SAN FRANCISCO—Last September, Claudia Altman-Siegel heeded the call "Go west, young woman," moving to San Francisco after a 10-year stint at the respected New York contemporary-art gallery Luhring Augustine, where she had started as a registrar and worked her way up to senior director. On January 23, the 35-year-old opened her eponymous gallery with the group show "A Wild Party and a New Road," which included work by such young stars as the painter and collagist Josh Smith and the digitized-printmaker Kelley Walker, as well as the veteran painter Christopher Wool, with whom she worked at Luhring Augustine. This month she is showing photographs of surveillance satellites by the local artist Trevor Paglen priced from $6,000 to $9,500.

Altman-Siegel’s modest, 1,900-square-foot space is in 49 Geary Street, San Francisco’s most prominent gallery building; her third-floor neighbor is the venerable photo gallery Fraenkel. Among Altman-Siegel’s growing stable of artists are fresh talents like the multimedia artist Sara VanDerBeek and the filmmaker Emily Wardill.

With California’s contemporary-art scene centered in Los Angeles, San Francisco was a somewhat unusual choice, but Altman-Siegel praises the city’s developing scene. "Maybe it’s risky," she says, "but there are a lot of great collectors here: Don Fisher, Norman and Norah Stone, Charles Schwab. And there’s a real niche open for a gallery showing young international artists."

"Beckoning Bay" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.