About

Wessling Contemporary was founded in 2018 in San Francisco's gritty SoMa District as Radian Gallery, with a mission to bring the best artistic work  of North America's West Coast to The World, and bring some of the best bits of the Artistic World to the West Coast. Now located in the Union Square District, the gallery has showcased the talents of scores of emerging and re-emergent artists, primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area.  Just as pioneering Napa Valley wineries caused a tectonic shift in enotechnical perception via The Judgement of Paris, Silcon Valley innovators such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard, Xerox PARC, and Apple caused upheaval in the socio-technical sphere, and Northern California culinary mavericks such as Alice Waters, Bruce Aidells, Thomas Keller, Thomas Odermatt, Brandon Jiu, and Thomas Phan spilled onto the international food scene, the bold actions of pioneering  San Francisco galleriests of the 60s and 70s fomented the introduction of such now universally-revered Bay Area artists such as Ruth Asawa, David Park, Stephen de Staebler, Nathan Olivera, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, and Robert Arneson, among others, who  rocked the East Coast art establishment,  Wessling Contemporary is pursuing a vision that continues this West Coast tradition of jarring the status quo, injecting startling new ways of thinking about art and meaning and beauty into the conversation, and promoting a whole bunch of weird Left Coast ideas that blow people's minds and yes, changes the world.

 

It's a tall order. But we're up for it.

  • Gallery Contributors

    Anthony Wessling, Founding Director
    Anthony Wessling, Founding Director

    Anthony Wessling

    Founding Director

    After three decades and several successful entrepreneurial endeavors in the advertising/design/marketing space, Anthony  (Tony)  Wessling returned to his roots in the fine arts by founding Wessling Contemporary (originally known as Radian Gallery) at his longtime studio space at 440 Brannan in San Francisco's SoMa District in 2018.  Wessling was trained as a photographer, printmaker, and painter at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art, where he studied under Joanne Leonard, Takeshi Takahara, and Louis Marinaro, among others.

     

    In addition to his creative pursuits, Wessling is a bicycling urban optimist who works with numerous civic groups dedicated to improving the livability of our cities and suburbs. And even though he doesn't look like a farmer, he also grows olives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  • Susan R. Kirshenbaum, Associate Art Consultant

    Susan R. Kirshenbaum

    Associate Art Consultant
    Susan Kirshenbaum is a life-long art student, artist, art administrator, teacher, and curator. 

    From early childhood she was encouraged to pursue art and photography while working and studying at her family’s art school, the Ivy School of Professional Art, in Pittsburgh, PA, where Keith Haring was a student in her first class, Marks on Paper.

     

    Susan is heavily involved with the San Francisco art community, having worked with Artspan, City Art Co-op, Northern California Women's Caucus for Art, and the Sausalito Center for the Arts. She has also served as the SFWA (San Francisco Women Artists Gallery) Exhibitions Director and Chair for the UCSF Serenity Art Series. 

     

    Additionally, Susan maintains her own studio art practice at Art Explosion Studios in San Francisco's Mission District and is co-founder of The Invisibility Collective, an interdisciplinary intergenerational group of artists around the USA who delve into deep issues of identity and erasure.

     

    When not immersed in the art world, she travels the real world extensively with her husband, Jack.