford Taiko and Cardinal Calypso.
The long view
Silicon Valley has plenty of wealth and, in Stanford’s museums, serious institutions. What it has lacked is a commercial art market at the top tier, the galleries where collections are built and reputations made. A Hauser & Wirth outpost on Hamilton Avenue means the market now believes Peninsula collectors can sustain one. It also marks a cultural shift. A tech elite once known for spending on hardware, startups, and foundations is now being courted as a collecting class. Whether Palo Alto becomes a stop on the international art circuit or stays a satellite will depend on whether the region’s new money starts buying art the way it buys startup equity: early and in quantity.
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