Courtesy of Justin Giarla

It’s 4 p.m. on a Wednesday at the corner of Geary and Larkin. A man swaggers into the middle of the street, lunging after another man with a broken beer bottle. A cop pokes his head out from a pizza joint and yells, “Get out of the street!”

It’s an unlikely spot for an art gallery, but for almost eight years this lively corner in the Tenderloin has been home to Justin Giarla’s haven of lowbrow art, The Shooting Gallery, and the more recently opened White Walls. His third space, a tiny spot on Sixth Street, is appropriately named Gallery 3. 

This Saturday marks the official opening of Giarla’s fourth gallery in the Tenderloin, 941Geary, housed in a former smog-checking garage.

As this famously rough, beautification-resistant neighborhood shows the first signs of a creeping gentrification—brought on in part by the city’s Mid-Market revitalization plans—edgy galleries like Giarla’s are in the spotlight. But even though Giarla’s art has evolved from provocative, so-called lowbrow to a more “refined” street art, he can’t ever imagine leaving the Tenderloin.

Giarla came to the neighborhood in 2003 to open his first art gallery after a 10-year stint working in nightclubs. He was attracted to the Tenderloin’s cheap prices, but also its distinct character. “The Mission was already too gentrified,” said Giarla, “whereas the Tenderloin was just so raw.” And that rawness gave Giarla an artistic freedom he wouldn’t have had anywhere else in the city. “Back then, I was showing a lot of erotic and violent art, what some people would deem crass and in poor taste,” said Giarla. “I knew I could do whatever I wanted over here and people would leave me alone.”

But the same rawness that Giarla found so inspiring scared visitors away from the gallery, who asked to be escorted in and out of the neighborhood. For the first three years, said Giarla, crack dealers owned the block. “Back in the day, people would just stumble in completely annihilated and pass out on the floor,” Giarla said. 

His neighbors weren’t the only ones involved in illegal activities. In 2004, on the one-year anniversary of The Shooting Gallery, Marin native Giarla was arrested for selling cocaine, ecstasy and crystal methamphetamine out of the gallery. Giarla had been selling drugs to connections he had made in his nightclub days to “keep the gallery open.” Among other things, including over 100 tabs of ecstasy, the cops confiscated a handgun and bulletproof vest with nine bullets embedded in it, which turned out to be an art project, not evidence.

“The ironic thing is, the police thought I was selling to people on the street,” said Giarla, “but if the people on the street had known what I was doing, they wouldn’t have left me alone.”

Giarla went to jail for ten days and prepared for the end of his career as a gallery owner. “I was like, that’s it, I guess it’s all over now,” Giarla remembers. “I figured it’d be chained shut,” Giarla says, remembering his first visit back to the gallery after he got out of jail. “But my key worked, and everything was where it was,” said Giarla. The bulletproof vest was later declared a work of art by the superior judge—the vest, which Giarla shot at nine times at his friend’s farm in Napa, had been part of the gallery’s annual gun show.

Thanks to the help of some dedicated artists and publicity in local newspapers, Giarla was back on his feet in no time—and more successful than he had ever been. I had artists lining up to show with me after that,” said Giarla, remembering one artist in particular from San Diego who wired him $10,000 overnight. Many of the artists he had shown—punk kids, graffiti artists—were sympathetic, as they dabbled in drugs themselves. “I’m not proud of what I did,” said Giarla, “but in an ironic way, it brought me success sooner.” He hesitated: “If I could go back and change it, I wouldn’t.”

These days, there’s more of a police presence on the block, and a lot of hipster clothing boutiques and diver bars have been moving into the neighborhood’s vacant commercials spaces. Usually when so many art galleries start opening in a low-income neighborhood like the Tenderloin, it’s a red flag for gentrification. But as long as the rent-controlled SROs are still there, “gentrification is going to be really, really slow,” according to Giarla.

While he says his art is inspired by the rawness of the Tenderloin, Giarla’s taste has broadened as street art went mainstream. “When I first opened, I was into art some would call ‘lowbrow’,” said Giarla, who used to show a lot of ‘50s and ‘60s hot-rod art, skate-punk and Betty Page pin-up style photography. He is currently more interested in pop surrealism and he even did his first abstract show recently. “The old graffiti artists grew up and are now doing fine art,” said Giarla, mentioning artists like Shepard Fairey, the Clayton brothers and Mike Giant, who recently gave up tattooing to focus on illustration and clothing design.

Giarla hopes his new gallery will be a showcase for a new genre of international, street-inspired fine art. The opening on September 18 will feature the solo show “Flotsam’s Wonder World” by artist Mike Shine from Bolinas, a surfer that does art on found wood that washes ashore, as well as a 20-foot long by 12-foot wide carnival tent, an epic art opera and trick-or-treating. It’s a genre-defying inaugural exhibition in a gallery that, above all, will be an experimental 3,000-square-foot canvas.

“That’s just it, what is street art? What is pop surrealism?” said Giarla. “It’s all just fine art if you put it in a gallery. And that’s the great thing about art—it has no boundaries.”