Jonathan Carver Moore Is Rewriting the Gallery Playbook

It’s often the gallerists who didn’t come up through art school, insider networks or academic pipelines who are best equipped to rewrite the rules of the game. Free from the conventions of the art world’s old guard, they build models rooted in intuition and lived experience rather than inherited business norms shaped by an elitist infrastructure that is increasingly showing its limits when it comes to reaching the younger, broader audiences the industry now depends on. Jonathan Carver Moore exemplifies this turn. He launched his eponymous gallery in 2023 after leaving a career in nonprofit communications and institutional development focused on criminal justice reform and racial equity.

He grew up across cultures, shaped early on by a life of movement between countries, languages and ways of seeing. His father served in the Air Force, and as a result, Carver Moore spent his childhood between Belgium, Hawaii and the Philippines—an experience that likely informed his humanist curiosity and deep sensitivity to diverse modes of expression. After his parents divorced, his mother—originally from Washington, D.C.—returned there, and it was in the capital that he completed high school, college and graduate school.

Carver Moore moved to San Francisco a decade ago to take a job in the Tenderloin District, where he would later open his gallery. Despite—or perhaps because of—the neighborhood’s history and present-day reputation, he could not imagine a better location. The Tenderloin has long been a working-class and immigrant neighborhood and a refuge for those pushed out of other parts of the city: low-income families, LGBTQ+ communities, artists, newly arrived immigrants and, later, unhoused populations. Today, it is often portrayed in media narratives as ground zero for San Francisco’s urban crises, marked by visible homelessness, drug use, mental health emergencies and street-level disorder.

Yet it is also one of the city’s most culturally dense areas, home to major institutions such as the Asian Art Museum, SFJAZZ, CounterPulse and The Lab, and it’s within walking distance of SFMOMA. “I really believe in doubling down on this neighborhood,” Carver Moore tells Observer. “We’re situated between major museums, but even more than that, I care deeply about the fact that, as a Black gay person, people should be able to come into a space where they can see great art for free. That was the moment I realized, this is why I have to be here.”

The Tenderloin is also historically significant as a center of queer nightlife and political organizing, widely recognized as the oldest continuously documented transgender neighborhood in the United States—and possibly in the world. A place where experimental performance, underground music and politically engaged art have long flourished, it is a fitting context for the gallery Carver Moore had envisioned. As the only openly gay Black male gallerist in San Francisco, he is focused on championing LGBTQ+ and queer artists.

“When I walk my dogs, I love seeing people stop and peer into the windows, trying to understand what’s going on inside. The bus is right there—the one that runs up and down San Francisco—and I hear people say, ‘Oh my God, look at the Black art.’ It’s beautiful to be able to say, actually, I live here, and I will never leave.”

Carver Moore is acutely aware that the Tenderloin is often discussed exclusively in relation to homelessness, gentrification and the city’s drug crisis, but he refuses that framing: “These are my neighbors. I don’t mind sharing the sidewalk in front of the gallery with a homeless person. I understand it. And people here are incredibly kind.”

A few years ago, internationally renowned South African photographer Pieter Hugo produced an entire series documenting life in the Tenderloin and its residents. In 2024, Hugo agreed to present the series for the first time in a gallery context with Carver Moore, precisely because of this authentic connection to the place and the people he shot.

Most importantly, the exhibition resonated deeply in San Francisco, Carver Moore recalls, as many visitors recognized the people portrayed. For the first time, they were invited to look them in the eye, at life-size scale, and encounter them simply as humans. “That’s why I loved that show so much—it changed how people see unhoused people. I think it had to do with meeting them at eye level. So many people just step over others without really seeing them,” he says. “It was about acknowledgment—recognizing the scale and dignity of their lives, within the community.” As he flips through the exhibition catalogue, he points to the portrait of a man he used to see every day outside his apartment, who has since passed away.

It is with this same focus on human connection that Carver Moore speaks about the artists he works with; there is always a story of a relationship before any CV or price list. A casual encounter with an artist was also what ultimately pushed him to open his own gallery. During a visit to Canada, Carver Moore encountered the work of Zanele Muholi, the internationally acclaimed South African artist, photographer and self-described “visual activist,” who was honored last year with a major exhibition at Tate Modern. “We were at the Ottawa Art Gallery and walked in and saw these photographs. I had never seen a Black queer person like me represented that way. It completely stopped me,” he recalls. He posted an image on Instagram, and Muholi reached out to thank him—much to his surprise, given her massive following. “I asked her for an interview, and we became friends. After that, we spoke every single day. That relationship changed my life.”

By then, Carver Moore was already collecting art and showing artists informally in his office. Yet, like many, the pandemic forced him to reassess his life and sense of purpose. He had a stable career, but he was not happy. Conversations with Muholi and other artists encouraged him to make art his central vocation.

A few months after opening the gallery, Carver Moore also launched an artist residency in a space next door, which has since become a core engine of his gallery’s program. “When I launched the residency, people thought I was crazy. They were like, ‘You just opened three months ago, and you’re already talking about a residency?’ I didn’t care. I just did it,” he says. His goal was to create a platform that could support BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists at multiple levels. Crucially, the residency fosters sustained relationships—not only between artist and gallerist, but also with collectors and the wider community.

Artists receive workspace, a stipend and accommodations and work on-site for six to seven weeks before debuting new bodies of work at the gallery or fairs. At this year’s FOG Design + Art, Carver Moore presented a group of large-scale new canvases by self-taught Cameroonian artist Sesse Elangwe, produced during his recent residency. Set against recognizable Bay Area landscapes and urban backdrops, and rendered in Elangwe’s signature style—boldly saturated color and emotionally, psychologically charged eyes—the monumental portraits speak to acknowledgment, visibility and self-awareness. They were inspired by the artist’s encounters with members of San Francisco’s Black community during his stay and extended into a broader meditation on Black experiences across geographies.

The largest horizontal canvas anchoring the booth, Bloom Skies, is a meditation and a call for growth, aspiration and the quiet persistence required to move through obstacles. In the painting, Elangwe portrayed Carver Moore himself, turning the work into a testament to the role the gallerist plays in reshaping artists’ trajectories by amplifying their voices and creating conditions for meaningful visibility.

Set against the sunset and nightscape, the city lights emerge as a metaphor for possibility—distant yet attainable—urging the viewer to keep their eye on the prize. In the foreground, the fence is both a boundary and an illusion. “While it may initially appear insurmountable, its gaps reveal the lights beyond, signaling that obstacles are not fixed endpoints but moments to be navigated with intention and belief,” explained the artist. “The prominent eye invites a heightened awareness—an opening toward one’s goals and a reminder to remain focused even when the path forward feels obscured.” Fashion, posture and presentation carry their own significance here, underscoring elegance, self-definition and the power of how one chooses to show up in the world.

The painting was acquired on preview day by a U.S. institution. This is one of several institutional placements Carver Moore has secured in just a few years, including a work by Pieter Hugo acquired by SFMOMA, works by Aplerh-Doku Borlabi now in the collections of both the De Young Museum and the Denver Art Museum, Nkosi Ngiphile for the Cantor at Stanford and works by Sipho Nuse and Lulu Mhlana acquired by the National Museum of African Art.

This was also not the first time Carver Moore brought artists to a fair following a residency. The year prior, he did the same with Anoushka Mirchandani, resulting in a sold-out booth. “I love art fairs, but asking someone to come in, see everything, decide what they’re looking at and spend serious money—all in four days—can feel unfair,” he reflects. “People really responded because they had the chance to get to know the artist beforehand and connect with the work over time.”

The residency model functions as a bridge that brings artists and their stories closer to collectors and supporters who can follow their work over months rather than moments. “I realized that if you bring people along the journey—through residencies, open studios, open houses—they connect differently. There’s so much work that has to happen before you get close to the human behind the artwork. That’s what I’m interested in.”

During a recent residency, a collector helped Carver Moore cover the artist’s accommodation costs for a seven-week stay. The result is the soon-to-close exhibition of New Orleans-based artist Auudi Dorsey, presenting a new body of work developed during his residency and extending research he began in 2022 into the cultural relationship between African American communities and water.

“People actually want to support artists. They’re open to it. But sometimes they don’t have enough walls to buy more—and this is a different kind of support,” Carver Moore notes. It allows artists to make ambitious work they otherwise could not, and supporters become part of a longer trajectory rather than a single transaction.

Always exploring new models, Carver Moore is now in the early stages of organizing a collector-focused exhibition at Minnesota Street Project (1150 25th Street), timed to coincide with the San Francisco Art Fair—another critical moment for the Bay Area art scene. “It’s really a love letter to San Francisco and to the collectors who have quietly sustained underrepresented artists and helped keep the city’s cultural fabric alive during a time of major change.”

Carver Moore might not have gone to school for this, nor did he work for another gallery before opening his own. Instead, he built his gallery’s program and identity organically, one human connection at a time. “I’ve always had a very personal approach, and I think that’s why community matters so much to me here,” he says. “I don’t like to say I’m successful because of something, but I do think I’m successful because I don’t have a capped mindset. I don’t see limits when I’m trying to do something, and I don’t think anyone should. If I had gone through the so-called proper channels, I don’t think I would have done things the way I have.”

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