While the wider art community is struggling to cope with market contractions, while some legendary dealers are lifting the white flag, the Giant-Carrotto continues to expand its footprint in strategically affluent collector centers or areas currently full of boom and grand. Just yesterday, Hauser & Wirth quietly announced the opening of a new location in Palo Alto, California, which is scheduled for spring 2026. The gallery will be Hauser & Wirth’s sixth U.S. outpost, adding its five domestic spaces and expanding its cross-border network to 19 locations around the world, establishing a global banner at Silicon Valley’s Rises Rises Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Risishy’s Rises Risishers Interships.
The Swiss powerhouse already operates two locations in California, Los Angeles. First is its vast downtown space, which opened in 2016 with a 100,000-square-foot front flour mill complex dating back to the early 20th century. The site is partnered with Selldorf Architects and is converted by Creative Space. In line with Hauser & Wirth’s now signed art guesthouse model, the complex is more than just a traditional gallery with a public garden and party area in the central courtyard, a bookstore and educational loft, lectures and community programs, and the beloved restaurant Manuela, a farm-to-table restaurant that blends into the building and with its own Herb Garden Coop and Chicken Chicken Chicken Comple.
Hauser & Wirth opened its second LA gallery in the heart of West Hollywood in 2023, a strip of the area located in a well-restored Spanish colonial revival building in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Once an old car showroom, the 6,000-square-foot exhibition space was redesigned by Annabelle Selldorf, whose company has long been linked to the Hauser & Wirth’s Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-Museum-M
The new Palo Alto Gallery will also occupy a historic building – the post office at 201-225 Hamilton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, represented by the early Bay Area buildings in the early 1900s. After renovation, the corner structure will offer 2,600 square feet of exhibition space with the exterior of large street windows and will be combined with the bookstore. The exhibition plan will complement the speeches and events. But this time, the design was led by architect Luis Laplace and his award-winning company, known for creating sophisticated cultural spaces – including Paris Gallery of Hauser & Wirth in the 19th-century Hôtel Priewulluly the Right Bank. Currently, the integrated hospitality business of the gallery (including the head of households, bars or cafes) has not been announced, as it is common in many other places.
Although gallery president Marc Payot was unable to conduct the interview, it was because details such as opening dates and programs such as opening dates and programming are still being finalized – he highlighted in a statement the central role California plays in the development of modern and modern art and has played a role in Hauser & Wirth’s vision since more than three decades ago. “California’s artists, institutions, customers, collectors and geographical locations have deeply shaped the development of the art world,” he said. While the gallery already has locations in Los Angeles, Papeot notes that Northern California’s importance is equally important, “a very dedicated community of collectors and the museums they build…a top position in the Pacific edge of the best place to live on the Pacific edge and thriving in our art, our art and inspirational people who are created in the Bay Area community.”
Other giants – Mega-Galleries opened in the Bay Area (later closed) to calculate the action to get closer to Silicon Valley’s technological wealth and emerging art collectors. Pace opened a 5,000-square-foot outpost in Palo Alto in 2016 and quietly closed in 2020 amid the pandemic. That same year, Gagosian made his debut in San Francisco – 1,300 square feet by gallery standards, but still hosts exhibitions at top artists including Richard Serra and Urs Fischer. Gagosian closed the location in 2021. At the time, both galleries encountered a market that was often described as a “collector-rich but logically fragmented” with limited walk-in transportation and fewer institutional partnerships than in New York or Los Angeles.
Yet, if we look at the Bay Area’s collections, several of ARTnews’ Top 200 collectors have homes in the region, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison, billionaire philanthropist, investor, and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs, former Gap Inc. chairman Robert Fisher, tech power couple Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen et al.
The late Richard Kramlich died in February 2024, and he is also the main figure in the area’s collection site. He, along with his wife, Pamela Kramlich, is a pioneering patron of video and media art. Many of their works are installed in a San Francisco home designed by Herzog & de Meuron to accommodate the technical needs of time-based media. The couple also co-founded the new Art Trust, a program developed in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art and the SFMOMA Museum to help institutions acquire, preserve and present video art.
Deborah and Andy Rappaport also played a major role in the Bay Area’s cultural infrastructure. As founders of the Minnesota Street project in San Francisco, they blended real estate strategies with philanthropic support to provide economically sustainable space for galleries, nonprofits and artists in the city’s Dogpatch community.
Also located in the Bay Area is art collector Trevor Traina, a tech entrepreneur and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who sold a single-person auction in October 2024 in Christie’s post-war and contemporary photography collection, totaling $3.25 million. Zynga founder Mark Pincus is another local collector. In February 2020, he donated $3 million to James Turrell Roden Crater Projects, bringing large-scale land art installations into projects closer to completion – even the initial hope for public opening in 2024, has disappeared since then. Other notable Bay Area collectors include SFMOMA customers Jason Moment and Jennifer Biederbeck, as well as Sandy and Jeanne Robertson, who remain active supporters of the contemporary art community in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Bay Area has about 342,400 million miles of homes, ranking it as the second largest concentration in the world, behind New York City, according to the Henley & Partners/New World 2025 City Wealth report. It is worth noting that this number has increased by 98% over the past decade (2013-2023).
As of December 2023, previous estimates have brought the Bay Area’s millionaires population to approximately 305,700, exploring the rapid growth of short-term wealth over a short period of time. It is worth noting that while the Bay Area ranks second among millionaires and millionaires (with 756 people worth over $100 million), it has surpassed New York Billionairewith about 82 people, the number of New York City as of 2025, has 66 people, making it the top region for billionaires.
The wealth boom in the Bay Area is driven primarily by the technology industry, with Apple, Google (Alphabet), Yuan, NVIDIA, HP and numerous venture capital firms generating huge personal wealth. As the technology economy is expected to expand globally, Henry and his partners expect the Bay Area to eventually outpace the number of New York millionaires and wide distribution of wealth.
Even in Palo Alto, the median household income reached $220,408, although that number barely captures the extreme concentration of super-wealthy people in the region. According to IRS data, the 94301 postal code (covering downtown Palo Alto and Crescent Park) averaged $1.65 million in 2022, the fourth highest that year. Another postal code 94304 has an average income of $1.61 million. Only about 12% of income in these areas comes from wages. The rest comes from asset sales and investment.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which can be the most acquired in the region) has made large purchases in recent years, especially since its expansion in 2016. The museum’s focus is on acquiring living artists, especially those in the West Coast, Latino and AAPI communities. These acquisitions are often supported by key customers including Doris and Donald Fisher, Pamela Joyner, Norra and Norman Stone. Fisher’s collection contains more than 1,000 works, and is reserved for the museum’s long-term loan.
Bay Area tech companies are also starting to play a bigger role in art funding. Recently, SFMOMA received a $1.5 million grant from Google’s charity Google.org to support its Ruth Asawa Retrospective, a retrospective that will last in San Francisco from September 2, 2025 to September 2026 to September 2026 to September 2026 to September 2026 to September 2026 to 2026 to 2026 to 2026.
