Sujaro African Art Gallery Makes a Splash

The people closest to Mill Valley resident Andrew Berz have learned the drill. He’ll leave you scratching your head when he shoots for the moon, and subsequently wondering why you underestimated him when he achieves the outlandish.

“He likes to make big promises, almost to the point that you don’t really believe him,” says Ethan Rider, his partner in , which opened a new space adjacent to on Throckmorton two months ago and is hosting a grand opening party Saturday evening.

“And then he pulls it off again and again," Rider said. "It’s great to watch him do that. At the end of the day, he makes it rain.”

Quite literally, in some cases.

In the summer of 2006, Berz took a trip to Burkina Faso to buy some art for his San Francisco-based gallery. When he arrived in the capital city of Ouagadougou, Berz went to a local market and asked to buy $800 in rice with the intent of giving it to the small village of Goin a few hours south.

The purchase left jaws agape and smiles wide - $800 buys a lot of rice anywhere, but it gets you nearly two tons of it in Burkina Faso. After a two-hour, harrowing trip in a pair of large, rickety rental trucks on what was often not exactly a road, Berz and Rider arrived in Goin – a place that Berz had literally picked on a map.

They unveiled their gift, and elation ensued. Just moments later, a torrential downpour began, ending a six-week drought that had threatened crops and foreshadowed starvation in the poverty stricken region.

While the rain obviously was serendipitous, the people of Goin nevertheless looked at Berz with god-like awe, having just given them sustenance and seemingly made it rain at the same time.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Berz said. “I knew that I had done this in my lifetime. Nothing has ever arisen to the feeling that rose over me. I thought to myself, ‘this is what I want to do.’”

Fast forward four years, and Berz has a plan in the works. He says his gallery business is thriving, and Saturday’s opening serves as its coming out party in his hometown. But Sujaro will eventually, Berz hopes, propel him back to Burkina in spades.

“These people are starving to death,” Berz said. “There is no reason to have discussion or argument or dialogue. Just stop the starvation immediately and then you can do whatever you want in terms of budgets and planning. So that was my first instinct – to just feed people.”

Berz founded the Sujaro Direct Action Project (SDAP), a nonprofit dedicated to “dramatically improving the lives of a target population of 150,000 people living in extreme poverty in 20 villages in western Burkina Faso.”

While SDAP remains active and had distribution projects in 2010, Sujaro is on the front burner right now as Berz and Rider hope to grow the business to a point where they can shift their energy and resources to SDAP. They recently brought on Leigh Lapore as director of sales and operations to help them get there.

“Instead of trying to do both at the same time and not really doing either one too well, we decided to focus on the business so that we could really hit a home run when we go back to the nonprofit,” said Ryder, an African art connoisseur who met Berz when he walked into his then-public gallery in San Francisco to buy a wedding gift.

“I can change courses on a dime,” Berz said.

His resume backs up that claim.

Berz, who was born in the Los Angeles area, graduated from UC Berkeley and the University of San Diego’s Law School. After taking some time to travel to places like Indonesia and Morocco, he took a job working for then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown in the city’s Community and Economic Development Agency.

While walking down University Avenue in Berkeley on afternoon, he stopped into a shop called Arab Imports, where he spotted some handmade backpacks from India that caught his eye. The shop was going out of business.

Before long, Berz asked his future wife Claudia: “'What would you think if I bought 2,000 of those bags and quit my job?’ She said, ‘Well if you think you can put beans and rice on the table and support us, go ahead.’”

“Oh really? Good because I already bought the bags and quit my job – they’re in the car,” Berz replied.

Berz built his business, focusing on Asian art and selling at flea markets and out of his van and eventually opening a gallery in Berkeley. One day, an African art seller who had been Berz’s neighbor at the Ashby Flea Market for two years walked into the gallery and told him he should divest himself of the Asian art and move into African art.

The man said he'd sell Berz his entire massive inventory.

“He really saw me coming,” Berz said. “I saw what he had and that changed everything.”

It took Berz five years to pay for the entire inventory, from masks and statues to textiles, much of which was stored in a spacious house in Oakland. But about seven years ago, Berz came to the realization that he was selling art that was decorative but not necessarily authentic.

“The experiences I was having in Africa were so authentic, but the art I was selling was not representative of those experiences,” Berz said.

He began to shift the business toward art that was authentic and rare, focusing on pieces that were created for tribal use and pre-1940. That has raised the value of his collection and thus the types of clients he attracts, he said.

In growing Sujaro, Berz has faced an inherent hurdle. Dealers at national and international exhibitions must go through a vetting process, in which a panel of experienced dealers determine a piece’s authenticity, whether it is representative of the place and time in which it was created and whether its estimated value is accurate.

Berz said the vetting process can be tough on younger dealers, as veterans – and his competitors – get to control to a certain extent what he can show at an exhibition.

“There is absolutely a little bit of the new kid-on-the-block aspect to this,” he said. “But at this point, I would compare our selection with any African collection in the U.S.”

Youth also has its advantages.

“We don’t sit and wait for people to come to us,” Berz said. “We’re in Europe, we’re in Africa, we’re out meeting clients, we’re buying and selling art. We’re using our youth right now.”

Sujaro’s websites have also been a major driver of the business, said Berz, who sends out a quarterly email newsletter to clients all over the world with glossy photos of recent additions to his collection.

“This is the reality now,” he said.

But while having a public gallery might not be as vital as it once was, Berz said he is thrilled to have one in Mill Valley, just a short jaunt away from his home. He said the idea to open a space here came to him in a dream. His first public gallery in five years “just felt right.”

If Berz gets his wish, his hometown will serve as a platform for many more harrowing, awe-inspiring visits to Burkina Faso.

The 411: , 11 Throckmorton Ave. Grand Opening Celebration: Saturday, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. RSVP required at ethan@sujaro.com or (415) 362-6601. Dozens of recently acquired pieces will be on display for the first time.