San Francisco Chronicle: "Ken Harman's unusual path to Spoke Art"

Ken Harman describes his path in life as one of "happenstance and coincidence and serendipity." Thursday, Spoke Art, his small storefront gallery space in San Francisco's Nob Hill, should be a happy madhouse as it inaugurates its first show of the new year, the second annual Supersonic Electronic Invitational.

Not only is it First Thursday, the night when galleries throw open their doors to the public, but it is also the show's opening reception, to which one and all are invited. Supersonic Electronic, curator Zach Tutor's Tumblr blog from which the group show derives, has more than 195,000 followers; Spoke Art, not yet 2 years old, has more than 67,000 followers on Facebook.

"I mostly credit social media for the successes we've had so far," says Harman. "I don't know of any other art gallery that has that many followers. We have more than some major museums do. As a young space, that's sort of the environment that we're coming up in."

Harman also is part owner of Loakal, Oakland gallery, and also has an alliance with San Francisco's Castro Theatre or a series of limited-edition prints celebrating the theater's programming (the latest is artist Chuck Sperry's take on "Lawrence of Arabia"). He also is an art curator and writer for such publications as Arrested Motion and High Fructose.

"I have no background - quite literally," Harman says. "I never even went to college. I never got a curator degree from CCA, never got an art history degree or even a writing degree."

In a way, Barack Obama started Harman on the road that leads to Spoke Art. The 30-year-old Chatsworth (Los Angeles County) native moved to the Bay Area from Massachusetts in 2006 and decided to start blogging. At the time, he was working as a bagger at a Whole Foods and had nothing in his own life to write about, so he started looking for inspiration elsewhere.'

https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Ken-Harman-s-unusual-path-to-Spoke-Art-4161832.php