Making Our Mark
As the Richmond Art Center celebrates its 80th Anniversary year, it is preparing a major exhibition in tribute to its history and its mission. The exhibition, Making Our Mark, looks to artists who have had a history with the Art Center: artists who have exhibited, supported, and enriched the programs over the years. In selecting these artists, we reflect on the scope of interest—media as richly varied as painting, ceramics, fiber, sculpture, and photography—and themes as diverse as the cultural backgrounds at the foundation of the community.
We have also asked each of the invited artists to put forward a younger artist: someone whom they have taught or mentored or whose work they have felt should be shown and promoted. This, too, is in line with our history and our mission—giving voice to new artists and opening the galleries to new visions.
Some of the invited artists, including Jim Melchert, Hung Liu, Squeak Carnwath, and Lia Cook, had their very first exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center and have over the years served as the core of the Bay Area art community, teaching, mentoring, and lighting a path for younger artists. And for some of the younger artists, this exhibition presents one of the first major showings of their work.
Turning our attention to materiality, the environment, systems of power and inequality, these artists have followed different modes of expression with a common passion for their art.
These 28 artists participating in Making Our Mark, including William Wiley, Christopher Brown, Mildred Howard, Richard Misrach, Deborah Oropallo, Enrique Chagoya, as well as Allan deSouza, Michael Hall, Johanna Poethig, and Dru Anderson stretch in many directions and their art will occupy the Main, South, and West Galleries in a survey of our history, our present moment, and our anticipation of the future.
