As a child in the 1960s, Michael Brennan couldn’t get enough of the circus. Each year, as Barnum & Bailey set up the big top at the Cow Palace, Brennan would travel to San Francisco with his parents to take in the elephants and acrobats and clowns. He knew the circus was the "Greatest Show on Earth." He had no idea that it was a prelude to his own professional life.

Half a century later, as Brennan started planning a series of oil portraits depicting some of the local artists and curators and critics he’d befriended, he overheard someone wryly comment that “the San Francisco art world is a circus.” He immediately recognized that the comparison was apt.

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