Dave Eggers Opens Art + Water at Pier 29 This Fall

Dave Eggers spent years biking past a vacant warehouse at Pier 29 before he decided to do something about it. This fall, that crumbling Embarcadero structure, originally built around 1915 and damaged in a 2012 fire, will open as Art + Water, a 100,000-square-foot arts and education space co-founded by Eggers and Bay Area artist and educator JD Beltran.

The project centers on a tuition-free apprenticeship model designed to keep working artists in San Francisco, a city that has spent the better part of two decades squeezing them out. Thirty artists will participate at a time, split between 10 established artists and 20 emerging artists selected through an application process. All participants receive free studio space for a year. The established artists mentor the newer cohort in an atelier-style structure that prioritizes hands-on technique and daily collaboration.

“Economically accessible, demystifying, and welcoming,” Eggers said of his vision in comments reported by the New York Times. “Like, ‘Here, this is how we do this. You can do it, too.’”

The model is deliberately anti-credentialed. Art + Water is built as a working studio-school hybrid with free studio access, daily instruction from practicing artists, and shared workspaces meant to encourage mentorship over hierarchy. Participating artists already attached to the project include Paul Madonna and Taraneh Hemani.

The building will also house a large exhibition hall curated by René de Guzman. The inaugural show will center on filmmaker and musician Boots Riley, and organizers plan regular talks, classes, family programming, and retail pop-ups alongside the main exhibition calendar. Eggers and Beltran are framing the gallery space explicitly as a hub for artists and organizations priced out of traditional venues, which describes most of San Francisco’s arts community at this point.

Then there is the cafe, which by all accounts is a significant part of the physical footprint and conceptual vision. Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the local Yemeni coffee pioneer who helped put specialty Yemeni coffee on the global map, will oversee the food and beverage program. He is envisioning something closer to an 18th or 19th century salon than a typical third-wave coffee shop, drawing inspiration from historic cafe culture in cities like Sana’a, Cairo, and old Boston, where coffeehouses functioned as centers of intellectual and political life.

“He could have had 1,000 people open a cafe there,” Alkhanshali said of Eggers, according to Eater. “But what he wants to build, it’s going to be its own world.”

The cafe will also serve as the launch platform for Alkhanshali’s new luxury coffee brand, described as the first of its kind. The food menu will include drink pairings modeled on high tea or omakase-style service. Alkhanshali compared seeing the early plans to being shown Willy Wonka’s factory before construction began.

From a real estate and public space standpoint, the Pier 29 project is worth watching closely. The Port of San Francisco controls the Embarcadero waterfront, and the piers have long been a contested resource, cycling through ambitious proposals that often stall in permitting, financing, or political disagreement. A 100,000-square-foot activation on a historically significant structure, with a credible operator and clear community programming, is the kind of project the Port needs to demonstrate that waterfront revitalization can mean something beyond luxury hotels and corporate offices.

Eggers first noticed the empty Pier 29 warehouse during a bike ride along the Embarcadero in 2022. Four years later, the space is scheduled to open this fall. That timeline reflects the grinding reality of development in San Francisco, even for projects with strong public support and no residential neighbors filing appeals.

Art + Water is not a housing project, but it is a housing story. The artists who might train and work at Pier 29 are the same people being pushed to Oakland, Sacramento, and Portland by rents that have made San Francisco’s creative economy largely theoretical. Whether a tuition-free studio program at a renovated pier warehouse changes that calculus in any measurable way is an open question. At minimum, it is a serious attempt to hold the line.