111 Minna Gallery Art Gallery / Bar / Club / Event Space / Live Music Venue / Restaurant

SoMa, San Francisco –

With stark white walls, gnarled wooden sculptures, and wide-open dance floors, 111 Minna is what might happen if an art gallery and bar/restaurant gave birth to a club.

During the day, the two-room venue doubles as a gallery, attracting erstwhile creative types and trendy intellectuals with widely varied rotating exhibits. Displays change every month in this urban loft space, and feature local and international shows that run the gamut from brilliantly colored natural landscapes to abstract figurative portraits.

Patrons, consequently, enjoy a diverse mix of art, as well as a diverse mix of fellow visitors. Tatted-up twenty-somethings are just as likely to be sipping a beer at one of the two bars as are fifty-year-old professors, while scruffy art students over-analyze the display near the emergency exit until someone informs them it’s just the ATM machine.

Evenings after 10pm can – though not always – bring the club vibe, when promoters book DJs who spin everything from house and techno to 80s throwbacks and Top 40. If the DJs aren’t spinning, there might be a live band, performance piece, dance showcase, or any number of other special events.

Critics may try to classify it, but anyone who has been to 111 Minna more than once knows it’s impossible to put this multi-faceted spot into a box – and if they did, curators would simply put it on display, and everyone would do an interpretive dance around it.