In a semisecluded nook off 14th Street, a raw warehouse is flanked on one side by a noisy scooter shop and on the other by a pack of menacing-looking huskies that guard a neighboring entrance as if it were a Siberian lair. The space, a busy woodshop for 20 years, appeared destined to become a neighborhood eyesore until audacious art dealer Chris Perez spotted it in the summer of 2007 as he casually browsed the Mission for available leases. The unlikely building now houses his gallery, Ratio 3, which prides itself on being off the beaten path. “You have to know we’re here,” Perez says, with a laugh.

Since the gallery’s unveiling a year and a half ago, neither the dubious location nor the furry guardians have deterred the movers and shakers of the international art world. That much was evident last May, when the gallery celebrated the West Coast solo debut of superstar photographer Ryan McGinley, whom Perez befriended during the gallerist’s tenure at the Whitney Museum of American Art, from 2000 to 2002. Within minutes, Ratio 3’s ample space on Stevenson Street brimmed with enthusiasts, its raw wooden floors creaking under the collective weight of curators, like Apsara DiQuinzio from SFMOMA; power players, like Jens Hoffmann of San Francisco’s California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; a fistful of understated collectors; and more than a few wide-eyed indie boys lugging vintage cameras in hopes of catching a furtive snap of their idol. (The braver ones politely asked me to take their photo, arm around McGinley.) While trying to recall how a real-deal analog camera works, I glimpsed film director John Waters being trailed by designer Todd Oldham.

The crowd soon reached capacity and began overflowing past the main doors and, for my taste, a bit too close to the now perplexed huskies. So I guarded my beer near the gallery’s front desk, which gave me a clear vantage point for the arrival of none other than Gavin New­som and then fiancée Jennifer Siebel. (The missus is a bud­ding art collector.) The pair strolled in nonchalantly—at least, as well as they could with security in tow. McGinley ran toward me eagerly, his own camera in hand. “Take a picture of me with the mayor!” he yelled, beaming. In that flash, it hit me: Here, in the outer reaches of the San Francisco art world, away from SFMOMA, the de Young, and the Geary Street hub, the photography of an international art sensation was on display. The exhibit had drawn members of both the establishment and the young, in-the-know crowd. The electricity was indefinable yet unmistakable. In the recent past, this same type of energy has not only invigorated a city’s art scene but has also changed the course of art history—SoHo in the ’80s, Los Angeles’s Chinatown in the ’90s, and the Lower East Side at the beginning of the current millennium. This time, though, it was San Francisco that was abuzz.

Perez and a handful of other young, ambitious, outward-looking gallery owners are at the center of an invigorating generational shift that could forge a new art-world identity for San Francisco. Glen Helfand, a critic who has written about art in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, says, “There is great stuff happening here, and it’s the smaller spaces—the diaspora away from 49 Geary—that are increasing an awareness of the Bay Area.” Wattis Institute director Hoffmann, whose arts programming is expanding the international visibility of San Francisco, agrees.

“There is a new type of energy here, and the newer spaces are starting to do a different type of work”—work that is innovative and risk-taking. In such dire economic times, this might seem like a naïve gamble, but historically, the art world tends to reward mavericks over the meek, both in the short term and the long. “I think it’s a good moment to open a gallery,” says Hoffmann.

These new gallery owners are attempting the unprecedented: To make the work of young San Francisco artists matter to the international art world, they’re making their art matter in San Francisco itself. Historically, the city has had abundant talent, art schools galore, world-renowned museums, and many notable, established galleries running healthy businesses that support mid-career artists: Fraenkel Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Gal­lery Paule Anglim, and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, to name a few. But for emerging contemporary work and its corresponding scene, San Francisco has been regarded as an escape from the pressures and trendiness of art’s power centers. New York, London, and, more recently, Los Angeles have been the breeding grounds for young artists, polishing them and guiding them from art-school prodigies to art-world sensations with the skills, talent, and self-promotional know-how to last.

Every so often, one of these metropolises truly blows up, as a burst of creative output intersects with a rush of attention from gallery owners, curators, the press, and collectors to create a new art-world zeitgeist. The most recent example occurred in downtown New York. In 2002, new galleries, many on the Lower East Side—Rivington Arms, Reena Spaulings Fine Art—began advocating for a new pool of artists. Trendsetters took heed. The excitement built, and within two years, Banks Violette and Mathew Cerletty had been selected for the hugely influential Biennial at the Whitney. In 2006, both Vanity Fair and W published their first art issues, which, of course, trumpeted this scene; Hedi Slimane, then the designer for Dior Homme, photographed Violette and Cerletty for Vanity Fair. The murmur that had started quietly four years prior had ushered in the next gene­ration of vital American artists.

Chris Perez isn’t particularly interested in giving San Francisco a Lower East Side makeover, but he wants to have a similar effect. “In New York, a gallery is supposed to look and act a certain way,” he says. “We can reinvent it—it’s the Wild West here!” In seven years, he has not only built a booming business but also single-handedly upped the ante for young local gallerists by nailing the crucial aspects of generating buzz: tapping an impressive collector base, making global art leaders pay attention, working the ever important art-fair circuit, and launching the careers of local artists, such as Mitzi Pederson, a young sculptor whose review committee Perez sat on while she was still a timid art student. “What he’s done is amazing,” raves Sabrina Buell, the daughter of Mark Buell and Susie Tompkins Buell and the director of the West Coast outpost of New York powerhouse gallery Matthew Marks, which she runs from her luminous loft on Bryant Street. “He’s on par with any other great gallery in the world,” Buell says.

Perez’s peers have similar goals. Silverman Gallery in the Tendernob, run by 26-year-old Jessica Silverman, has developed a bold freshman roster of locally grown talent, even as it has drawn up-and-coming international artists to San Francisco. Dina Pugh and Joyce Grimm, of Triple Base Gallery in the Mission, are as committed to local talent as Silverman is, and they have drawn attention by subverting long-standing prejudices about the local anticommercial art scene. John Trippe, another member of this new wave, has been an international pathfinder, building his influential website, Fecalface.com, before opening the genre-busting brick-and-mortar Fecal Face Dot Gallery on Gough Street, on the edge of Hayes Valley.

But the new generation’s effort to put San Francisco on the map as an art-world epicenter won’t be easy. “In the past, it hadn’t clicked here, and it really doesn’t make sense to me,” says Buell. “There’s money here; there’s a progressive, interested community of people who are supportive of culture in general; there are amazing institutions. But the gallery scene hadn’t been strong enough to really get it going.” The high-profile director of one of New York’s most prominent galleries puts it more bluntly over email: “There are still cheap rents there, so that means lots of loft parties and great rock shows. There are good art schools, too. But the overall gallery scene is like a no-go.”

For evidence that this could change—and, in the process, alter the future of San Francisco’s art scene—you need look no further than Los Angeles, which nearly 20 years ago was a gallery no-man’s-land. Then, between 1993 and 1999, a slew of new spaces opened. “In the 1990s, collectors were buying largely from what were then relatively small galleries, like Marc Foxx and Regen Projects. But by doing so, they changed the way Los Angeles thought of itself,” says Lawrence Rinder, the newly appointed director of the Berkeley Art Museum, a former dean of CCA, the founder of the Wattis Institute, and the patron saint of this new gene­ration of art players. And what started in a few offbeat locations quickly turned into a citywide renaissance that mobilized a new surge of artists, including Cathy Opie, Lari Pittman, and Charles Ray, who were championed by collectors like Dean Valentine and Peter and Eileen Norton. “Everyone said, ‘Art here matters!’ ” Rinder recalls. The surge also created a self-perpetuating cycle of press covering Los Angeles’s galleries and collectors purchasing work by those galleries’ artists.

Today, art is such a part of the culture of Los Angeles that Culver City is practically Chelsea West. Back when L.A. was awakening, at least some people thought San Francisco was ready to follow suit. In 2002, Javier Peres, a San Francisco lawyer with a penchant for conceptual art and the overtly sexual work of raunchy young artists like Terence Koh and Dan Colen, left his practice to open a new gallery: Peres Projects, at 1800 Bryant, on the eastern edge of the Mission­—a neighborhood in transition, with enough condos and big-box stores, like Ross and Office Depot, to ensure healthy foot traffic. Peres braved the uncertainties of the setting, amassed a colorful stable that included San Francisco Art Institute graduate and aspiring painter Matt Greene, and mounted a series of provocative exhibitions. But after only a handful of shows in six months, he shuttered the space. Its swan song was a gay neo-Nazi-themed dinner for Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce at the East German restaurant Walzwerk. There was no shortage of fans but not a collector in the house, and without them, no sales. “And that, in a nutshell, is why I left San Francisco,” recalls Peres.

What makes the story so tantalizing today is what happened to Peres next. He relocated south, to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and in four years, Peres Projects became synonymous with the new L.A. art scene, as well as one of the nation’s most internationally recognized and sought-after young galleries. Its somewhat lewd roster was featured in major exhibitions, including at London’s renowned Saatchi Gallery. Unveiling outposts in Berlin and New York, Peres has transformed himself into a main attraction and has garnered an enviable amount of high-profile press. And the aspiring painter? Greene’s epic, sexually explicit canvases now reportedly fetch upward of $150,000—despite the fact that most reputable sources still consider him an early-career artist.

What Javier Peres could accomplish only by moving to Los Angeles, Ratio 3’s Chris Perez is doing in San Francisco. After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in 1999 with a BFA in studio art, Perez cut his teeth in New York as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney. While there, he helped organize the 2002 Biennial and cultivated his own projects on the side, like enlisting many of the unsung artists he’d befriended to show in a stealth biennial of his own, staged guerrilla-style in his Brooklyn flat. “It was apartment 3,” he says drily, explaining the moniker that stuck.

Perez emulated that approach when he returned to San Francisco in 2002, launching a makeshift gallery in the 10-by-11-foot living room of his apartment at 21st and Guerrero Streets. He mixed his East Coast allies with local finds, many of them his former classmates from CCA. He showed their work mostly by appointment and reluctantly opened his doors to the public for a few hours each week, on Sundays. His efforts struck a chord, and Ratio 3 outgrew its tight quarters and relocated to the warehouse on Stevenson Street.

However, Perez’s early experiences with the Bay Area collecting scene underscore how unlike Los Angeles’s or New York’s it is. Despite his New York cachet, it wasn’t until he began working the international art-fair circuit that he began persuading local buyers to take a risk on what was available in their backyard. Perez is all too aware of the irony here: “It was a bit ridiculous at first,” he recalls. “We’d go to Miami or Basel and meet collectors who had never heard of Ratio 3, even though we were a few blocks away from them. It was only after they met us there that we started working together.” Contrary to what some East Coast art insiders believe, there are, in fact, collectors in the Bay Area—not merely established patrons, like the Kramlichs, Fishers, and Schwabs, who are often drawn to established midcareer artists or the blue-chip work of 20th-century masters, but also less visible collectors who hide in plain sight all around us. But many are shy and not especially adventurous. As the Berkeley Art Museum’s Rinder observes, “the wealthy community of San Francisco is of a very different kind than New York’s. One does not demonstrate one’s wealth and flaunt acquisitions here.”

True to form, most gallery owners, including some of the new breed, are reluctant to disclose prominent buyers, even those with highly visible civic ties. A prime example: When—after a personal introduction from one of the new-guard gallery owners, special visits, and repeated assurances—I finally persuaded one such patron to come out of hiding, she was modest and unassuming, favoring polite email exchanges that downplayed the importance of her considerable investment in local art. This is a far cry from many New York collectors, who are habitually plastered on the society pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Page Six as they attend an endless round of opening receptions, artist dinners, and museum galas.

But San Francisco’s inconspicuous consumption is only half the problem for these ambitious gallery owners. The contents of many local buyers’ collections invariably betray a sensibility that strays eastward. Bay Area collectors, despite their cultural pedigrees, are not unlike magpies: drawn to all things shiny, especially a piece of art. In this case, the glimmer comes from what’s already been stamped with a seal of approval from the art-world powers that be. So Bay Area collectors will clamor for that Warhol silkscreen and that Ryan McGinley photograph as the artist in the loft next door goes unsupported.

But this pattern is already showing signs of shifting. “Last year, that would have been true, but now it is turning on its head,” says Jessica Silverman, who has tackled head-on the challenge of elusive local collectors. She has succeeded by reaching out to a younger generation of art enthusiasts and by never wavering in her commitment to San Francisco and its innovative artist pool. “There are more artists here per capita than in any other city in the world, and the artists I’m having the most success with are here,” she says.

She’s the youngest of the new gallerists, having started Silverman Gallery three years ago while completing graduate school at CCA. Her artists are equally green—in age, if not in spirit. They share a youthful curiosity that yields intrepid experiments with materials or simply an unabashed wistfulness, as in the dreamlike snapshots of Silverman’s star photographer, 24-year-old Job Piston. “Starting in San Francisco is both a blessing and a curse,” Silverman says, recalling her gallery’s initial incarnation, a basement with slanted walls in a remote section of Dogpatch. Deciding to shift gears last year, she chose a more customer-friendly location near the swiftly gentrifying but gallery-free intersection of Sutter and Jones. “It’s changed everything,” she says. “There are things happening now that I would never have thought possible in 2006.”

The momentum started with the zany videos of 34-year-old UC Berkeley graduate Desirée Holman, whose reenactments of ’90s sitcoms in rubber masks (Roseanne and The Cosby Show being two inspirations) received multiple curatorial accolades, culminating in the prestigious SFMOMA SECA Art Award in 2008, as well as the acquisition of one of her pieces for the Berkeley Art Museum’s permanent collection. This recognition, and growing interest from such notable art publications as Artweek and Artforum, has helped other Silverman artists as well, including Tammy Rae Carland, who takes emotive still-life photographs. Such buzz invariably translates into more sales: Holman’s videos, along with her beautifully rendered colored-pencil drawings, are well on their way to selling out. “It’s exciting,” Silverman says. “People who collect are coming out of the woodwork for me every day.”

Silverman’s efforts underscore the importance of visibility for a new gallery, particularly one that’s out of the way. Visibility may also hold the key to redefining San Francisco’s role in the art game at large. One of her peers, John Trippe, has figured out a creative solution: using the web. In the nine years since it launched, his online gallery and art resource, Fecalface.com, has attracted a massive international audience of up to 13,000 unique visitors a day, building an arts network that encompasses San Francisco, New York, Brazil, and Australia. Using it, a skinny jean–sporting art fan in London can tune in to the hottest painter currently working in West Oakland.

The website began as a zine in 1998, when Trippe was living in a “dirty skater house.” It was mostly a personal project, an informal platform where Trippe nurtured and documented his long-standing interest in visual culture, amassing snapshots, write-ups, and snippets of friends’ work, much of it related to design that came out of skateboarding culture. The project gradually evolved into a website around 2000, when Trippe, then a programmer, was working on the website of skater magazine Thrasher. Opting for a lucrative dot-com offer, he took advantage of the ample free time afforded by corporate office work and slowly started building Fecalface.com.

“I worked on it while everyone else was emailing their friends,” he says. Those first postings have expanded to include artists’ blogs and in-depth interviews and reviews, as well as a thorough arts-culture calendar used by most of the city’s art community. Perhaps more important, Trippe has provided worldwide exposure to local artists, such as painter and draftsman Josh Keyes, whose work started moving as swiftly as Trippe’s posts went up in 2006, and Paul Urich, a relative unknown, who was the first artist featured on the site and who has gone on to show his ghostly renderings throughout the United States and Europe, as well as being featured in Artweek.

Fecalface.com reached a crossroads in 2007, when a space in Hayes Valley became available. Trippe considered it an opportune time to venture into real space and to capitalize on the far-reaching network his website had developed. However, he’s the first to stress that this is far from being a traditional gallery: “We don’t work with any specific artists, really. I’d say we work within like-minded sensibilities. It’s a bit hard to describe, but it probably has a lot to do with growing up in punk rock and skateboarding culture.” This loose approach can’t help but evoke the creative legacy of the Mis­sion School, the slacker-driven movement from the mid-’90s. This was San Francisco’s last art-world splash and has remained an unshakable association. But with his dual operations, Trippe has managed to subvert the stereotype of the so-called slacker aesthetic by rechanneling the energy of street culture into a more mature enterprise. When pressed, Trippe is ultimately ambivalent about this historical baggage: “Those guys—and girls—were some of the first artists in the skate/surf scene to take the step down the fine-art route. But I don’t know how I feel about the titles and stuff.”

Dina Pugh and Joyce Grimm, the owners of Triple Base Gallery, are all too familiar with San Francisco’s loaded recent artistic history. In late 2005, Pugh and Grimm took over the space during their final year in the curatorial master’s program at CCA. “Triple Base was originally founded by two artists working together in the Mission,” says Pugh. “They used it as their studio and also did all kinds of art projects for the community. But it wasn’t a structured gallery with regular programming—or even business hours, for that matter.” In other words, the gallery was another example of that famous fixture of the San Francisco artistic community: the alternative art space, an intrepid artist-run nonprofit with earnest goals and minimal success as a selling space of notice to the art world. “I don’t think there’s another U.S. city that has so many,” notes Jens Hoffmann of the Wattis Institute. So Pugh and Grimm decided to invent a new model: part nonprofit artist mentorship space, part real commercial gallery. “We liked what it stood for already,” Grimm says, “but we wanted it to have more of an international scope and dialogue.”

One of their first projects, “The Flat Files,” amassed an archive of drawings and other small-scale works by local artists, which eventually evolved into a formal collection that now includes the sculpture and drawings of Jay Nelson and the works of Rachel Kaye. “We make a commitment to represent artists that are going to continually challenge themselves as they move forward,” stresses Grimm. “These are the people who can challenge the community and really invent the space anew.”

This approach has allowed Triple Base to extend its reach far beyond its storefront, and to tap into new resources. As members of the highly respected New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), Pugh and Grimm have been able to showcase local work in NADA’s annual art fair in Miami alongside fellow attention-getting new galleries, including Ratio 3 and Jack Hanley. “In our first couple years, we’ve worked hard to get the four original artists we represented recognition outside of the Bay Area, and it seems to have worked,” says Pugh. “Jay Nelson had his retrofitted scooter parked on the NADA entrance lawn. Kyle Mock’s work is so popular in Copenhagen, he’s had two successful shows there. Bryson Gill is living in Berlin for the year and is going to have a solo show with us next January.” And, Grimm quickly adds, “we have only just begun.”

If the recent SECA opening at SFMOMA is any indication, the new galleries’ collective potential is limitless. Since 1967, the biennial SECA Art Award has singled out the best and brightest among Bay Area artists, providing them with a full-scale exhibition, a catalog, and ample press exposure—in short, all the early-career perks any emerging artist could wish for. But given the commotion caused by this year’s winners, you’d almost think they didn’t need the assistance.

The crush at the door said “international sensation” rather than “local debut,” as MOMA trustees and scrambling press packed into the brimming galleries to view works by Silverman’s Desirée Holman and Ratio 3’s Jordan Kantor. The frenzy was a testament to these fledgling power players’ ability to push young artists onto the walls of a world-renowned institution, only a few feet away from the century’s most provocative innovators.

Allotted more square footage than any previous SECA exhibition, this year’s show seemed to warrant it—both for its content and its magnetism. Mingling with the well-wishers were suitably larger-than-life art-world figures, including New York megagallerist Jeffrey Deitch, who hadn’t visited San Francisco in almost five years (despite showing the work of another 2008 SECA winner, Tauba Auerbach, and fellow Bay Area artist Barry McGee). Also onsite were Chelsea artist Keegan McHargue and Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall, who was working on a large-scale commission for the museum, and, of course, enough of the well-coiffed and artfully disheveled to fill the society pages of any glossy rag. All in all, it was the type of glittery, high-profile spectacle that’s not terribly unusual for a major art-world capital—and that’s precisely the point.

“The SECA opening proves that San Francisco is a new up-and-coming city,” SFMOMA assistant curator Apsara DiQuinzio told me a week after the opening. (She and co-curator Alison Gass narrowed down the pool of finalists to the four award recipients.) “These artists are working in the Bay Area, but they are not limited by the region. They’re engaging issues being developed in the art world at large, nationally and internationally. This can’t just be categorized as ‘Bay Area’ art.”

The Bay Area’s expansive potential was captured strangely well by Holman’s multiple-channel video installation, previously shown on flat-screens, but now given ample space to create a full viewing environment. Projected as a three-by-five-foot image, the work went from being quirky to being incandescent and hypnotic. “The presen­tation allowed us to see much more detail than the first go-round. In making the image that large, there was just so much more in the video that hadn’t been seen before,” said DiQuinzio. The same could be said of San Francisco’s art scene blown up on a large scale: It reveals unprecedented possibilities. “Though these are very new galleries,” DiQuinzio adds, “they show that San Francisco is vital.”

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Franklin Melendez is a San Francisco contributing writer.