This untitled ink and graphite on paper (1964) from the Grant Family Collection is part of the Richmond Art Center show.Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Painter Richard Diebenkorn, whose style has been described as a bridge between Henri Matisse and Abstract Expressionism, became a household name while living in Berkeley from 1955 to 1966, where he and a group of artists started a renaissance of figurative painting, which later became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Many of his paintings made it into private Bay Area art collections, where a majority of them remained, out of public view. Until now. Beginning Sunday and running through Nov. 16, the Richmond Art Center will display more than 40 of Diebenkorn’s intimate figurative drawings and prints from his Berkeley years, several of which have never been displayed in public.
“Closely Considered: Diebenkorn in Berkeley” will also include drawings by Diebenkorn’s Bay Area figurative contemporaries and friends, including David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira, James Weeks and Joan Brown.
“The works on display come from a drawing circle they had together. They would meet in each others’ studios each week and be models for each other,” said guest curator and Berkeley painter Jan Wurm, who studied under Diebenkorn at UCLA. “It was a social interaction for them as well, because as artists they’d spend so much time alone painting, this was an opportunity to eat and drink together and talk about art and life.”
Born in Oregon, Diebenkorn moved to San Francisco at age 2, and began drawing at 5. He entered Stanford University in 1940, and studied classical oil painting technique under professor and muralist Victor Arnautoff, and Professor Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work of Edward Hopper that influenced his own paintings.
“His printmaking was complex for the time,” Wurm said. “He’d use different media, overlapping etchings by scraping into the plates directly or altering them with acid baths, or he’d color his prints by hand or tear them into a collage, just to see what would happen.”
Wurm culled the show from former students, artists and friends she knew who had beloved Diebenkorn works in their private homes. The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation opened their database to her and let her scan their archives.
“I specifically chose pieces that had another life in people’s life,” Wurm said, “One person had a Diebenkorn in the dining room, or their bedroom, or right by their front door so they could consider it every time they were about to walk into the world. I noticed people really were devoted to their Diebenkorns, for the way his work shifted how they saw color and space.”
Also included in the show is a set of six etchings of a coat on a hanger that Diebenkorn created for a book of W.B. Yeats poetry published by Arion Press in San Francisco, which creates limited-edition artworks and classics using a 100-year-old printing press.
“He transforms a line from a Yeats poem about a coat on a hanger into a sense of loss, meditation and mortality,” Wurm said. “There’s a great deal of tenderness and emotion invested in these drawings, which I’m hoping people will find revelatory.”https://f30d58a49e35b97e381bb2f1567ef493.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
The show includes a schedule of retrospective events and art classes in Diebenkorn’s honor, including a free Sept. 21 talk given by Diebenkorn’s daughter Gretchen Grant about watching her father at work and living in a home driven by art, and a documentary about Diebenkorn created by Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press in San Francisco, which published Diebenkorn’s work.
Meredith May is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mmay@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MeredithMaySFTop Picks In Shopping
Even before Ruth Braunstein opened her first art gallery in Tiburon in 1961, she was collecting pieces that made her happy and was drawn to works in clay.
A new exhibit of Braunstein’s private collection of ceramics that opens Saturday at the Richmond Art Center pays tribute to her advocacy of clay as a fine-art medium. Many of the pieces – by well-known artists including Peter Voulkos, Richard Shaw and Robert Arneson – have never been shown before.
“I love the exhibit on several different levels,” said Richmond Art Center curator and exhibitions director Anthony Torres. “It’s paying homage to Ruth’s life and work, but the collection is also a form of portraiture. It tells a great deal about who she is, and shows how she worked hard to democratize art.”
He added, “It’s diverse and beautiful, and there’s a whole myriad of objects.”
Braunstein, the founder of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association who closed her eponymous South of Market gallery in 2011, after 50 years, recently told Torres: “When I came to San Francisco and saw what people were doing with clay, I flipped out. This was before I knew there was a thing called craft and craftspeople. So when I opened my gallery in Tiburon, I showed clay.”
The exhibit at the Richmond Art Center includes a range of clay objects, from freestanding sculptures to utilitarian-style works, such as teapots, bottles and cups. There is a 3-foot-high vase by Voulkos and an assemblage of objects by Shaw. There are tiny sculptural forms that allude to modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham (Braunstein was a professional dancer early in life), and a self-portrait by Arneson.
Braunstein, now 91, told Torres: “It has taken many years for people to accept clay as an art form. It has happened in Europe, Korea, Japan and places like that. It has been very hard for Americans to cotton to clay, for some reason or another, (but) Richard Shaw and Peter Voulkos have been recognized all over the world.”
Braunstein is expected to attend the opening-night reception on Saturday.
“Focus on Clay” is one of three new shows offered by the nonprofit Richmond Art Center, founded in 1936. The other exhibits include “Sculpture,” featuring mixed-media works by established and emerging sculptors, and “Slusky and Sullivan: Sculptures, Drawings, and Related Antics,” with works by noted University of California artists and professors Joseph Slusky and Chip Sullivan.
If you go:
Ruth Braunstein: Focus on Clay: Reception 5-7 p.m. Saturday. Through Aug. 22. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. (510) 620-6772. www.therac.org.
The Breakfast Group: Jive and Java at Richmond Art Center
March 22 to May 30, 2014 2540 Barrett Avenue Richmond, California, 510-620-6772
Jan Wurm, Nocturne: Camping, 2012. Triptych, oil on canvas, 48 x 108 inches. Courtesy of the Artist
We value connections to the past, and the Breakfast Group, a loose affiliation of Berkeley-based artists, sustains a conversation that extends back more than fifty years – a living connection to ancestral figures of the Bay Area movement. There’s a certain look to that art, exemplified most prominently by David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, but its specific program is hard to define; perhaps that’s why the conversations have continued so long. This show brings together thirty-one artists currently affiliated with the group, and the works themselves, diverse as they are, engage in dialogue, suggesting that enough common ground persists to merit examination.
The Breakfast Group officially traces its origin to regular Friday lunches that painter Elmer Bischoff arranged with his Berkeley colleague Sid Gordin in the 1960s. These, however, merely extended the weekly drawing sessions and conversations that Bischoff held with Diebenkorn and others, before Diebenkorn left the area, when Fridays were a day off from teaching, and life centered around the campus and their nearby studios. When lunch took too much time out of the workday, meetings shifted to breakfast, at 7 am, and the group expanded to include William Theophilus Brown, Erle Loran, Hassel Smith and other artists teaching at Berkeley.
The group developed spontaneously, with no particular artistic agenda beyond a mutual interest in what people had to say. As it enlarged, eventually to include women, the group moved from one restaurant to another, as establishments closed or their proprietors grew impatient with people sitting so long over coffee.
Bischoff and Loran were cosmopolitan, commenting on art in New York and Europe, but also discussing teaching, new art materials or local politics. Boundaries were fluid – artists like Sid Gordin made both painting and sculpture; gestural forms coexisted with Cubist geometry, along with an undercurrent of Surrealist improvisation. Distinctions between abstraction and representation, while vigorously debated, were not enforced with the same theoretical rigor that Clement Greenberg established back East, and Bischoff’s own work moved from the figure into abstraction during the 1970s.
For Bischoff, breakfast discussions didn’t extend to studio visits; he encouraged debate but kept a more general focus. When group exhibitions inevitably took place – most notably at the Weigand Gallery in Belmont (1987) and at Holy Names College in Oakland (1991) – they offered a chance to celebrate the group’s diversity, and to examine the networks of artistic affiliations that emerged, like the submerged root system of a tree. So it is with the current show: more diverse than ever, the group can consider how it’s grown and how its present configuration reflects the passage of time. Members seem mildly surprised at how big it’s become and how long it’s been going, fueled simply by interest in one another’s conversation; aware of the history of artists’ groups in Paris cafes and New York automats, they wonder if something significant may have transpired.
Shows have also become reminders of artists no longer with the group – the 1990s were marked by Bischoff’s death in 1991 and Loran’s in 1999, and Jerry Carlin, the member with longest standing in the current group, passed away shortly before this exhibition was installed. Appropriately enough, his two works from the 1980s featured here are transcriptions in oils of old family photographs, which he endows with touches of color and personal inflections that bring their subjects back to life. They exemplify the mixing of media and interest in painterly depiction that inspired both the Bay Area Figurative Movement and other Bay Area artists such as Jess.
For many members, affiliation with the Breakfast Group involves allegiance to the Bay Area tradition that mixes figuration and abstraction. Terry St. John, now perhaps the senior member of the group, continues to create densely worked landscapes and figures, extending the legacy of Bischoff and Diebenkorn. His somber landscapes here suggest the depth of experience that informs his immediate response to a site. Lin Fischer goes further in her response to underlying impulses in her landscape-based abstractions, while Donna Fenstermaker creates more succinct plein-air studies that focus on shadows and reflections.
Interchanges with Europe and New York are integral to Bay Area art, dating back to Erle Loran’s inviting Hans Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in the 1930s. The German artist subsequently settled in New York, where his fusion of color with Cubism informed the rise of Abstract Expressionism. His visits to Berkeley, followed by a donation of money and paintings in the 1960s, enhanced ongoing interactions with New York. Here, Tom Schultz’s restlessly shifting rectangles evoke Hofmann’s grid-like compositions, while Arthur Monroe, another New York transplant, brings the gestural energy of Kline and de Kooning to his overall abstractions. A similar tension animates the drawing of Katie Hawkinson’s tightly compressed ellipses.
Abstract Expressionist impulses also emerge in sculpture, in the bronzes and stacked stones of Patricia Bengston-Jones. Her hand-worked slabs with their markings and suggestions of archaic structures hark back to an era before Minimalism and the “death of the object” upstaged such traditional forms. Joe Slusky’s animated armatures of painted steel and the assemblages of Stan Huncilman also exude a playful, improvisatory energy. Kati Casida abstracts gestural forces into origami-like shapes of aluminum, and that expressionist energy carries over into Marvin Lipovsky’s free-flowing sculptures in seductively colored glass.
Dialogues with New York can be complicated; Sandy Walker’s hybrids of figure and landscape, spare and edgy, speak directly to Bay Area art but originate in his exposure to Hans Hofmann’s legacy at the Studio School in New York. And Foad Satterfield owes the inspiration for his dense, overall landscapes, which amplify the scale and ambition of his Bay Area predecessors’, to his study in Louisiana with New York painter Paul Georges; Georges rejected Abstract Expressionism in favor of work from nature, but instilled in students the energy and ambition of the New York School.
Some women in the group have developed more individualized approaches. Nancy Genn and Edythe Bresnahan, who absorbed Berkeley’s varied influences as students, take them in more contemplative directions, composing with architectural structures on richly layered material surfaces. They share a concern for planar luminosity with Carol Ladewig’s color calendars, whose gridded panels chart the phases of the moon, and with Carl Worth’s hard-edge abstractions.
New technology has filtered into some works, but they remain grounded in individual sensibility. Jeanette Bokhour’s digital prints transform and enhance photos of Marvin Lipovsky’s colored glass sculptures, while those of P.G. Meier dissect and reconfigure everyday objects like pens or forks. Kim Thoman goes a step further by digitally “applying” her abstract paintings onto virtual vessels; she presents them here as large prints, although she is prepared to build them with a 3d printer. In more traditional engagements with high-resolution images, John Friedman photographs Nevada’s arid wastes in the manner of New Topographics, while British artist Anthony Holdsworth paints landscapes on site with a detailed realism reminiscent of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes.
Other works take a post-modern stance, but with personal inflections. Byron Spicer links older Bay Area art to the contemporary media era with his appropriated photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger, rendered in dense mosaics of one-inch square paintings. Genn Toffey’s portraits of historic women overlaid with transparent candy wrappers share in the subtle luminosity of Loren Rehbock’s delicate watercolor renderings of models on patterned backgrounds, which reflect his experience in poster design. The cut metal sculptures of Bruce Chaban recall Frank Stella’s compositions, albeit on a more intimate and playful scale, while Guillermo Pulido’s mixed-media constructions with chairs combine playful formal composition with graphic images of political conflict, reminding us of this important component of Berkeley’s culture.
Organization of this show was spearheaded by Jan Wurm, whose paintings blend Bay Area figuration with simplified renderings of men and women against flat backgrounds, which highlight social interactions, with details of clothing and mannerisms that lend them an ethnographic dimension. Difficult to categorize, they exemplify the combination of high sophistication and improvisatory play that characterizes the Bay Area scene, as do Robert Simons’ hand-painted prints, evocative of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Barbara Hazard’s idiosyncratic self-portraits from a mirror cube, which feature animals and multiple self-images in a contemporary version of folk art.
Such is a snapshot of the Breakfast Group today – or Groups, since it is currently split in a dispute between members who prefer Cafe Leila and those faithful to the Vault, a longstanding hang-out, where they maintain an earlier meeting time. The value of conversation and shared information still sustains the expanded group, even as other forces conspire against it. Cuts in education and higher rents have fostered dispersion (Terry St. John offered me comments via Skype from Thailand, where he now maintains a studio for much of the year); artists now commute to teach all over the Bay Area, and few can afford studios close to Berkeley. This has made it more difficult to recruit younger members. A sense of changing demographics and new trends in art lends this event a particularly retrospective and reflective character.
Given the richness of the show, there’s a sense that the gallery system should offer more opportunities for these artists to exhibit; there too, however, rising rents and the invasion of high-tech corporations have created an unfavorable climate. At least for now, weekly breakfasts continue, enacting a cultural form that can be transported and recreated in new locations. Celebration of the Breakfast Group at the Richmond Art Center continues through May, featuring weekly spotlights on selected members accompanied by potluck breakfasts, artist’s talks and workshops.
Top image: Terry St. John, China Camp, 2002. Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the Artist/ Dolby Chadwick Gallery
Victor Cartagena likens the act of remembering to that of crossing a bridge. In his artist’s talk at the Richmond Art Center, he described how he was forced to leave his home country of El Salvador in 1985 due to civil war, and sought refuge in California. Since being displaced, he has relied on this imagined bridge as recourse to a sense of identity and belonging. But it has been decades since he left his home, and much of what he wishes to return to no longer exists. Such tensions around identity and politics are the subject of the Bay Area artist’s installation Sites/Sights of Intervention, which is now on view at the Richmond Art Center.
The installation consists of various pieces that are meant to be experienced as a visual and spatial dialogue within which the viewer is centered. The gallery is dimly lit, and entering it is like wandering into Cartagena’s memory — a negative space of placelessness. “I heard the other day that memory is such a place that those who have memory leave the present …. and that makes me feel that I am not alone because being part of this group of immigrants, who live all over the world, we don’t belong anywhere,” said Cartagena. “We have our own territory, our own country — the immigrant country.”
Victor Cartagena’s “Bang, Bang Toy Gun.”
One of the most affecting pieces in the show is the series “Tattoos of Memory,” for which Cartagena superimposed faces onto diagrams from American-made manuals describing how to torture El Salvadorian prisoners. Although he was never tortured, Cartagena speaks of this historical episode as a tattoo upon his cultural memory. In his artist’s talk, he related these tattoos of memory to the actual tattoos on El Salvadorians who were born to refugee parents in the US and then deported back to El Salvador after the war. These people often became homeless and, as a result, got involved in violent gangs, whose members covered their bodies in tattoos. “We all have las maras [gang tattoos], because we’re immigrants,” said Cartagena. “I have my own tattoos on me and I call them tattoos of memory, and they’re all over my face, and I can’t erase those tattoos.”
Cartagena’s immersive and almost surrealist installation also incorporates passport photos from the Eighties that he collected from the photographer who took his own passport photo when he emigrated from El Salvador. Although he doesn’t know for sure whether the subjects emigrated, he knows at least that they hoped to.
While many of the symbols Cartagena works with are pulled from personal experience, they speak to broader issues of violence, alienation, and ignorance. In this way the artist opens up both collective and personal wounds with the understanding that the first step in healing is acknowledgement.
Sites/Sights of Intervention runs through May 30 at Richmond Art Center (2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond). 510-620-6772 or TheRAC.org
The more topical political art gets, the sooner it starts to look dated. Victor Cartagena has averted this risk by not tying his “Sites/Sights of Intervention” at the Richmond Art Center too closely to events in his native El Salvador.
Works in his complex ensemble evoke the tragedy of Latin American elites’ corruption, civil war and American anticommunist imperialism, but not too specifically.
In this context, an ostensibly simple object such as “Ante-Ojos/Anti-Eyes” (2014) – a framed pair of crushed glasses – summons thoughts of violent reprisal, the punishment of conscientious witness and the blindness of media complicity.
The work even suggests itself as a distant, underprivileged relation of Jasper Johns‘ satirical relief sculpture of lensless glasses, “The Critic Sees” (1961), in which mouths stand in for eyes, and as symbolic windows to a disfigured soul.
Cartagena’s “La Silla y Identidad Rota/The Chair and Broken Identity” (2014) consists of an overturned, busted-up wooden chair spotlighted on the floor, surrounded with tiny torn photographs of nameless people.
An American flag binds what remains of the chair seat and its unbroken leg, suggestive of both a bandanna and a tourniquet. Cartagena’s background and the work’s bilingual title link it to the use of torture in Central American conflicts and imperialist interventions. The moral nosedive in American interrogation practice and foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, gives Cartagena’s piece even wider relevance.
Similarly, revelations about targeted assassinations and “extraordinary rendition” in the so-called war on terror have expanded the reference of Cartagena’s “Materia Prima” and “Transparencias/Transparencies” (2004/2012).
The former consists of a light table crowded with jars of tinted fluid, each holding a small photo portrait. A projection of larger, fainter human images washes over the wall-mounted light box. The box’s form recalls – perhaps derisively – elements of Donald Judd‘s studiedly nonreferential “stack” wall sculptures.
Cartagena’s “Transparencias” and his other uses of anonymous portrait photos may borrow from French artist Christian Boltanski, who has long used such images to evoke the nameless, unnumbered casualties of war and the Holocaust.
Cartagena’s “Sights/Sites” surprises by its emotionally stirring quality. It taps into our sense of guilty fecklessness as citizens of an empire that has reacted with vicious interventions for decades out of panic at losing its grip on world power.
Victor Cartagena: Sites/Sights of Intervention: Mixed media installation works. Through May 30. Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave. (510) 620-6772. www.therac.org.
This Saturday’s Upcycle event is featured in the SF Chronicle’s 96 Hours section. We sure hope to see you for an afternoon of making, upcycling and music!
Landfills will be a little emptier this weekend, thanks to a fun, kid-friendly program at the Richmond Art Center.
The program, the second annual Upcycle, is a maker festival where families can create, see and learn about the art of “upcycling,” creatively reusing materials otherwise headed for the garbage.
Over the course of the day, visitors will be able to sew bags and quilts from old pieces of clothing, weave small rugs from old T-shirts, use broken plates and tiles to create a colorful mosaic trash can, turn use bicycle inner tubes into jewelry, and experience the magic of fire and metal to fold-form 3-D objects. In many cases, participating families will be able to engage in these activities with the help of local artists, too, taking direction from creative minds who work with upcycled materials every day.
Why Not Just Photograph it? That’s the question that Jeffrey Carlson, Contributing Editor at Fine Art Connoisseur asked John Wehrle the curator for our exhibition The Language of Realism and a California artist best known for his site-specific public artworks. This exhibition features four West Coast realist painters — Michael Beck, Christine Hanlon, Anthony Holdsworth and John Rampley.
I have often been asked the question, ‘Why not just photograph it?’ I have never had a simple answer, either for myself or for others. So, one of the goals of this exhibition was to provide examples of realist painting that, if not providing a definitive solution, at least presented a variety of reasons.” – John Wehrle.
Victor Cartagena, “Sites/Sights of Intervention” at Richmond Art Center
MARCH 28, 2014
Installations and artworks by local artist Victor Cartagena on view at Richmond Art Center in “Sites/Sights of Intervention” act almost as the artist’s autobiography. Appropriating imagery which reflect his own experiences and responses to world events to explore broader socio-political issues, Cartagena in many ways surrenders his private experiences and personal, difficult memories to public view to not only provide healing, but to facilitate meaningful conversation and perpetuate lasting change to the troubling issues and attitudes he has faced and witnessed.
At 19 Cartagena left his native El Salvador in 1985 and came alone to San Francisco to flee his country’s civil war. His early work drew upon these experiences, boldly exploring memories of that difficult time. Some of the most pressing themes his work expresses are the challenges and discriminations immigrants like himself endure in America. Since the beginning of the civil war, between 500,000 and one million El Salvadorans have come to America. Thus in many ways the artist tells their story while also making a powerful statement about all immigrant experience through his work. Passport portraits, strung together hanging from the ceiling and projected in grand scale in installations like “Transparencias” at the Center act as a combined symbol of travel and identity, but stripped from original intention, these floating and dislocated images of now anonymous persons are often interpreted with ominous undertones and solemn connotations.
Now living in San Francisco, Cartagena and his artwork are also influenced and informed by local struggles, and community concerns. Many of the artist’s works interpret and respond to pervasive issues in the region, like gang warfare. “Bang Bang Toy Gun,” an installation composed of several toy guns suspended from the ceiling, while a video image of one in a white hoodie that masks his face makes a panorama of the gallery space with a gun clutched tightly in his hands and pointed directly at the camera. It creates a foreboding and intimidating environment that speaks to a culture of violence and suspicion in America that has now seemed to trickle down even to the very young. Drawing parallels between “play” violence and real violence, Cartagena may be questioning how or whether one contributes to the other, or indeed simply if perpetrators of violence are able to comprehend the reality and severity of the situation.
“I go into a place of frustration ” says Cartagena, “and the only way I can do something, is just doing my art.” His work thus is both a kind of catharsis to heal and relinquish the affectations of the memory and also to relive in order to learn from it. Cartagena’s artwork has much to reveal about the world, and audiences have much to experience, and learn.
“Victor Cartagena: Sites/Sights of Intervention”will be at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue through May 30, 2014
Kristin Farr from KQED stopped by to view our latest exhibition, The American Teenager Project, a collection of photographs and audio recordings completed by 20 local teenagers.
Robin Bowman is a photojournalist who traveled the country interviewing teenagers about their lives in the early 2000s. She took their portraits to illustrate the interviews, and later published them in a book. Bowman’s portraits prove that a picture is worth many words. She skillfully captures moments and complex stories in single, black-and-white images. The project grew when Bowman began working with teens on another level, training them to conduct their own interviews and shoot portraits of their peers. The group of students currently working on the project are in Richmond where many of the portraits are on view in the bustling back hallway of the Richmond Art Center.
The SF Chronicle 96 Hours cover story featured our exhibition The Art of Living Black. Writer Kimberly Chun stopped by the Richmond Art Center for a preview of the exhibition and spoke to some of the 50 artists who will be showing their work. We’re thrilled that our work hosting this long-running exhibition of established and emerging artists has received this major coverage!
It’s unique — there’s nothing else like this in Northern California. There’s no other place you can go every year and see a cross section of the area’s black artists.” — Oakland artist Ajuan Mance.
