Golden Moon Gallery: Downtown San Mateo’s Wonderland of Art & Expression

“We are here for the 74-year-old man who came in the other day and he found something therapeutic in [the art] and he had never found that before,” owner and founder Nick Chaboya said. “Or the kids who come in and are in awe asking a hundred questions about each thing to their parent. I remember those moments.”

Chaboya grew up in the Bay Area and has been an artist pretty much since birth. High school was art school for him, then it was California College of Arts and Crafts, and after that he established himself internationally on the strength of his tattoo work and his painting. With that reputation and career built, he had a chance to return home and share the world and the people he discovered along the way. Golden Moon Gallery is the blossoming fruit of Chaboya’s life as an artist so far.

“At the core, what we strive to be is a community. A community of people who appreciate the handmade, and people who believe in art,” Chaboya said. When you do find your way through the doors of Golden Moon Gallery, and you do meet Nick, you quickly realize that this is a place where imagination and personality can truly run free.

This is a place where an artist can come from anywhere, and anything can be art – a chemist can make ceramics, a hunter can make jewelry. You look at a roll of duct tape on a shelf and you think it is a mundane thing, included to compliment a display, and you would be wrong. The tape is also art, designed and crafted by a person as a form of expression, not by a corporation as a unit of commerce.

If you are starting to get the impression that Golden Moon Gallery is a place where anyone is welcome, where all ideas are appreciated, where all stories and expressions have value, then you are starting to get the point.

Chaboya appreciated the culture that was growing in downtown San Mateo, but what he didn’t see amongst the restaurants and stores was a place that you could stumble upon, that you could wander into for no other reason than what you saw in the window piqued your curiosity. When you walk out you should have a new story to tell, or a new hobby to explore. Downtown needed a place that dealt in inspiration. The gallery itself takes an unusually low commission of its sales so more of the local community can afford beautiful and unique items in their homes. Golden Moon Gallery is truly about inspiring the community and supporting the arts.

“A high percentage of the artwork displayed here comes from people I meet and interact with while traveling,” Chaboya said. “There’s also a lot of local artists that walk in, introduce themselves, their artwork, and bring their art and community with them. We’re always having a call for artists, every day. I would love to support you.”

Like any world built on imagination, one has to indulge in the curiosities while you are there. Be that kid that asks a hundred questions. Chaboya, his wife, his mother, or any of the staff at the gallery are happy to indulge you because the pieces you see at Golden Moon Gallery are not cottages at sunset or happy little trees painted simply to sell, or to pass the time. These are passionate expressions of lives and emotions that needed to be turned into creative output. That bowl in the corner is a chemist who is so devoted to his science that he simply must figure out how to make the elements of clay and glaze swirl in a precise way. That painting on the wall is the healing of an emotional wound put to canvas.

The assemblage of each terrarium you see helped a homeless man eat well for a day.

There are pieces of traditional art that will leave you in awe, but there are also pieces of non-traditional art that will leave you wondering how it was even made.

That wonder and curiosity is forming the next step for Golden Moon Gallery.

The gallery begs to be a social space. Chaboya is eager to begin welcoming people to events that will allow the community to be a part of the artistic process, to learn and experience new things with the artists of the gallery, to expand the reach of their inspiration and count the patrons as active members of the Golden Moon Gallery family.

Ideas are swirling all the time and beginning to gel for classes and exhibitions that will offer something unexpected and exciting to downtown.

Golden Moon Gallery may not reach out and grab you with a neon sign or a pitch man on the corner. It is in it’s own way, a wonderland that requires a certain degree of curiosity to discover. It is a place that, once discovered, will have you returning time and time again, and each time it will be different. You will find new things to explore, and new things to experience. It is a place that must be seen to be believed, and a place that will no doubt pay dividends on your curiosity.

Some Featured Artists

Heather McLean

McLean is a translator: pulling ideas from the invisible world into a receivable language. Straddling the intersection between the phenomenal and the nominal world, using the human form to put the insides on the outside. She examines inner conflict by illustrating the many forms of personal civil war, and victory, and the intersection of science and spirituality. Her main influences include the human drama, music, primates, astrophysics, existentialism, quantum mechanics, biology, psychedelics, sci-fi, robot dreams, physical and mental yoga, rebooting and rewiring the human program and loops, Advaitic Hinduism, and tardigrades.

Kaija Heitland

Heitland is a Metis Craftsperson who grew up on Canada’s Sunshine Coast. Her work is deeply inspired by that area’s natural beauty and quiet places. She strives to create a low impact, low footprint product line with ecologically sound beginnings. She attempts to create pieces that do not contribute to continued de-forestation, extensive mining and poisonous extraction. Her love for nature drives her to find suppliers and other trades-people who share her need for low-impact ethically-sourced materials. Her jewelry only uses fair-trade, conflict-free stones, and reclaimed, recycled metals, helping to ensure a low-footprint product.

Molly M Design

Molly McGrath is a designer and professional architect based in San Francisco’s Mission District. While using a laser cutter to make architectural models, she recognized the machine’s unique potential to make the jewelry and other objects in her collection. She runs her San Francisco studio in the Werkstätte tradition - a hybrid of design, craft, and tech with a focus on the applied arts. Her approach to design is heavily influenced by her background in architecture - a synthesis of concept, form, material, details, connections, and use.

Sean Forest Roberts

Roberts’s background in chemistry and years of work experience in science labs bring an experimental mindset to his ceramics process. His work is constantly changing as he develops new tools in his experimentation in the studio. His deep fascination with the underlying randomness in the patterns and structures of nature is apparent in the aesthetic of his finished works. His primary current work is the product of four years of experimentation with marbling colored slips. Colored liquid clays are mixed and poured to create the vast array of patterns available in this series.