The Box Shop

Tucked in a neighborhood of San Francisco never seen by tourists, a gorgeous, eclectic artist-maker space thrives. 

At The Box Shop, it's completely unsurprising to find someone taking a blow torch and a hammer to a sheet of metal, someone else casting a shimmering cascade of rainbows across LED strips, or an artist pulling brushstrokes across a canvas taller than themselves. 

The Box Shop includes an 8,000-square-foot warehouse filled with a dizzying array of metalwork and industrial machinery. In the yard outside the warehouse sits stacks of 60 shipping containers (the boxes to which the space owes its name). Each container is rented and used as an individual studio by an artist or art collective, and these artists form the incredible, collaborative community that makes this place so special.

Metalworkers, stone carvers, seamstresses, painters, woodworkers, sculptors, bicycle engineers, and electronic car producers are among the artists who call The Box Shop home.

In the past year, the shipping containers themselves have been transformed into astonishing pieces of art. The containers now host over 100 different murals each painted by local artists.

Many of the art spaces in the Bay Area have disappeared in recent years due to rising costs, but the Box Shop persists.