When Jonathan Carver Moore talks about his gallery, he rarely starts with sales figures or artists’ résumés. He starts with a feeling. The feeling of walking into a space and not wondering whether you belong there.
That instinct is on display this week at the FOG Design + Art Fair in San Francisco, where Moore is presenting a solo booth of new paintings by Sesse Elangwe, developed during the artist’s recent residency with the gallery. The work is lush and exacting, saturated with color and attention, but what Moore is really staging is an argument. Art should meet people where they are. A gallery should feel like a conversation rather than an exam.
It is an approach shaped less by art world convention than by Moore’s own path into it. Before opening his eponymous gallery in 2023, Moore worked in nonprofit communications and institutional development, including roles focused on criminal justice reform and racial equity. He came to San Francisco nearly a decade ago for that work, without plans to open a gallery, but with a habit of collecting, installing, and quietly selling art wherever he landed. Offices became rotating exhibitions. Conversations with donors drifted toward artists and objects.
In retrospect, Moore sees those moments as training. Learning how to read a room. Learning when to talk and when to listen. Learning that people often want permission to ask questions before they want answers.
Bloom Skies (2025) by Sesse Elangwe. Photographs by Francis Baker
Images courtesy Jonathan Carver Moore.
That sensibility now defines his gallery at 966 Market Street, at the edge of the Tenderloin and within the city’s Transgender Cultural District. The address matters to Moore. The block sits near the site of the 1966 Gene Compton’s Cafeteria riot, an early flashpoint in the fight for transgender rights, years before Stonewall. For Moore, history is something you live alongside, not something you borrow for atmosphere or cache.
The gallery’s program reflects that mentality. Moore works with artists who are Black, queer, Indigenous, women, and others whose practices have often been sidelined. But he resists framing the program as corrective. He focuses on creating situations where artists, collectors, and first-time visitors meet on equal footing. Artists are given time, space, and an audience, often through a residency program housed next door to the gallery, where they live and work for weeks before debuting new bodies of work.
That residency model feeds directly into the FOG presentation. Elangwe, a Cameroonian-born painter now based in San Antonio, spent seven weeks in San Francisco photographing local residents and absorbing the city’s rhythms. The resulting paintings place his subjects against recognizable Bay Area backdrops, weaving portraiture into place with a steady hand and an eye for bombastic color that still feels rooted in reality.
For Moore, the goal is not simply to introduce an artist to a fair audience, but to give collectors a reason to care about the art, a personal relationship instead of buying a work because they are following a trend or what the market says is “hot” at any given moment. “People are buying to live with this work,” he said during a recent interview. “They’re buying something that becomes part of their daily life.”
That philosophy shapes how Moore thinks about collecting more broadly. He is open about the importance of welcoming new buyers early, before habits harden and anxieties set in. Pricing is discussed plainly. Conversations begin with what the viewer sees rather than what the artist intended. He aims to treat curiosity as a strength.
The long view matters to him. Moore often talks about collectors who started with modest purchases and grew alongside the gallery. A couple who once hesitated over a $4,500 painting later became among his most consistent supporters. Another first-time buyer went on to support an institutional exhibition. Moore recounts these stories with modesty and a measured tone. For him, it’s clear that the only way relationships can develop is over time.
That perspective was sharpened when Moore brought his gallery to the Atlanta Art Fair last fall. Amid a crowd that skewed younger and more local than at many, more established, art fairs, he noticed a shift in the room. The audience felt familiar. Cultural reference points landed quickly. A painting depicting a Black woman doing her hair in a kitchen with a hot comb resonated without explanation. Moore was struck by how rare that ease had felt elsewhere.
Elangwe in the studio. Photographs by Kari Orvik. Images courtesy Jonathan Carver Moore
Atlanta did not change his thinking so much as confirm it. The next generation of collectors is present. They respond when invited into the conversation with openness and patience.
That forward-looking approach also shapes how Moore thinks about fairs like FOG, which sits at the intersection of art and design. Rather than resisting that overlap, he leans into it. His booth is staged in collaboration with the San Fransico design studio Coup D’Etat, placing furniture and paintings in dialogue without turning the presentation into a lifestyle vignette. The aim is familiarity. Visitors are encouraged to imagine how the work might live with them.
“People should be able to see themselves with the work,” Moore said. “That changes how they engage with it.”
The clarity of that vision comes, in part, from Moore’s position outside traditional gallery pipelines. He did not apprentice in blue-chip spaces or inherit a set of unspoken rules. He learned by asking questions and acting on instinct. When he opened the gallery, he moved quickly to establish a residency program. When he wanted to collaborate, he reached out directly. Momentum followed.
“I didn’t know there was a chain of command,” he said, laughing. “So I just kept moving.”
That instinct places Moore in an interesting position within the Bay Area’s art ecosystem. As galleries in Los Angeles contend with consolidation and closures, he speaks less about rivalry than connection. He talks openly about strengthening ties between Northern and Southern California, about sharing artists and audiences, about building networks that feel durable rather than extractive.
For now, Moore’s focus remains close to home. FOG offers a chance to show what his gallery has been building over the past three years: a model grounded in access, patience, and sustained attention. It is not a reinvention of the art fair or the gallery system. It is something quieter. A belief that art works best when people feel comfortable enough to stay and look.
