An exhibition of works on paper, Joan Brown : In Living Color, reflects the bold originality and the continued impact Brown has had on artists, educators, and collectors in the Bay Area and beyond. Joan Brown’s deep determination and humanistic commitment catalyzed artists in the San Francisco Bay Area to forge a path against the grain of formalism in upholding the narrative. The core of Joan Brown’s life and experiences became the subject of her art.
Joan Brown : In Living Color reveals the intimate and personal in the renderings of an artist who never stopped drawing. Any piece of paper could be taken in hand for notation of child, cat, dream, or view of oneself. Many of these works come from the artist’s estate and have never been exhibited publicly.
We are deeply grateful to the following individuals and organizations who have generously sponsored this exhibition:
Susan and Steve Chamberlin
Jacobs & CO
Jay DeFeo Foundation
James Curtis III
City of Richmond
Susan and Thomas Newmeyer
Elizabeth D. Moyer and Michael C. Powanda
Image: Model with Foot on Table 1973
Acrylic, graphite, and ink on paper
36 x 24 in.
Estate of Joan Brown courtesy Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco
In conjunction with Joan Brown: In Living Color, the Richmond Art Center is presenting a companion exhibition, Earth, Wind, and Fire.
In Earth, Wind, and Fire, the Richmond Art Center looks to artists working across multiple media to investigate, reflect, and assert a vision of the environment, nature, and human nature as played out in an ecology of imminent concern.
Image:
Chester Arnold Histories
Oil on linen
74 x 84 in.
2010
Complementing Pogo Park’s 10th Anniversary, the exhibition Pogo Park: A New Model for Community Transformation showcases the vision, concept and design, models, stories, and voices of the people involved in transforming little-used city park (Elm Playlot and Harbour-8 Park) into safe and vibrant place that sparks children’s imagination and initiative.
Pogo Park is about much more than playgrounds. Its unique approach combines two distinct but interrelated strategies: child development and community development.
PressingOn—Contemporary Printmakingoffers the opportunity to see the most contemporary explorations in contemporary printmaking. In a time when things happen with the push of a button, the hands-onmixing materials and process – the transformation from plate to print—is still magical. We invite the private view, the personal voice, and the public position: all current trends in printmaking as artists keep PressingOn.
The juror for PressingOn is Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Foundation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In a career spanning decades, Karin Breuer has mounted exhibitions ranging from the scholarly depths of Japanese woodblock prints and their influence onWestern art to the archives of local art presses and a flowering of California printmaking and reveling most recently in the idiosyncratic, humor-infused screen prints of Ed Ruscha.
Glass Currents is a national exhibition showcasing talent from emerging and established glass artists, with a connection to California by birth, residency, or a degree from an accredited institution. This regional focus is meant to celebrate the significant role of California artists, and the Bay Area, in the early roots of the Studio Glass Movement. It also provides a contemporary survey of glass art, showcasing a diverse range of techniques that exemplifies where glass has evolved to today.
Our annual open non-juried showing of our member artists takes place every summer. This year our Spotlight Artists are Marisa Burman, Katie Hawkinson, Jan Langdon, and Gordon Morris.
Richmond Creates: The 5th Annual Art in the Community Show brings a portion of the work created this year in our off-site satellite classes here to the Richmond Art Center. The artists shown here range from ages 5 to 85 and were all participants in 6-10 week art classes held at local school and community centers. This exhibition showcases work made in a variety of media – printmaking, sculpture, metals, book arts, public art, weaving, painting, ceramics and mixed media. The talented teaching artists facilitating these classes are dedicated to sharing the joy and power of the creative process in service to learning and well-being.
This year, AIC offered a total of 38 classes and one school-wide residency, engaging over 1500 students. In collaboration with the WCCUSD office of expanded learning, we provided after-school art classes in 6 elementary schools, one middle and one high school. In its third year, our school-wide spring residency at Washington elementary focused on printmaking, ceramics and book arts. Half of our partnerships occur in non-traditional learning spaces which include local non profits, City of Richmond community centers, the E.M. Downer YMCA, and housing-affiliated community centers. This year Art Center staff and teaching artists shared strategies for artmaking with 45 elementary school teachers and 20 after school group leaders through the Bring Art to Your Classroom professional development workshop series.
Sculpture has witnessed many changes: it has left the pedestal, it has sprawled on the floor, it has crawled up the wall, it has dug into the earth, it has written itself a thought on paper, and it has washed away with the tides. In Marking Space seven artists move off that historical pedestal to establish measured distance, to examine the nature of material, and to expose structure. In diverse materials, Mari Andrews, Robert Brady, Genevieve Hastings, Jann Nunn, Gay Outlaw, Lucy Puls, and Tracey Snelling, deploy matter to mirror habitat and architecture, to explore aggregation, to reflect on social structures, and to give voice to a common impulse to locate myriad humanistic concerns in space.
Here the very boundaries of what sculpture is become as fluid as the active movement of these artists from one material to another, from one line of visual investigation to another. Turning our attention to identity, materiality, the environment, systems of power and inequality, these artists have followed different paths with a common passion of expression. Yet there are thematic arcs to be read across each artist’s work. Likewise, there can be found thematic and conceptual commonalities bridging the works of these artists.
The struggle for resonance between form and content, a content of personal devotion and conviction, is especially poignant in the works of Lucy Puls who takes the book and makes language concrete in literal ways. Carum Thesaurus holds the breadth of language, but the pages are rolled, embedded, separated, encased, and suspended. Meaning remains elusive.
How measure is taken: by the breadth of the hand, the length of the arm, the foot or the stride, the body is intrinsic in anchoring space and in finding place.
The idea of the step, the shift in balance, can be manifest in the literal of Outlaw’s Screaming Mayme as it can in the abstract of Three-Legged Inversion. We can also see this unhampered in Robert Brady’s wooden figure, Return, which not only takes on the figure, but dons angel’s wings to introduce another level of spiritual content.
The humanity of our lives is often understood through our bodies, through the vulnerability and awareness of the fragility of anatomy. In Breathing Space the fragility of the human body, the delicacy of the intricate systems of life, these inform Jann Nunn’s work as a vision of strings of thin glass pipettes gently rise and fall to air warming and cooling in cycles, a body of glass breathing – an invocation of life.
This careful and mindful eye is cast on nature in the work of Mari Andrews. The structures of plant form are taken for the structure of the sculptures, the materials found and collected are laid out in mimicry of their own architecture. Andrews orders the most delicate scraps in place and allows the quirky images to unfold like a winding trail.
With a probing eye, Tracey Snelling constructs the most specific and detailed representations of buildings, streets, and neighborhoods with lights and sounds and societal markers. Snelling creates tableaux mirroring our common architecture, reflecting our daily habits.
Genevieve Hastings is creating a new installation for the Richmond Art Center Courtyard as part of Marking Space. Occultation presents a mysterious structure beckoning entry. The enveloping and haunting work of Hastings creates a space to evoke memory, association, and relationship to interior and external worlds. Based on the workers’ company housing erected cheaply and quickly where crops once grew in Richmond,Occultation stands as a sign of all that is no longer visible just as it gives voice to lost connections and offers the beauty and solace of commemoration.
These artists present personal work investigating language, the body, and the very nature of image and recognition, space and orientation. Materiality is explored; materiality is challenged. The objects in space are spread out and then the physical is expanded through the integration of media. And throughout these artworks, a narrative emerges and re-emerges: self, home, loss, boundaries. The fleeting and shifting, the solid and anchored – here they evoke immediate response and lingering memory. The metal is scarred, the wood splintered, the asphalt cracked, the paint flaking. The child is screaming, the angel limping, the dinosaur extinct. So the art reaches high to the ceiling, stretches out along the path, lights up and calls out. It holds up the dry seed pod, points to the constellations, and whispers as softly as the air escaping our lungs. In bright plastic or smooth stone, a way is marked – a path from what we know and where we are to where we may find its meaning.
Artists’ Talk
April 1, 2017 at 2:00 pm
Panel Discussion with Mari Andrews, Genevieve Hastings, Jann Nunn, Gay Outlaw, and Lucy Puls
Maps have been drawn to mark where we are, what lies around us, what lies before us, and to note the paths taken so that others may follow or we may return. We mark these paths to understand what is present, what is important, and in what relationship things exist. Maps anchor us to a home-base and they give us the freedom to explore expanded vistas.
The five artists in Mapping the Uncharted use physical maps as a point of departure for reconfiguring impressions of geography, politics, and visual language.
Guillermo Galindo composes music from instruments made of found objects. These objects have been collected along the US – Mexico border in collaboration with photographer, Richard Misrach. Abandoned under dire conditions these belongings of illegal immigrants all have a sound in Galindo’s constructed instruments and find voice in his compositions. Galindo’s scores of unique notation are printed on maps, photographs, and flags which have marked humanitarian water stations. Thus his scores create a map of passage and loss.
Mark Garrett cuts and paints and transforms maps into visualizations of patterned accretions emphasizing the fragility and debasement of the ecology.
Indira Martina Morre creates delicate surfaces marking the most ethereal — cyberspace – passwords and passages are noted with symbols and layers noting information. In an almost blinding light, the surface allows islands of gray to emerge with direction and aggregated form.
Lordy Rodriguez expands and conflates maps to make visible our cultural and political conceits. He takes the very iconography of map making and transposes it into a vocabulary for witty images reflecting our popular culture, expectations, and prejudices.
Diane Rosenblum appropriates artworks and superimposes auction prices creating a map of the art world. The transformation of the artwork into a gauge of the art market economy charts a world which otherwise can only be seen by those who navigate the sales rooms and offices of auction houses.
Artists’ Talk
April 8, 2017 at 2:00 pm
Panel Discussion with Mark Garrett, Indira Martina Morre, Lordy Rodriguez, and Diane Rosenblum
This exhibition showcases and celebrates the diverse talents of the Richmond Art Center teaching artists who inspire thousands of students in our Studio and Art in the Community programs.
