San Francisco, via Flickr

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

The budding West Coast art industry expands with artMRKT San Francisco, a new  contemporary and modern art fair saddled with an eccentrically spelled hipster name.
Running May 19-22 at the Bay City’s Concourse Exhibition Center – a 57,000 square foot refurbished railroad station in the city’s trendy arts district – the fair includes 65 international contemporary and modern galleries.

artMRKT  joins another new West Coast fair. Art Platform – Los Angeles, is set to launch in Sept. 2011.  That venture is backed by the Merchandise Mart conglomerate of Armory Show fame.

The artMRKT official gallery roster  is not complete, but according to fair organizers participants so far include:  Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Forum Gallery, Babcock Galleries, and Cynthia Reeves (New York); Shark’s Ink (Colorado); The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, Other Criteria and XPO Gallery (London);  LeBasse Projects, Blythe Projects and Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles); and Michael Rosenthal, Guerrero Gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim, Catherine Clark Gallery, Hackett/Mill, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, Paul Thiebaud Gallery (San Francisco).

The artMRKT fair company was co-founded by Brooklyn based 3rd generation gallerist Max Fishko and business partner, Jeffrey Wainhause. Events surrounding the fair will be a fundraiser for local San Francisco eduction and cultural institutions. MRKTworks  is an online and live auction created to benefit a selection of local arts nonprofits.  The nonprofit is paired with participating artMRKT galleries who will each donate one work to the program.