By Vanessa VerLee

Ben Frombgen, the owner of Birdhouse Gallery at 31st Avenue and Judah Street, is the kind of yes-man who inspires emergent magic and collaborative creation rather than maintaining the status quo.

“I’ve struggled with a personal flaw of saying yes to too many things,” Frombgen said.

But instead of fighting that instinct, he has learned to flow with it.

“This has been an experience of just blowing it up in the biggest way possible,” he said. “Not taming that part of me but just allowing it to be wild.”

The 360-square-foot gallery occupies what was once a driveway belonging to the pet store next door, which boarded and sold birds before closing in 2019. The former use inspired the name, but very little is caged or constrained here now. Even the repurposed bench currently sitting in the middle of the gallery floor changes location and set up depending on the show.

Since moving his architecture practice and home into the building in 2021, Frombgen has used the space as an ongoing experiment in community-building – bike club nights, paella parties, a local chili oil pop-up, neighborhood polling center or whatever people happen to suggest.

In October 2023, he hosted his first proper art show and has kept a steady pace since, with 21 shows completed and 15 already scheduled for this year. One of his favorite questions to ask anyone who wanders in – for a show, or just to fill time while their kid is in gymnastics next door – is simple: “What do you think this space could be?”

The answers keep coming.

A small group of filmmakers in their early 20s showed up recently asking if they could promote their feature film in the window. They brought a classic jazz band into the space for the occasion.

This summer, Frombgen and colleagues plan to fill that same back space with sand, submerge circular benches in it, and project a real-time feed from Ocean Beach onto the wall — a concept he’s tentatively calling “Desert Lounge.”

With his design firm downstairs and home upstairs, Frombgen lives with the art every day of the month it hangs on the walls. February’s featured artist, Lani Asher – a Bayview resident and San Francisco Art Institute graduate who has shown work in the City since the 1980s – had never exhibited in the Sunset District before. Birdhouse showed her layered collages, assembled from hand-painted papers, evoking quilts and ancient maps.

“His way of choosing artists is very intuitive,” Asher said. “It’s not like working with a typical gallery owner.”

That intuition is the closest thing the Birdhouse has to a curatorial policy. There are no fixed rules about medium, style, career stage or geography – only Frombgen’s sensibility and a genuine openness to what the community brings through the door.

“We really have our door wide open a lot of the time,” he said. “I really relish the range of people that randomly make their way through – that serendipity is the important essence of what we’re doing.”

He did not set out to be a gallerist. What he set out to do, in a more instinctive way, was make something useful for his block and, gradually, for the whole western edge of the City. His architecture practice has long been woven into the neighborhood fabric – including one of the parklets at the original Trouble Coffee location on Judah, before it closed – but his relationship to materials runs deeper than any single project. Years ago, when clients began compensating him with salvaged wood during lean times, he found himself with a growing collection and a different way of thinking about design.

“What does the wood want to be?” became a guiding question.

A current residential project near the Great Highway will be built from Monterey cypress logs salvaged from the Presidio – local material that has, as he puts it, “come into the neighborhood” and wants to become something new. It’s a philosophy that maps almost exactly onto how he runs the gallery.

“The work starts with something small, and then something keeps going,” he said.

The space is sustained almost entirely through community spirit, and Frombgen is candid about the fact that it runs on more goodwill than infrastructure. Past artists have offered to help hang shows, repair the glass and build out the space in exchange for future exhibition slots. Neighbors have stopped in off the street wanting to contribute. The operating manual is, after 21 shows, still being written. Anyone interested in getting involved – whether as an exhibiting artist, a volunteer or simply a regular – can start by walking through the open door on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, or by following the gallery on Instagram at @birdhousegallerysf.

Frombgen’s longer vision is to see Birdhouses elsewhere: spaces that respond to, rather than impose upon, what a community wants to express. For now, though, he is focused on this one.

“As we grow these communities and create this buzz, I feel an obligation to not let up,” he said. “I want to keep the momentum.”

Birdhouse Gallery is located at 3110 Judah St. at 31st Avenue. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday.