Catharine Clark Gallery marks its 35th anniversary with a celebration on Thursday, October 15, 2026, from 6 - 8 pm. The evening honors the artists, staff, collectors, curators, writers, performers, collaborating organizations, and audiences who have shaped and supported the gallery since its founding in 1991.
Catharine Clark opened Morphos Gallery in January 1991 in a 900-square-foot storefront in Hayes Valley, guided by the belief that art and ideas were inseparable. The gallery championed artists willing to take formal and intellectual risks, for whom exceptional craft served the realization of a compelling concept. From the outset, its program embraced practices that crossed established categories, including video and performance. Thirty-five years later, those principles continue to guide the gallery.
The gallery moved from Hayes Valley to 49 Geary Street, then to Minna Street, before settling in its present Potrero Hill location in 2013. An expansion in 2023 increased the gallery’s footprint to 9,200 square feet and created added space for BOXBLUR, its performance initiative and a fiscally sponsored project of Dance Film SF, and EXiT, its store devoted to art books, prints, multiples, and artist-designed objects. Through four locations, more than 250 exhibitions, and 200 art fairs—as well as economic upheavals, a pandemic, and profound changes in San Francisco’s cultural life—the gallery has sustained its commitment to artists and to the difficult, thoughtful, and enduring questions their work considers.
The practices of the artists represented by the gallery encompass painting, sculpture, photography, film, animation, textiles, ceramics, language, social practice, installation, performance, and emerging technologies. They are connected less by a shared aesthetic than by a commitment to storytelling and sustained inquiry into history, war, migration, race, citizenship, labor, environmental loss, gender, belief, family, humor, memory, and the construction of cultural narratives.
Catharine Clark describes narrative as central to the program: “Stories are how we understand ourselves relationally. They allow histories that have been suppressed, distorted, or forgotten to return to the present.” She continues, “The artists I have been drawn to are storytellers in the broadest sense. Their work does not offer simple narratives; it complicates what we think we know.”
Catharine Clark Gallery invites its community to celebrate on October 15 from 6 - 8pm and to recognize the roots and shoots that the artists, ideas, experiments, and relationships have contributed across the 35 years of the gallery’s history.
