In 2019, Meng was offered a hand-me-down space by the artist community, and Friends Indeed was born. The galleries first location was founded as an absurdly small experimental vitrine featuring works for sale by leading local and international contemporary artists. The gallery borders San Francisco’s historic Chinatown and downtown Financial District, beneath a Philip Johnson designed building, overlooked by the three Corporate Goddesses.
In Fall 2021, the gallery expanded to a warehouse in Bayview. The new gallery is near to the ICA San Francisco where Meng is a founding partner. As a curator-led gallery, our artwork placements are primarily with museums, foundations or collectors involved with them to support the longevity of the artists we champion. Often times, we work with international curators to organize exhibitions, talks, and special projects. The gallery-cum-institution reimagines the traditional framework of what a dexterous contemporary art space looks like; borrowing from both to meet the needs of artists today. Supporting emergent conversations of diaspora in today's hybrid and international canon, mentorship for young artists, with an overall aim of fostering a healthy and equitable arts eco-system in the San Francisco and global art dialogue. Since 2021 the gallery has opened additional spaces in NYC and Paris.
Meng herself is a dealer, curator and artist advocate working on the West Coast in a global context, she has held gallery positions at Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Altman Siegel, San Francisco; and curatorial roles with LAXART and The Wattis Institute where she also served as Assistant Director for five years while managing the renown Capp Street Artist Residency.
Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it ihas developed its reputation with modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paahlen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her Surrealist programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon. In 2022, Norris’s artist Leonora Carrington featured in the Venice Biennale and later Norris presented Carrington’s work at Art Basel where Norris is making their Swiss debut.This year Wendi Norris’s curated ‘Landscapes of the Mind’, at Frieze Masters, celebrating the influence of Mexican and American cultures on the surrealism of artists including Carrington, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon and Dorothea Tanning.
