South Beach Artists Studios is a loose collaboration of artists and crafts people whose studios are in the FreewayWrap building at 340 Bryant Street, in the historic South Beach area of San Francisco. This four-story warehouse, surrounded by the Bryant Street onramp and the Bay Bridge itself, has been many things over years, including an industrial printing plant and machine shop. Since the late 1970s, the building has been the host for an eclectic mix of artists and small businesses. Current tenants include painters, printmakers, photographers, performance and installation artists, music producers, filmmakers, graphic designers, architects, antique dealers and refinishers, a signmaker, a tee-shirt company, a jeweler and maker of wearable art, a furniture maker and a shoemaker.
In 2009, we organized South Beach Artists as a way for us to work together to present and promote the art made in our building. So far we have collaborated on Open Studios and SoMa Art crawl events. Future events include the launch of an ongoing series of group shows.
More about the neighborhood: 340 Bryant is located in South Beach, a half-block from South Park, on the slope of Rincon Hill. Our micro-neighborhood is the old South End Warehouse District of San Francisco, and one can still see the concrete finger pier of our building that trains used to unload huge spools of pulp paper. Rails from the old train tracks are visible just a few feet from our main entrance.