Richmond Art Center showcases the artist’s journey from Vietnam to East Bay murals in a comprehensive retrospective
By Janis Hashe
Apr 22, 2025
From his time as a Vietnam War combat artist, to his iconic East Bay murals, to his recent digital photographic work, Richmond-based artist John Wehrle has used his insatiable curiosity about the world and human effects on it to inform his art.
“Time & Tide,” on view at the Richmond Art Center through June 14, is the first major exhibition to “comprehensively survey [his] work,” according to RAC materials. The show occupies all three RAC galleries.
Exhibition guest curator Jeff Nathanson first met Wehrle in 1991, when Nathanson was RAC director. “I visited him at a mural he was working on, and we went on to collaborate on an exhibit, ‘Sense of Place,’” he said. This led to a decades-long personal and professional relationship.
“Time & Tide” contains examples of Wehrle’s work in multiple media, but featuring the murals and public art presented a challenge. This was solved, Nathanson said, by creating both a slide show projecting images over the doorway to the RAC’s “Education” room, and by exhibiting Wehrle’s maquettes, small-scale models artists use when working on larger-scale artworks.
Also on display are some of the artist’s many paintings; sculptures, including TV War & Piece, clearly inspired by his wartime experiences and the American-culture-in-denial of the time; videos; and “stitched” photographs, which Nathanson described as a technique of connecting individual photos together to form a single image.
Linking many of the works is Wehrle’s “fascination and wonder at the world,” Nathanson said, alongside his sense of humor and knowledge of history. Also, “his technical proficiency is amazing.”
That satirical humor is displayed, for example, in the 30-foot painting, Rising Tide, which depicts a partially flooded downtown San Francisco, which pedestrians, a guy in a rowboat and a guy fishing seem to take for granted. Penguins slide down an awning, and a polar bear poses on a piece of ice.
Wehrle’s involvement with public art also goes back decades, and extends beyond the East Bay. For example he painted Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo, a large mural on the north retaining wall between Spring Street and Broadway in Los Angeles, as part of the 1984 Olympics and Arts Festival.
It depicts fragments of classical Greek buildings and statuary floating in space, while a sculptural piece shaped like a finger points to an astronaut on Jupiter’s left, “recall[ing] the central panel of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel,” according to one review.
“It was designed to be viewed as you drive past,” Nathanson said, comparing it to a film strip. “John started in film and conceptual performance art.”
Locally, swimmers at the Richmond Municipal Natatorium are treated to Plunge, a mural occupying the entire back wall of the interior, in which snowy egrets, Canada geese and a Great Blue heron share a waterway with a swimsuited woman, standing, with characteristic Wehrle whimsy, in front of a sign reading “No swimming.”
Revisionist History of San Pablo Ave, painted alongside the underpass of Hwy 80 at Barrett Avenue, “creates a facsimile of the street scene that existed before the freeway was there, peopled with the different cultural groups who lived in the area during the last 500 years or so,” according to Wehrle. “The storefront business evolved into historical themes, like the Liberty movie theater relating the events of the Kaiser Shipyard.”
This mural, begun in 1991, wasn’t completed until 1995. “Gratuitous visual mention of museum artists includes Frank Stella, Joseph Beuys, Deborah Butterfield, Roy Lichtenstein and others,” Wehrle mentions on his website.
The now-84-year-old artist continues to create, and Nathanson said the best way to experience “Time & Tide” is to “come take a journey with him. John’s art is not just a visual experience. It is an invitation to explore the complexities of our existence and connect with the emotions that define us as human beings.”
RAC visitors will have a chance to connect directly with the artist during a free panel discussion on April 26, 1-3pm, moderated by Nathanson. Panelists include Wehrle, Roberto Martinez, Kim Anno and Betsy Davids.
Visitors can also pick up maps for self-guided tours to view local Wehrle murals, and a catalogue of the exhibit is also available. Schools can book youth art tours, following an art-making session through this link: richmondartcenter.org/education/art-tours/.
‘Time & Tide,’ through June 14, Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. Gallery open Wed-Sat, 10am to 4pm. Admission is free. 510.620.6772. richmondartcenter.org
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Top Image: RICHMOND ARTIST John Wehrle’s 30-foot painting, ‘Rising Tide,’ is on view in his exhibition at the Richmond Art Center through June 14. (Photo courtesy of Richmond Art Center)
