Worlds in Miniature

The Museum of Performance & Design is making preparations for a new exhibition featuring the world of toy theatres.

Toy Theatres: Worlds in Miniature opens in July and will showcase 21 rare toy theatre models from around the world, some dating back to the 18th century.

Toy theatre certainly isn't dead. In recent years contemporary artists including Sandow Birk and William Kentridge have used toy theaters to create stunning new work.

Sandow Birk produced and filmed his interpretation of Dante's Inferno entirely on the stage of a toy theatre, and Kentridge used a toy theatre to create a production of Mozart's Magic Flute that employed Kentridge's unique projections.

You can see more images of toy theatres at MPD here. I've had the opportunity to work with some of these models and they truly are a fascinating coming together of the visual and performing arts.

Photo of "William Tell" toy theatre courtesy of MPD.

Looking for Art in One of the Wrong Places

Haven’t gotten out much to see art in the last 4 months, with the exception of the early February opening of Love, Art and Chocolate at 323 Gallery, and more recently a quick sprint through SFMOMA 75th Anniversary exhibit.

On an early morning walk the other day, I came across a row of boxy 1950s-style houses that were all painted about the same time during the fresh-paint-and-then-flip housing boom a few years ago. Even though the paint wasn't that old, several houses had massive peeling.

One house caught my eye, and I stopped to marvel at how the paint peeled in interesting and creative forms. I wondered if it was a different painter, if he or she knew that by ignoring all the rules of paint preparation, and then applying the paint a certain way, it would yield a few short years later a 3D mural of peeling paint in the shape of butterflies, the continents of Africa and Australia, the islands of Hawaii, Indonesia, and Rhode, a large manta ray and a tall ship. It was something to behold in the early morning light.Speaking of murals, San Francisco muraling team Jennifer Ewing and Leo Germano recently completed several large art deco paintings that are installed in the historic Varsity Theater in downtown Davis. The theater web site doesn’t mention the murals; I guess you need to buy a ticket to see them. Another reason to go to Davis is to see the Proclivities show of SF encaustic artist Adele Shaw at the Pence Gallery. The opening reception is tonight Friday April 9, 7-9PM. The show runs through May 9.

posted by Phil Gravitt

Chinese Master Ink Painters at the Cantor Arts Center

Just a few quick notes about a show I saw today: "Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future - Master Ink Painters in 20th-Century China" at the Cantor Arts Center, through July 4, 2010
I was really excited to see this show. Not only was it a room full (100 pieces) of ink & watercolor paintings, but it built on the things I learned in February at the "Shanghai, Art of the City" show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
This exhibit at the Cantor was work by four artists, known in China as the "Four Treasures" of 20th Century painting: Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Huang Binhong (1865–1955), and Pan Tianshou (1897–1971).

One of the first images the visitor sees on entering the exhibit is a very large portrait of Wu Changshuo, executed by two of his students. the head is painted in photorealistically, the rest of painting is the loose, brushy style more common to traditional Chinese ink paintings. Until I saw a similar piece at the SF museum recently, I'd never seen this kind of work before. They had several examples here sat the Cantor. Always done in collaborations, with one artist working on the face, another artist finishing the rest. Wu Changshuo's work was very colorful and some showed the influence of the European impressionists. (His painting of hanging gourds below.)


Qi Baishi's animal scrolls were animated, sensitive masterpieces - the perfect line, single strokes, awesome! (That's his shrimp at upper right.)

Huang Binhong did plain air painting in the countryside, and some of his "sketchbooks" (tiny scrolls) were on display in cases. Amazing when you consider they had to grind the inks. His larger scrolls were mostly blacks & greys with lots of layered overpainting and dry brush. (Image of his work at top left.)

Many of Pan Tianshou's scrolls were massive in size. They were designed for public spaces and often hung in government buildings. He also used his fingers instead of brushes much of the time! (Image at right is his.)

In the hall outside the painting exhibit are photographic of the artists, their students, and some of the areas where they lived and worked.

There are a few YouTube videos about the exhibit, but the Cantor web site has almost no images.

Friday Gallery Walk

Just a quick run-down of a few galleries we saw this evening:

F*cal Face Dot Gallery
Marco Zamora & Derek Aalbeck - Extremely small gallery (one room, about the size of a master bedroom) but bold art. Incredibly rendered graphite drawings by Derek Albeck and interesting ink & watercolor paintings on wood by Marco Zamora.

Octavia's Haze
Expressionist paintings by James Michalopoulos - Had trouble finding this gallery (the gallery web site says it's located at 370 Hayes - it's actually a block away from there) and when we did finally locate it, it was closed. Even though we were there an hour before the stated closing time. Too bad, I really wanted to see James Michalopoulos' paintings.

So we checked out another gallery instead - Polanco Gallery at 393 Hayes. They had a terrific group show of Mexican artists - the best show of the evening, really. Unfortunately, they don't allow photos in the gallery, which is really too bad since the images on their web site don't do justice to the work. The work was arranged exceptionally well and paintings by Rafael Rodriquez and Carlos Jaurena were top quality. There was also a great little piece by Abel Almenara that is not even on the web site.



Rare Device is one of those small gallery & craft places that seem to be proliferating these days. Theoretically, sales of the small craft items support the fine art exhibition space, but I've heard from some of the folks in these spaces that actually the economic downturn has hurt small craft sales more than fine art. "94xxxx5" is a photo show in a tiny back room at Rare Device - the work focuses on SF neighborhoods and fits well with the rest of the items in the space.

Along the way, we passed some outdoor art on Octavia:

Allison Adams At the SF MoMA's Artists Gallery at Ft. Mason

"I seek the outdoors and that feeling of connection as much as possible, but I am still within this urban environment most of the time, which can sometimes feel isolating. I reflect and muse upon all that I experience and see here and seek out the Nature hidden under asphalt, pavement, and planted green lawn. " Allison Adams

Allison Adams, Pathway (now on exhibit at the SF MOMA Artists Gallery)

At the current show in The Loft space at SF MOMA's Ft Mason gallery, Curator Renee de Cossio has paired Adams' woven textile forms with Stern's more open and airy pieces. Using an old-fashioned loom four harness loom, Adams uses recycled plastic as well as wire, monofilament, audio and video tape to create asymmetrical woven pieces and three-dimensional sculptural pieces. The woven pieces are shinny and dense, glittering with bits of recycled material, integrated into the irregular grids. The Nebula pieces are more open, and very evocative of the star clusters from which they get their name. Many of the woven textile pieces are enclosed within dark frames which does not, in my opinion, allow their need for visual expansive space. The lighter framed pieces are more successful because the frame disappears against the wall, allowing the viewer to be pulled in far enough to examine the superb craft of the artist as well as the inventive use of recycled materials.  

Allison Adams, Swirl Nebula III

 Unfortunately, Adams' three-dimensional pieces and Stern's airy abstractions (some of which are on unframed paper0 don't always work well together -- or, to be more accurate, the Loft's gallery space is too small to allow each artist's work to claim its visual territory. I was reminded of SF MoMA's exhibit in which they combined pieces by Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe. In many instances, Adams' dark, glossy photographs sucked energy from O'Keefe's more delicate and colorful abstractions. A 2009 show at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts,  which paired O'Keefe and Dove was more successful. Both those artists shared a painterly vision and a similar technique and palate. Yet I understand why the curator packed the small Loft gallery with these pieces. They are unique and deserve to be shown. But, given the gallery situation in San Francisco, artists like Adams and Stern have to fight for recognition in a town with too little space for serious artists.

http://www.allysunkadams.com
SFMOMA Artists Gallery at Fort Mason
Building A, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, CA 94123 USA
415.441.4777
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday, 11:30 a.m. - 5:30
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages
All images courtesy of SF MOMA Artists Gallery and the artist

Pia Stern at SF MOMA Artists Gallery at Fort Mason (through April 23)

Stern didn't start out to be a painter; in college she studied social sciences, language, city planning, anthropology - the grab bag of a student unsure of her direction and lacking discipline and focus. That's an observation, not a criticism. I think most of us were in the same place in the less financially stressed college atmosphere of the 1960's and 1970's. But she spent her junior year in Aix-en-Provance, signed up for a painting class which changed her life:

Pia Stern. Nocturne

"I felt at home with the people teaching that class...They were all devoted to Cezanne and lived in the shadow of Monte Saint-Victoire. I felt at home with how they looked at things, philosophically speaking, as well as their way of perceiving things visually."

" I remember the first stoke; cobalt blue, a diagonal stroke on a rectangular three-by-four canvas. I burst into tears when I made it. It was a Zen experience."

When she returned to California, she began to study painting in earnest. She was fortunate in her teachers for the art world here was still infused with the unique artists that came out of the post-war generation - Diebenkorn, Park, Thiebaud. They distrusted too much verbalization and taught in a direct, personal manner. One of her most influential teacher, Elmer Bischoff addressed the work on "what was going on, or not, in inner terms." (1)

 Pia Stern. This Time The Promise

Out of this she developed a lyrical style, based on intuitive gestures and spontaneous marks, a cryptic language that almost seemed understandable if the viewer looked long enough.  Her current work at the Artists Gallery at Ft. Mason is still lyrical but is edging closer to abstraction. The pieces are larger than the ones last shown here in the lobby of 555 Market Street but they still pull the viewer in. Stern describes her current oils on canvas as a cross between optimism at Obama's election but concern over the dismal decade that we had just survived and where we, as a country and the world, might be going. The canvas is large, rectangular, layered with a palimpsest of oil and oil pastels. She retains the poetic feeling of her earlier work but the gestural shapes and quasi-writing float in the luminous field, asking questions that only the viewer can answer.

 Stern's concerns with what she describes as "...existential nature of her work...the tension between light and dark" comes to the fore in the series "Earth Abides." These charcoal pieces were done just before the US entered the war in Iraq and prefigure the devastating conflict to come. Nevertheless, her work retains what Sister Wendy Beckett wrote about in her 1988 publication, Contemporary Women Artists:

 "When art is personal and private, we can feel an irritating sense of exclusion. The artist has therefore to win our trust, and lure us into his "private dreams" in a way that we can understand. Pia Stern ..has an unusual power of transforming her "dreams" into our own. They remain hers; she does not share them..But we are not asked to riddle out Stern's private meanings." (2) 

What I find fascinating is that Stern, while continuing to develop as a painter, has avoided the pull to make work that is completely insular and self-referential. Her work speaks to me beyond her biography - her parents escaped Nazi Germany -  or even (possibly) her intent. Like all good work, it allows the viewer to make their own assumptions and associations.

(1) Charles Shere. Impulse, Depth and Poetry: The Art of Pia Stern. Imagio, Vol 21, February 1999, pp 31-41.
(2) Sister Wendy Beckett. Contemporary Women Artists. 1988

SFMOMA Artists Gallery at Fort Mason
Building A, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, CA 94123 USA
415.441.4777
artistsgallery@sfmoma.org
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday, 11:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.  
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/artists_gallery_exhibitions
All images courtesy of the artist. Photographer Ian Cummings.

Pia Stern at the SF MoMA Artists Gallery at Ft. Mason

Pia Stern, "Wicked Romp" (2009). photo, Ian Cummings (courtesy of the artist).

From the press release..

"Stern's paintings suggest a logic of the heart, which she uses to guide her art-making process. Her painted and drawn figures and forms set within abstract fields combine to create rich, tactile, and vibrant expressions that allude to the individual's psyche and one's place in the natural world."

I am going to write a decent review later but for now, I just want to mull over the luminous beauty of her paintings. In her book on Peace, Sister Windy Beckett wrote: "Stern shows us two ways of being: the physical, answerable only to accident, to wind and tides; and the spiritual, answerable to inward truth. One is free-flowing; the other is fixed, grounded in more than its own small compass - in God. "

http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/artists_gallery

Same as It Ever Was

. . . in the immortal words of 80s icons the Talking Heads.

Went to the Getty Villa a few weeks ago. You probably know this already, but it's all antiquities now--the paintings were trucked over to the Getty Center. I am a philistine, I know, but one floor of antiquities is pretty much my limit, then they all start to look the same, so much so that my friend had to call my attention to the paintings of drunks on the wine vessels. The drunks were doing what drunks do everywhere (click on these to see the vessels): singing; singing while urinating (a servant holds a pitcher for his master's eliminations); dancing; flirting and frolicking; making unwelcome advances; having a sexual encounter; staggering home with the help of one's friends; and, of course, the classic: vomiting.

International Women's Day and San Francisco's own International Museum of Women

International Women's Day (8 March) is an occasion marked by women's groups around the world. This date is also commemorated at the United Nations and is designated in many countries as a national holiday. When women on all continents, often divided by national boundaries and by ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic and political differences, come together to celebrate their Day, they can look back to a tradition that represents at least nine decades of struggle for equality, justice, peace and development.

International Women's Day is the story of ordinary women as makers of history; it is rooted in the centuries-old struggle of women to participate in society on an equal footing with men. In ancient Greece, Lysistrata initiated a sexual strike against men in order to end war; during the French Revolution, Parisian women calling for "liberty, equality, fraternity" marched on Versailles to demand women's suffrage. The struggle continues today because the issues that impact women are our issues - poverty, racism, injustice, violence. As the saying goes, women hold up half of the sky.

San Francisco has it's own museum dedicated to women. The International Museum of Women, (I.M.O.W.), is a social change museum that celebrates and values the lives of women around the world. The museum's programming is offered locally in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as globally. The museum began as the Women's Heritage Museum in 1985 and in 1997 became the more encompassing International Museum of Women.

The need for a larger museum was realized in 1997 when a group of Bay Area teachers sought a place to take their students. One of these teachers, Elizabeth L. Colton, who had been on the board of the Women's Heritage Museum, spurred the drive to create a larger museum, in part through private funding.

Since its rebirth under the new name in 1997, I.M.O.W. has organized more than seven major exhibitions, hosted a number of public fora, developed educational curriculum for schools and created a number of speaker series programs. Current on-line exhibits include "Economica: Women and the Global Economy" and Women on the Map."

http://www.imow.org/home/index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Museum_of_Women

Shanghai - Art of the City at the Asian - Soiled Doves, New Women and Celluloid Goddesses

What do the following have in common – foot binding, prostitution, the silk industry, concubines? They all have to deal with the reality of women in Shanghai and they are all omitted from the current exhibit at the Asian. Shanghai, The Art of the City,  presents such a cleaned up and ready for its close-up image that you would never guess that it was a byword for decadence, corruption, violence,  and in the 1920's and 1930's, the  VD capital of the world.

Shining Eyes and White Wrists. (Above) (1887-1893) Wu Youru. Ink on Paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. Women are playing billiards in one of the new public gardens in Shanghai. Since upper class and "respectable " women were largely secluded during this time, it's a reasonable assumption that these women were prostitutes (from the catalog of the show, p. 95)

In the first part of the exhibit, we are treated to a display of charming images about women. One brush-and-ink drawing is described as women playing table tennis, another one is identified as a courtesan while another women is using a sewing machine, but among the lot, there is only a casual mention of bound feet.

Bound feet were a fact of life in China. In a conversation during the press preview, Barbara Koh, the Shanghai Celebration assistant, told me that food binding wasn’t banned until 1949. So, all those tiny feet peeping out underneath trousers were actually bound, one of the numerous ways humans have invented to torture themselves in the name of fashion. Girls, some as young as four years old, had their feet strapped and broken. They suffered years of pain and a life-long restricted mobility, all for the sake of fashion, custom and what was thought of as sexy and erotic.

Image on the left: Bound feet (Wikipedia, Creative Commons License)

It wouldn’t have taken much to include this information in the exhibit –  maybe a photo, a pair of the tiny embroidered slippers and we would have had a telling visual of the deformed feet that Chinese women tottered on for centuries.

What about the reality in the section titled "New Women?"  In Stella Dong’s book on Shanghai, she recounts the experience of Alicia Little, a 19th century Englishman who attended an upper class banquet. As upper class women were secluded, the only women who attended were concubines and prostitutes attached to the various brothels in the district. Beautiful, young and beautifully dressed, the women were carried into the room in palanquins and "limped" back into them after the dinner was over. These women were the lucky ones, pretty, with some accomplishments who lived in fairly luxurious surroundings until they got too old to ply their trade or got ill. But the reality for most women in Shanghai was different.  By the time Shanghai became a treaty port, it was the brothel capital of the world. One in every 130 women in Shanghai were prostitutes and the city had the highest rate of VD in the world. (Dong, 35 - 45).

The exhibit would have gained immeasurably if there had been an open acknowledgment of the status of women during the 150 years covered by the show. Women were regarded as inferior and expendable. An ancient maxim decreed “Eight saintly daughters are not equal to a boy with a limp.” It's something that the Chinese Communist government fought against but their "one family, one child" policy resulted in more male births with girls being either aborted or abandoned (and China is not alone in this attitude).  This policy resulted in a disparate ratio of 114 males for every 100 females among babies from birth through children four years of age. Normally, 105 males are naturally born for every 100 females.

It Often Begins with a Smile, Jin Meisheng, 1930's - New Woman or just the same old profession, dressed up in new clothing? (from the catalog, pl 148).

There is a whole section of the exhibit on the new women of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The posters are gorgeous, the new fashionable dress elegant but how many women would afford this life style?. There is a delightful poster of two women dancing together. They are called tea girls but the text tiptoes around what their actual profession was.

Now, I realize that the museum is doing a survey and that a lot of children come to view the exhibit. It wouldn’t do to have too much frankness in the signage but why not somewhere in the catalog? In fact, given the talented museum staff, why not something in the wall text?

Some new women – like the Soong Sisters, daughters of a millionaire family really were new women -- although they were still defined by whom they married.  The second daughter, Ching-ling married Sun Yat-Sin, the founder of the Chinese Republic. The youngest daughter, May-Ling married  Chiang Kai-shek., the eventual dictator of China and Taiwan and the eldest daughter, Ai-ling, married the richest man in China at the time. There were the daughters of the nouveau riche bought the gorgeous Art Deco furniture and carpets displayed in the exhibit but the majority of women in China, in Shanghai (or elsewhere), worked for pennies, were treated like dirt and lived hard and difficult lives.

Even the goddesses of the Chinese Cinema suffered from public expectations of their behavior and their role. Ruan Lingyg, one of the most famous, committed suicide because of this. I wrote about this in a previous post:

http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/2010/01/upcoming-at-asian-shanghai-opening-feb.html

 Where the Asian DOES get it right is in their film series. Starting off with the film "Triad," they will be showing a wide variety of films not normally seen in the U.S. There are films from ethe earliest days of Chinese cinema, films with a social focus and ones that portray the reality of the city, from the prostitute in "Triad" to "The Goddess," the best known surviving film staring Ruan Lingyu to documentaries on the Jewish refugees in Shanghai.

If women make up 50% of the population, why are we, why is the museum in 2010 promoting such an inaccurate and sanitized picture of their lives? The Shanghai exhibit at the Asian is a survey show. Parts of the exhibit suffer from taking such a wide angle view of a city with such rich and difficult past. Yet, it would not have taken much to include a few items such as an opium pipe, a pair of bound slippers, a portrait of of a real prostitute, even a photograph of the Chinese part of the city to have make the show more accurate, without sacrificing its broad appeal. Monday is International Women's Day and we are still fighting to have our authentic experience and history told.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soong_sisters
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/onechild.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_China
http://www.asianart.org/ 

Stella Dong. Shanghai, The rise and fall of a decadent city.

Joe Cunningham, Quilter and Artist-in-Residence at the De Young

Bend in the River. Joe Cunningham. Now property of the De Young.

  I've always liked quilts and even helped make a few when I visited my grandmother. My participation was limited to cutting out blocks of fabric as my stitches were nowhere near her standards. I enjoyed playing around with the fabric and listening to the ladies from her quilting group as they stitched away, needles flashing and tongues clacking as they destroyed the reputation of somebody else in the tiny Oregon lumber town where she lived. Of course, at the next meeting, it would be somebody else's turn to be the topic of gossip but the cakes and pies were always good. I especially remember the coconut pie which I will always associate with the Wedding Ring quilt pattern. It's funny how the memory works!

This months' artist-in-residence at the De Young probably doesn't continue the gossip portion of the quilting bee (we certainly won't be served coconut pie, alas) but his quilting skills are right up there with the best in the tradition. He invites visitors of all ages to experiment with their own quilt making ideas, as well as learn quilting techniques such as hand-quilting stitch and quilting on a frame.

Joe Cunningham began making quilts professionally in 1979, after a ten-year career as a musician in Michigan. His early mentors were steeped in the history and traditions of quilts, leading Cunningham to a life of study in quilt history and a love of traditional technique. Over the years his work has evolved into a unique personal style both original and shaped by the tradition. Throughout Cunningham’s career, he has written eight books on quiltmaking, including an essay on the current exhibit on Amish Quilts. He has made appearances on the HGTV series Simply Quilts with Alex Anderson, as well as The Quilt Show with Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson. Cunningham performs a musical quilt show titled Joe the Quilter for guilds and theaters nationwide.

Cunningham explains, “I enjoy interacting with the public and explaining to them the history of quilts and the process of quiltmaking. It is rewarding to have people join me at the frame to learn how to quilt. I am an ambassador from the quilt world.”

De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118

Hours: Tuesday–Thursday, Saturday and Sunday: 9:30 am–5:15 pm
Friday: 9:30 am–8:45 pm. Closed on Monday

http://www.famsf.org/
Joe Cunningham's web site: www.joethequilter.com. 
More on cloth and textiles at the always well-written and insightful Venetian Red:
http://venetianred.net/

Gail Wight, Restless Dust - San Francisco Center For the Book

 "Anemones would mock us and Darwin's ghost would lose his mind among the barnacles" Gail Wight, Restless Dust. 2009 IIMPRINT Residency Book project at the San Francisco Center for the book.

Since 1996, the San Francisco Center for the Book has been teaching bookmaking and related skills and showing work that expands the boundaries of the book arts. The current exhibit, "Restless Dust," by Gail Wight is no exception. The source of the book title is a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,

“It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.” 

 It was Wight's idea to issue an invitation to Darwin's ghost to wander around the greater Bay Area and the metaphysical colloquium between them led to this elegant and poetic dialogue between art and science. In looking at the ways in which Darwin's legacy has impacted our culture, she examines the fragile and endangered state of our environment.

Gail Wight, Cabinet of Curiosities -2001

Touch any image on the top of the cabinet and it will lead you to another series of images (some with sound) to a time-based meditation on the nature of evolutionary science.

In an e-mail exchange with Ms. Wight, I asked her "what actually led you down this artistic path in the first place? You've been working in the intersection of art and science for quite some time. Was there an "ah-ha" moment or was it slower, more organic (as it were)? How did you come to link Mary Wollstonecraft and Darwin? Or was it "just" an artistic leap? I was also looking at your CV - do you think of yourself as an artist who uses scientific images or a scientist who uses art to convey ideas? Or is that misframing the question?"

This is her response, "A good two decades ago, while an undergrad at Mass Art in Boston, I was going through some medical difficulties. The entire world of medicine - its history, altruism, and vagaries - just overwhelmed me. My fantastic professors gave me "permission" to think of medicine and science as subject matter for art, not so popular an idea back then. I am, happily, still stuck in this rut. It's an deep and cavernous rut filled with seemingly endless inspiration for art."

"I'm absolutely an artist, not a scientist in any way. I do rely on the generosity of scientists. I like to think that while I'm using scientific imagery, I'm also tapping into scientific methods, practices, habits, abnormalities, culture, tools, and a certain way of viewing the world, in order to construct artistic allegories that might have some relevance for people."

"Wollstonecraft and Darwin... They're both on my personal list of favorite "great thinkers." I think they were both trying to think outside of the rigid constraints of their times, and expand our understanding of our own humanity. That quote by MW just breaks my heart. Darwin was so determined to do so much, discover so much in the little things of life. Barnacles were his favorite, but he studied SO many aspects of the living and geological world. When I started to think about him as a person, rather than just a figurehead, Wollstonecraft's quote came to mind."

In addition to the completed limited-edition book and documentation of Wight's residency, the exhibition includes earlier referential work such as The Cabinet Of Curiosities, Ghost and Ground Plane, among others. In the glass case lining one part of the exhibition space, the Center is displaying some of the paraphernalia that went into the making of the book - steel letterpress alphabet shapes, lino cuts, hand made stamps, tags with fragments of 19th century copper plate writing, pages open to show some of the quirky and poetical texts in the book.

The snowflake mandalas (Ground Plane, 2007-08), on the wall are actually digital prints, with individual images from hundreds of exact scale photos of squirrel, marmot, snake, frog and other animal bones. Taken from the Hadley Lab Collection, each mammal was between one to ten thousand years old. Wight states: “These images became a way for me to think about deep time and the Earth's crust as a crowded record of that time, a conduit of information about the past, and the space upon which we draw our present lives.”

The end wall of the exhibit has the following quote from from Stephen Jay Gould:
"The most important scientific revolutions all include as their only common feature the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another and previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos." By combining 19th century scientific images with 21st century technology, Ms. Wight's work is  playful, poetic, elegant and insightful. This is art that is made with the intent of making us think more deeply about our place in the world and our imprint upon it without being pompous or, worse yet, boring and trendily obscure for the sake of being obscure.

All images courtesy of the San Francisco Center for the Book
Michael Bartalos is a board member for the SF Center for the Book and provided the photos for this article. 
Blog of her work in progress: http://bartalos.com/2009/07/31/gail-wights-sfcb-residency-in-progress/
Gail Wight's website: http://www.stanford.edu/~gailw/

Restless Dust - A ghost walk with Darwin, up until April 17th, 2010
SF Center for the Book
300 De Haro St. Ste. 334
San Francisco, CA 94103
Gallery Hours: Sat 12-4; M-F 10-5.
http://www.sfcb.org/index.php3

Operation Restore Defenestration

Defenestration -- the art landmark building on the corner of 6th and Howard with all the furniture hanging out of the windows and crawling up the walls -- is celebrating its 13th anniversary. On March 5, 1:AM Gallery (right across the street from Defenestration) will kick off a fundraising event and solo show by the artist, Brian Goggin. Funds will be used to repair and restore the building so it will be "once again beautiful by day and vibrant by night."

On the artist's website, there's a history of the building and many opportunities to donate. You can even "sponsor" a specific piece of furniture.

--Ramona Soto

Weekend Wrap Up for Feb 20-21st.

Margaret Harrison. Captain America. Intersection for the Arts.

I've got some suggestions for weekend viewing - a mixture of shows from cartoons to a new show of Asian paintings at the Cantor Art Museum in Stanford.

http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/

Shanghai - Art of the City at the Asian Art Museum

My longer piece on Shanghai is up at Chez Namaste Nancy. I haven't exhausted the subject so be prepared for more. Upcoming is "Soiled Doves, Modern Women and Celluloid Goddesses - the visual vs the virtual."

http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/

Shanghai - Art of the City at the Asian

Over at Chez NamasteNancy is the first of several posts on this complex, interesting and sometimes disappointing show. I diss Baker, love Shen Fan and post a couple of links. As always, feedback welcomed, comments encouraged and no respectful opinion turned away. We even publish posts from bloggers not wearing shoes or the appropriate apparel.
Stay tuned for more...
http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/

Nudes for Valentine's Day

You can draw your own inferences about this, but when I decided to spend the day at the Getty, I'd completely forgotten that it was the Valentine weekend. (Not that I have anything against Valentine's Day; on the contrary, I love glitter and lacy white doilies and hearts and pink tissue paper and anything trimmed with marabou.) Nor would I have ever imagined that every single couple in Los Angeles would think of the Getty as a romantic pre-Valentine's Day outing. However. As is regrettably so often the case, I was wrong, and the lines of cars on Sepulveda proved it.

And upon reflection, why not? What better way to celebrate love than to look at images of love?
(Mars and Venus, Allegory of Peace, Louis Jean François Lagrenée, French, 1770, Oil on canvas)

In spite of the lines of cars--and the attendant delays--and the crowds (consisting in the main of couples, some very affectionate, some rather affectionate, and some not at all, such is life and the vicissitudes of love and relationships, God bless us all), I really did not mind being wrong about this.

There was something beautiful about being in such a lovely place with so many people--so many different people, people at all different levels of experience with museums and art. There were the few groups of young art students with their outlandish clothes and/or hairstyles and de rigeur sketchbooks; there were young mothers and fathers pushing strollers, and large families with children of various ages; there were grandparents with their grandchildren; and mostly, there were couples. Of every age. At sunset, every vista point--and this is a center with a great many vista points--had been taken over by a couple embracing in the pink and gold light.

I looked at the Rembrandt and pupils drawings, then chatted with the guard. He said his favorite exhibit was the French furniture, so that's where I went next. There were so many beautiful things--chandeliers and tapestries and polished wood chests with gilt all over, and silver, and porcelain, and an orange velvet settee with matching chairs that I coveted so intensely I believed for a tiny second that if I could only acquire that settee and those chairs, there would be nothing left to wish for in life.
Then I saw this bed:
This picture doesn't do it justice, maybe you will understand when I tell you that every single person who saw it (except me, I knew it'd be on the Innernets) pulled out a cell phone to take a picture. Every single one.

I asked the guard there what his favorite exhibit was, and he said the paintings, so onward and up I went. Rubens. All those billowy bodies. Rembrandt. All those wonderful Italian nudes. (Am I the only person who thinks this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen?)

And here are two of the millions of reasons to return, as these paintings are "not currently on view" (but I love them, so I thought I'd tack them on):

(Andromeda, "Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish, about 1640s, Oil on canvas")
(Female Nude in a Landscape, William Etty, English, late 1820s - 1830s, Oil on paper mounted on masonite)

The whole point--and forgive me for rambling, and forgive me for saying what we all know--is that sometimes art just makes you feel wonderful. It doesn't have to be provocative (although one might argue that the nudes certainly are, especially the Etty); it doesn't have to make you think (although it might). It can simply be a pleasure.

Happy Valentine's Day.
(The Fountain of Love, Jean-Honoré Fragonard French, about 1785, Oil on canvas)

Shanghai at the Asian Art Museum

Cross Posted from Working Artist's Journal

Saw the Shanghai show at the Asian Art Museum yesterday. It strikes me as an historical exhibit, using art to tell the history of Shanghai, one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities, and sister city with San Francisco since 1979.

Using paintings, prints, posters, furniture, clothing and installations, the show is arranged chronologically, covering the the period from 1850 to present. It's an abbreviated telling - the accompanying catalog is excellent however, and fleshes out many of the political and historical details between/behind the visual art.

"Shanghai Style" is on display here - an aesthetic sensibility that grew out of a place that had plenty of wealth, plenty of artists, a long history of cultural pluralism, and pride in local historical art motifs. The resulting innovation is a kind of torrone, with startling surprises like photorealist heads on the otherwise traditionally painted portrait scroll "Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng." (Click images to see larger version.)

A set of gorgeous woodblock prints (top image) from the 1950s reference Japanese woodblocks and European painting. And they have some spectacular examples of chromolithography made in the 1960s.

Contemporary Shanghai artists continue the fusion. Liu Dahong's "Mawangdui" is an embroidered banner based on one of his paintings. (Image at top left.) The stitching is done in such a way that the design is almost identical on both sides of the fabric. The images tell the story of a peasant girl as she moves through twentieth century political movements in China.

My favorite was an installation in the center court, by Zhang Jian Jun, called "Shanghai Garden." He used 3000 bricks from demolished 1920s era Shanghai apartments to line the floor and build bases for sculptures, which were cast from traditional Chinese garden rocks. But the sculptures are made of silicone. Tiny pots holding solar-powered animatronic plants dot the "garden."



Shanghai will be on view from February 12 through September 5.

Images courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, from top to bottom:

"Evening Glow on the Huangpu River" 1955. By Shen Roujian (1918­1998). Woodblock print with oil ­based inks and watercolors. Collection of the Shanghai Art Museum.

"Mawangdui", 2009 (detail). By Liu Dahong (b. 1962). Embroidered silk, one of two pieces. Collection of the artist.

"Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng", 1924. By Yu Ming (Chinese, 1884–1935). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper. Collection of the Shanghai Museum.

Last two images, "Shanghai Garden" by Zhang Jian Jun, photo & video by Anna L. Conti

Tuymans - essay and discussion

http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/

Weekend rambles: outsider art, sky photos and video whimsy

I followed Ramona's advice and went in search of art that I hadn't already seen. Well, I've seen Hartman's work in the past and loved it but the other artists I looked at were entirely new to me. James Castle (at Gallery Paule Anglim and BAM) is another outsider artist who has been recently discovered and Katya at Haines Gallery (up until February 20th) uses video and illustration to create works that are charming and bizarre (in a good way)

Natasha Shawver and Ernie Shawver at Gallery A440
A440

More at: http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/2010/02/weekend-rambles-outsider-art-sky-photos.html

Inspiration across disciplines

Just a quick note to remind everyone how important it is to be open to cross-disciplinary experiences in the arts. Many readers are visual artists, and often we find that we mainly feed off others doing the same thing: we attend art openings of --yes-- visual art.

So, if you have the opportunity this weekend, attend an exhibit, concert, reading, or performance a little outside your usual sphere. It will inspire you in unexpected ways.

One performance to catch is the Ronald K. Brown / Evidence dance troupe, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tonight and Saturday. We attended last night's performance, and it was eye-opening for its dynamic use of color, composition, and space. The integrated but non-matching choreography, as well as the diversity of the dancers' bodies, was captivating and fresh. Sitting there, flashes of ideas for new work kept popping up. So be prepared to capture those inspirations by sketching/writing them down on a moleskine in the dark!

--Ramona Soto (bluemonk)

Studio Visit: Carol Es

Cross posted from "Working Artist's Journal":


Early last month I visited the studio of Los Angeles artist, Carole Es. Her "Moppet" space is located in the Highland Park area, in a rectangular pumpkin-colored building with a steam-punk Dutch door. The moppet is painted over the door and rests on the studio divan. The space is small, bright, attractive and incredibly neat. She offered us some drinks, showed us her work and then sat down to chat.



I first became aware of Carol and her work in (I think) 2004, via the nascent art blogging community. There weren't many artists blogging then and almost none were women. Carol's voice was funny, powerful, and true. So I guess I was drawn to her words, at first. When I started noticing her visual art, she was working on prints, drawings and books, so I mistakenly assumed she was not a painter. Wrong. I wasn't paying attention.



But I have to say, her books, prints, collage projects, and other non-paint projects are fabulously original, stunningly well-crafted and full of narrative content. The stories are personal and dreamlike (nightmarish in some cases) but there's always an intelligently humorous salve to the edge. One of my favorites in her print series was "Blogger Killings" - a revenge fantasy.



The paintings are similar in terms of content but with the additional element of the paint's layers and color subtleties. She still incorporates patterns and stitching in the pieces. I asked her about the painting on the easel. She said we were looking at the acrylic underpainting - she'll add oils next, and do the stitching last. The paintings are on stretched canvas and she forces a stickpin through the painted (dried) canvas before threading the design. This was the first time I'd seen her work person and it's larger and more complex than photos can convey.

She's been in this studio since last summer and it took a tremendous amount of work to get the studio set up. She started with a raw, abandoned space that needed cleaning, painting, new windows, and door installations. I asked her if it had had any effect on her work. She wasn't sure: "I have a home studio too, this space is more for studio visits . . . I don't know so much doubt this space because it's kind of small. I can work on a couple of things at once, but my old studio was much bigger, it was overlooking the ocean, in a park, it was really tranquil. It was really a precious place . . . something I'll never have again, and I was able to work on 6 or 7 projects at one time. It really was a sanctuary, so it was a completely different thing I'm dealing with now . . . there's street noise, it's completely different . . I don't know if it's affecting my work."

She's applying for multiple grants & residencies, an ongoing process that she's very persistent about. Depending on the outcome of those applications, she may do another book this year. Her upcoming shows are listed HERE. Another recent blog review is HERE.