/ (pronounced slash) is a 501c(3) nonprofit visual art space founded by Ana Saygi in 2018 to advance and promote the expanding field of contemporary art in San Francisco through exhibitions, publications, and public programming. / aims to connect local artists, curators, and audiences with national and international artists and is run by a team of four artists: Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen, Efe Özmen, Ana Saygi, and Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, who met through their MFA graduate studies in San Francisco.
Our main gallery programming supports the work of Bay Area-based, independent curators as they organize thematically relevant exhibitions that bring international and globally exhibiting artists into dialogue with early-career and local artists. We work with our Advisory Committee to identify curators with strong artistic visions and roots in Bay Area and international communities and collaborate closely with each guest curator, supporting their curatorial visions through space and a meaningful budget. We acknowledge that local curators play a central role in holding together the ecosystem for artists in the region and hope to help sustain their practices. Exhibitions are accompanied by public programming and publications, featuring essays by commissioned art writers.
Our library, a unique space with built-in wooden bookshelves, supports guest curators and artists with longer-term, archive-, research-, and community-based projects rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each project unfolds in our library for six months and is activated through in-person programming, including workshops, conversations, and readings centering collaboration with local artists, writers, and scholars.
/room/ is the small project space adjacent to the / main gallery and library dedicated to exhibiting work by local, emerging artists selected from open calls by a series of guest jurors. Initiated in the office at /’s first location in 2019, /room/ continues to be a space for artists to exhibit experimental, primarily solo projects developed collaboratively from their submitted proposals. /room/ creates a supportive onramp for local artists earlier in their careers by offering them a platform to exhibit their work parallel to more established artists on view in the main gallery.
/ programming is offered free of charge and designed to be accessible to the general public.
/ Advisory Committee Members: Drew Heitzler, Dorothy R. Santos, Sam Vernon, and Tanya Zimbardo.
/ Staff: Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen (she/her), Creative Lead | Efe Özmen (he/him), Exhibitions Manager, | Ana Saygi (she/her), Director | Maxine Schoefer-Wulf (she/her), Deputy Director