By DeWitt Cheng
May 27, 2025
Continuing to June 14, 2025
This massive retrospective of muralist John Wehrle reflects on a long career. Over this period the artist has produced murals that have become iconic in his East Bay home and far beyond. “Time & Tide,” guest-curated by former RAC Executive Director Jeff Nathanson, features scores of paintings, digital reproductions of murals, preparatory drawings, maquettes, and painted wood sculptures, not to mention analog and digital photography. I recommend the catalogue, you will want to return to these pictures long after the originals have come down.
Wehrle’s nomadic art career began in rural Texas. A non-athlete by his own wry admission, the tall, affable Wehrle discovered his artistic superpower copying WW2 fighter planes from Flying Magazine: Corsairs, Lightnings, Spitfires, Mustangs, and Marauders. During college at Texas Tech he majored in art and drew cartoons for the school newspaper while participating, at his father’s insistence, in the Reserve Officer Training Program. In 1966, during his military service, Lieutenant Wehrle became the leader of the first of three combat artist teams documenting the Vietnam War. “I was basically trying not to get the team in fire fights,” he reflects today. “ The paintbrush doesn’t make a very good weapon.” The paintings made from field sketches were exhibited in Art of the American Soldier at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. They are represented here by digital reproductions.
After studying art at Pratt Institute in New York, Wehrle began his teaching career at the de Young Museum’s education program and at California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now CCA). But in 1973 the restless artist left academia for a back-to-the-land experiment in cabin-building in Montana, overwintering there alone while living in a VW camper. His Thoreauvian adventure became the subject of a 12-photo book, “Whiskey Gulch.” More importantly, the prolonged solitude amid the frozen woods became a formative experience.
Returning to the comparative comfort of the Bay Area, Wehrle worked as a baker and carpenter, and was eventually lured back to the art world by a de Young colleague who pointed him toward the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a 1970s-era successor to the 1930s Works Progress Administration. Artists were paid by the federal government to make public art until 1981, when th newly elected President Ronald Feagan ended the program Richard Nixon had signed into law.
But mural painting proved a perfect fit for Wehrle, who enjoyed the public performance aspect of working on a scaffold as well as researching the contexts and histories of public spaces. He found that he could express his curious, playful, gently ironic temperament. Wehrle’s murals portray all the inhabitants of an area, past and present, as interacting characters in a transtemporal saga. Ohlone people, in Berkeley, at the Amtrak station? Vaqueros and grizzlies at a gas station on San Pablo Avenue? Yes, of course. “A photograph is like a moment,” Wehrle notes, “whereas with a painting, you can put a lot of moments together.”
“Time & Tide,” which proverbially wait for no man, is thus a fitting title for this show, with its lighthearted chronological revisionism and low-key environmentalism that celebrates the regional, but also elevate it into a larger, more expansive Our Town view of life.
“Positively Fourth Street,” the mural that Wehrle and John Rampley painted fifty years ago on the side of the de Young parking lot in Golden Gate Park, introduces a theme that recurs in many of the works here. The ambiguous relationship between the human and animal worlds, between culture and nature, is expressed in a view of San Francisco’s eastbound freeway ramp approaching the Bay Bridge. The Fourth Street signage dangles precariously, cars emptied of drivers and passengers, all of it reclaimed by wildlife. The skyline buildings (sparse by current standards after decades of Manhattanization) stand mute witness. Post-apocalyptic narratives have become a staple of mass entertainment in the decades since, and we have become accustomed to the idea of humanity’s near extinction. Unlike film industry hyperbole, “Positively Fourth Street” is presented here, matter-of-factly, in an understated manner that is Wehrle’s own.
Explains Wehrle, “With the onset of melting ice caps, one begins to speculate on a future resembling the past … Nature is a powerful force and wants to reclaim its own. Weeds push through the sidewalk cracks, ice crumbles walls, water rises. Time changes everything …”
“Rising Tide” (2011-24) reprises the narrative of ecological collapse, but less apocalyptically than “Positively Fourth Street.” The junction of Columbus Avenue, Washington and Montgomery Streets in San Francisco’s North Beach is the scene, with the Transamerica Pyramid and the Beaux-Arts Sentinel (aka Zoetrope) Building dominating the background. No mysterious extinction seems to have taken place here, however. People go about their business normally despite the obstacles of knee-deep waters and icebergs emerging from side streets. A couple walks and talks on cell phones; a young man hooks a fish; a boatman rows a painting to safety; penguins and a flock of Canada geese search for new homes in the new landscape. A lamppost banner advertises “Noye’s Fludde,” the title of a 1958 children’s opera by Benjamin Britten based on an early fifteenth-century miracle play about biblical disaster, featuring in its cast “the voice of God” and a “chorus of animals and birds.”
Aside from the breadth of Wehrle’s historical research and his artistic virtuosity, plausibly arranging the multiple source images with their varying viewpoints is an achievement. Accompanying perspective-gridded preparatory sketches reveal the wit and humor that inform the finished work. Painted wooden sculptures are both corny and clever; think of the philosopher-comics of Northern California Dude-Ranch Dada such as William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Roy DeForest.
The schism between nature and culture is given form in the juxtaposition of animal or human protagonists and confining, old-fashioned cubic cabinets that had housed cathode-ray tube sets during Baby-Boomer childhoods. In “Fact/Fiction,” a claw-footed Chippendale coffee table painted grass green is carved with the two words of the title, rendered in contrasting colors and fonts. Bisecting the table into bipedal halves is a sawfish, decisively separating the irreconcilables. In “Clamped,” a trout struggles against a woodworker’s clamp. while in “Nesting Instinct,” a mother heron brings her chick, just breaking free of its TV shell, a succulent morsel of cable.The three-dimensional talking head in the ”Fox News” television set blathers on, interminably, his circular logic manifest in a coil of twanging bedspring. An array of nine TV sets, stacked three on three, present multiple versions of two images, distorted by disjunctures, all cleverly rendered by the artist-carpenter: a housewife joyfully extolling her detergent, and the famous Eddie Adams Pulitzer-Prize photo of the pistol execution of a Viet Cong prisoner of war. In “Kafka Dream,” the confining rectangle is a framed excerpt of Boschian hellscape from which a tree branch protrudes, bearing a crow holding in its beak, like nest-building bric-a-brac, cutout letters spelling the author’s name. It’s a curious but apt literary monument.
Wehrle’s experiments with digital photography are notable for their microscopically detailed composite shots of street signage (“BUMP,” “STOP”). His motion studies of ballet dancer Muriel Maffre (“Muriel 2”) are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century multiple-exposure images by Muybridge and Marey. “Li’l Egypt” is a composite photo of the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, but cut into the shape of a diving whale’s tail. A modestly-sized panorama of a golden brown California landscape with a lake flanked by a row of trees and a fence bears the title “Et in Arcadia Ego” (“I, Too, was in [the legendary paradise of] Arcadia”), after Nicolas Poussin’s famous elegiac 1638 painting. “Arcadia Ego” has been interpreted as art or memory confronting and transcending mortality — time and tide, that is, for the present company.
