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March 18, 2023
The New York Times: For an Artist, the Morgan Is Subject, Object and Venue
Nina Katchadourian pairs her artwork and family heirlooms with some treasures from the collection founded by John Pierpont Morgan.
The collaboration works.
By Dawn Chan
March 2, 2023
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In Nina Katchadourian’s current exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, the contours of two very distinct personalities take shape. There’s Katchadourian herself: a multimedia artist who turns modest materials into quirky, conceptually witty works. And there’s John Pierpont Morgan, the 19th-century American financier who used his unimaginable wealth to build a collection of art and manuscripts so grand that The Times of London, in 1908, called it “one of the wonders of the world.” Their two sensibilities merge in a joyful polyphony in Katchadourian’s show, “Uncommon Denominator,” which brings together nearly 130 artworks, artifacts and heirlooms drawn from the artist’s own practice and possessions, as well as from the Morgan’s extensive holdings. “Uncommon Denominator” focuses on photographs but offers much else, too: a figure drawing in chalk by Antoine Watteau; sketches and scribbled notes by Saul Steinberg; the broken top of a champagne bottle used to christen Morgan’s yacht. Katchadourian’s artwork is a key part of the show. Some of it crouches in the weeds, among other artifacts. Other pieces take center stage, like the 24 photos in the middle of the room, all from her series “Look Who’s Talking.” In them are books Katchadourian pulled from the Morgan Library’s Carter Burden Collection of American Literature, and then arranged into jagged stacks, photographing their spines so that their titles can be read together as pithy, surreal poetry. (One such verse: “Big Sur / Oh What a Paradise It Seems / Suddenly Last Summer / Fires / Burning Bright / Ah, Wilderness!”)
Over the past several decades, Katchadourian has become known for unassuming, playful art that tinkers with the natural order of things to question what we take for granted, or point out the vast possibilities that exist in the smallest of realms. The results can be outright humorous, but as she once said in an interview, “I am not just making little jokes.” Her work has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, Turner Contemporary, and in the Armenian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. She’s mended broken spider webs with red sewing thread, then chronicled how her gestures of good will were received. (The spiders rejected her handiwork, replacing it with their own.) She’s sliced and diced geographic maps into new arrangements. Perhaps her most popular works were self-portraits she shot in airplane bathrooms, wearing paper toilet-seat covers on her head that she’d folded or torn to resemble the hoods worn by 15th-century Flemish women. Those photos aren’t on view, but others made 30,000 feet in the air are: namely, her “Seat Assignment” pieces, for which Katchadourian, determined to treat her economy-class seat as a temporary artist studio, transformed whatever she had on hand — in-flight magazine spreads, rolled-up paper napkins — into odd tableaus she photographed with her camera phone. Katchadourian’s D.I.Y. approach makes the lingering impact of Morgan’s aesthetic seem all the more extravagant. Katchadourian’s “Big Sur,” from the series “Look Who’s Talking” (2022). The artist photographed the books’ spines so that their titles can be read together as pithy, surreal poetry.
For Full Article please see: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/arts/design/nina-katchadourian-morgan-library.html
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March 18, 2023
W Magazine: Doing It Their Way
Native artists are finally gaining visibility in museums and galleries— upending long-held stereotypes in the process
by Jori FinkelPhotographs by Tommy Kha
Published February 8, 2023
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Marie Watt
Marie Watt (above) with Untitled—Work in Progress, 2022, consisting of panels from Whitney Sewing Circles. Photographed in Portland, Oregon, December 2022. Styled by Rachael Wang. Watt wears a Toteme sweater from Frances May; Chimala jeans from Frances May; her own glasses and jewelry. Known as Germantown Revival, Cody’s style involves the use of commercially manufactured bright, aniline-dyed wool yarn. She tends to mix traditional Navajo symbols such as the Spider Woman cross (“a symbol of balance,” she says) with personal and pop-culture references like superpixelated video games. “Being a child of the 1980s, I grew up with Atari and the first Nintendo, and all of those influences are definitely evident in the work,” she says, also comparing her line-byline process on the loom to the motion of an inkjet printer. The techno imagery sets her work apart, but that’s far from the only source of innovation. Cody describes the history of Germantown weaving as particularly creative. It originated in 1864, when Navajo peoples from different regions were persecuted by the U.S. military. If they survived the death march known as the Long Walk, they were imprisoned at Fort Sumner, in New Mexico. As supplies, she says, they received brightly colored blankets made from wool milled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Navajo weavers then unraveled these blankets and rewove them into their own styles, creating the mash-ups called samplers as patterns were “exchanged among the weavers from different regions who were corralled together,” she says. “That’s what I’m really drawn to—the idea that during such a dire time, the creative spirit of people couldn’t be broken and couldn’t be stolen.”
Marie Watt also skewers the myth that Native art traditions, too often dismissed or devalued as “craft,” are conventional or static. One of her examples of historic innovation is how Native peoples shaped tin lids, typically from tobacco cans, to make the bell-like jingles used in the Jingle Dress Dance, which is associated with healing and, some say, originated during the influenza pandemic of 1918. She is currently making cloudlike, suspended sculptures out of jingles for a June show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago, noting that she is interested in the “reverberations—sounds, stories, actions, and relationships—that are a part of gathering.” Watt is best known for using blankets as a way to evoke and also create community: building tall sculptures, sometimes supported by steel beams, out of used or “reclaimed” blankets that are folded and stacked. “I’ve thought a lot about how blankets are exchanged in our community,” says Watt, who got her MFA from Yale. “And, of course, we all have these intimate experiences with blankets: We’re received in blankets, and, in a sense, we depart this world in blankets—and in between that, we’re constantly imprinting on these humble pieces of cloth.” But more than any material, Watt sees gathering and communal forms of storytelling as the through line of her work. She has facilitated sewing circles, loosely modeled on the storytelling circles run by her educator mother, in which she invites people at a museum or elsewhere to meet up, chat, and stitch text panels that feed a larger collaborative artwork. (One at the Whitney Museum last year drew hundreds; the result is going on show at Marc Straus Gallery, in New York, on March 12.) And the public art project she is now developing, a huge neon sign that says “Turtle Island,” the Seneca name for North America, promises to be a conversation starter. She doesn’t expect people to know the creation story behind the name, but she hopes they will be inspired to learn more and maybe see their homeland differently. “If we rethink what we call a place,” she offers, “it might change the way we steward it.”
For Full Article please see:
https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/contemporary-native-artists
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February 02, 2023
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February 01, 2023
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November 17, 2022
'A Miscellany of Things that Cohere'
by Renny Pritikin for Squarecylinder.com
The married collaborators Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, known for their wit and distinctive way of manipulating found objects, group together more than two dozen works in their exhibition, One thing after another thing. It’s a charming hodgepodge of “things” that break down to the following: four clocks, three nets and a suite of prints about nets, three videos, rocks, a bird cage and several prints of bird cages, three distressed books, and several painted columns. These found objects are manipulated through a process in which aesthetic research becomes serious fun. The result, as the title implies, is a miscellany of things that cohere.
Let’s start with the analog clocks, generic wall decor seen ubiquitously in institutions from offices to schools. The artists’ intervention involves detaching their numbers, which, once removed, pile up as a scrum of “limbs” at the bottom of the clock faces. The artists aim to satirize the tyranny of time and clock watching but are unsuccessful because we don’t need the numbers to tell time; the hands of the clock do it for us. Freedom from the oppression of regulated hours will need a stronger fix than missing numerals. Like these clocks, much of the work in the show examines how our apprehension of the world is habitual and ingrained.
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August 23, 2022
Ana Teresa Fernandez speaks to borders and the environment in 'At the Edge of Distance' by Tony Bravo for The San Francisco Chronicle
Artist Ana Teresa Fernández’s practice creates visual connections among some of the most significant issues of our times.
In her 2021 installation “On the Horizon” at Ocean Beach (and later the Cliff House), she crafted a potent metaphor for how climate change will directly impact communities of color in San Francisco living in low-lying areas of the city with her series of saltwater-filled tubes showing how high the sea will rise. Now, in her first solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery, “At the Edge of Distance,” on view through Sept. 3, that intersectionality continues.
“It’s the broad spectrum — identity politics, social justice, environmental justice — that interests me,” said Fernández, 42, who was born in Mexico but has lived in San Francisco since she came to the city in 2001 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. “Areas where there are inequities, I definitely tend to touch a lot.”
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December 01, 2021
Ana Teresa Fernández
How Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, and Other Artists Turned a Former Retreat for San Francisco Elites Into a Stark Reminder of Climate Change
For a show at Cliff-House, the For-Site Foundation enlisted 26 artists to install work at the seaside venue.
By: Julie Baumgardner
Published on: November 26th, 2021
Daniel Beltrá, Oil Spill #12, (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
It’s almost impossible to think about San Francisco without thinking about its landscape: the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the 1989 Earthquake. California’s Golden City, a boom-and-bust town with an economy, immigrants, and urban identity so tied to its environment, that the climate itself is a central character in San Francisco’s story.
It was no surprise then that when For-Site Foundation founding director Cheryl Haines began to consider the next exhibition for the Bay Area-based organization, the climate crisis would be its central query. In the last decade, the city has been plagued by drought and fire, they too becoming local residents in the psyche of San Francisco. But it was when the National Park Service all but tossed Haines the keys to Cliff House, the Victorian-era landmark leisure complex on the Pacific Ocean, that the theme of the new exhibition, titled “Lands End,” really began to take on tones that might otherwise not be there.
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November 10, 2021
Fernández
Set Against the Crashing Waves of the Pacific, a New Art Exhibition Takes on the Climate Crisis
By: Marley Marius
Published on: November 5th, 2021
Ana Teresa Fernández, On the Horizon, 2021. Acrylic resin cylinders filled with seawater. 72 in. high each. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Courtesy of Ana Teresa Fernández
Since 2003, the San Francisco-based FOR-SITE Foundation has centered “art about place,” mounting affecting exhibitions at Fort Mason Chapel (2017’s “Sanctuary,” examining “the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground” through a series of contemporary handmade rugs), Fort Winfield Scott (2016’s “Home Land Security,” which activated former military structures in the Presidio), Alcatraz Island (2014’s ”@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz”), and other sites. With its latest, “Lands End,” opening to the public on Sunday, the setting is San Francisco’s historic Cliff House, a former restaurant and ballroom built in the mid-19th century. There, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, 26 artists from 14 different countries are using painting, photography, sculpture, sound, and other media to respond to the climate crisis. (...)
The setting proved especially resonant for Ana Teresa Fernández, the artist behind On the Horizon (2021), an installation of six-foot-tall acrylic pillars filled with sea water. (In a worst-case-scenario, sea levels could rise by that much over the next 80 years.) “You have all this epic landscape occurring, and you have these waves that are, like, 15 feet and crashing into these three large boulders that are just in front of the building,” she says. The precariousness of the site—its proximity to a ruinous force—feels germane to the issue at hand in “Lands End.” “There’s nothing ‘pacific’ about it,” Fernández says of the site. “It’s quite literally the wild west.”
So too was she inspired by the variety of approaches and concerns represented in the show. “I’ve known their work for quite some time,” Fernández says of the other artists “Lands End,” “so it’s interesting when we intersect. For example, Andy Goldsworthy’s piece and mine are at opposite extremes, right? Mine is about an abundance of water and his is about scarcity and dryness. But this is very much what the conversation around climate change is—extremes, and all the complexities in between.”
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November 10, 2021
Fernández
Provocative eco-art exhibition in S.F. forces confrontations with climate change
By: Sam Whiting
Published on: November 7th, 2021
Dinners made of beach plastic ready to be served at the Cliff House in San Francisco, Calif.
Sea levels may be rising, but Ana Teresa Fernández and her bucket brigade are doing what they can to combat it.
Forming a 200-yard human chain on Ocean Beach, they drew 170 gallons out of the surf, hauled the sloshing saltwater off the beach and up to the old Cliff House restaurant, where it was carried into the dining room and muscled up a ladder to be poured into seven clear cylinders, all six-feet tall.
“It was a lot of fricking work. For the next three days I couldn’t lift my arms,” said Fernández, at the opening of “Lands End,” a provocative environmental art installation curated by the For-Site Foundation. Fernández’s contribution to the group show is called “On the Horizon. ” The seawater cylinders are intended to show exactly what a sea-level rise of six feet will look like. (...)
“We want to bring visitors’ attention to the very complex conversation around climate change,” said For-Site founder Cheryl Haines, noting that the show opened during COP26, the international climate conference in Glasgow. “We shouldn’t just leave this to government and industry to solve. There is also an individual responsibility to affect change in our own lives.”
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November 10, 2021
Fernández and Arnold
An iconic structure is resurrected with the installation of an exhibition focused on climate change.
By: Jessica Wolfrom
Published on: November 3rd, 2021
The former Cliff House, now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is situated at Lands End in San Francisco. | Photo courtesy of Terrance Emerson / shutterstock.com
San Francisco’s Cliff House has long teetered on the edge of the world. Famed for its panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, the Victorian-era landmark has been destroyed and rebuilt several times throughout its history, once after a schooner carrying explosives crashed into the rocks near Point Lobos, and again after succumbing to multiple fires.
Now, it will be transformed into an art gallery, where a forthcoming exhibition will ask visitors to contemplate the changing climate.
Lands End, presented by San Francisco-based For-Site Foundation and the National Park Service, will make its debut November 7 and run through March. The show includes 26 contemporary artists whose work explores the tenuous ground upon which humanity stands in the face of a warming world.
Featuring works by Catharine Clark Gallery represented artists Ana Teresa Fernández and Chester Arnold.
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October 30, 2021
Paul Rucker and Stephanie Syjuco
Austin Peay State University’s The New Gallery presents new Garment Exhibition
‘Preserve & Protect’ – reveals our ‘Shrouded Histories’
By: News Staff
Published on: October 28th, 2021
Some of Stephanie Syjuco's work.
Clarksville, TN – The Austin Peay State University (APSU) The New Gallery, with support from The Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts and the Department of Art + Design, is pleased to present Preserve & Protect to continue an engaging 2021-22 exhibition season.
Co-curated by Michael Dickins, director of The New Gallery, and Erika Diamond, curator and assistant director of CVA galleries at Chautauqua Institution, this exhibition of conceptual garment work looks at the complex ways in which textiles, particularly garments, tell the stories of the past, present, and future. More than just armor for the body, they relay the resilience of a culture – worn for protection but also as a way to proclaim one’s identity.
“Textiles serve to protect us, to tell our stories, and to display our privilege,” Diamond said. “Through recognizable structures in historical fashion and strategic embellishments, these textiles recontextualize and assert shrouded histories. They affirm the value of lives lost due to persistent ideals of colonialism, bigotry, and unequal power structures. They reveal concurrent histories and ask for better futures.”
The exhibit includes works from Michael Sylvan Robinson, Paul Rucker, Stephanie Syjuco, Winnie van der Rijn, and Anangookwe Wolf.
Their works “bear witness to and challenge our shared American history,” Diamond said. “They question whose histories have had the privilege of being heard. They ask for a more inclusive authorship of our shared history. Together, they represent an army of truths. Will we take up this call to arms and begin to protect each other, listen to each other’s stories, and share our abundance of resources?”
The exhibit opens on Monday, November 1st, and runs through December 10th at The New Gallery, located in the Art + Design building on the campus of Austin Peay State University. -
October 28, 2021
Saar
See Sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Alison Saar, and More Commissioned for Destination Crenshaw, L.A.’s $100 Million Black Arts Initiative
100 sculptures will ultimately line a 1.3-mile corridor in South Los Angeles.
By: Caroline Goldstein
Published on: October 26th, 2021
The City of Los Angeles’s Cultural Affairs Commission has approved plans for the initial stage of Destination Crenshaw, the $100 million public art and environmental revitalization project that aims to turn a 1.3-mile-long stretch of South Los Angeles into a hub for Black arts and culture.
Earlier this month, the organizers revealed the designs for seven permanent sculptures by artists Charles Dickson, Melvin Edwards, Maren Hassinger, Artis Lane, Alison Saar, Kehinde Wiley, and Brenna Youngblood that will be installed on Crenshaw Boulevard. Four of the pieces will be placed in the new Sankofa Park to be built at 46th Street, named after the traditional African symbol of a bird mid-flight, with others sited further down towards 50th Street, near the project’s southern terminal on Slauson Avenue.
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October 26, 2021
Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco’s “Fixed Focus (Dead Center)”
Read more about how artist Stephanie Syjuco intervened in the American imperialism narrative
By: Asian Art Museum
Published on: Not Listed
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography,sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has foused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narrastives of history and citizenship.
Syjucos's latest work resulted from a 2019/2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in which the artist spent hudreds of hours searchig for visual evidence of the Philippines and Filipinos in the official American archive. (...)
By showing these texts as fallible and correctible, Syjuco hints at the possiblity for a counter-narrative to also be applied to the form of the archive.
"As a young Asian American girl I struggled to feel the museum was "mine" -- that it was "them" looking at "us" No longer! - Stephanie Syjuco.
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October 26, 2021
Ana Teresa Fernández
Why There Were Water-filled Cylinders at Ocean Beach on Sunday
By: Michelle Robertson
Published on: October 13th, 2021
Dancer Meredith Webster among "On the Horizon" by Ana Teresa Fernandez on Oct. 10, 2021 at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
Courtesy William Randall Henner
An unusual sight stood against the vast water at Ocean Beach on Sunday. Six-foot-tall cylinders of clear acrylic, filled to their brims with seawater, jutted into the sunny, blue sky.
The cylinders were not there by mistake or accident. Rather, they were part of an art installation titled “On the Horizon” by San Francisco artist Ana Teresa Fernandez.
The installation, she told SFGATE, “is about climate change and specifically sea levels rising.”
In her research about climate change, Fernandez said she continually ran into the same figure: Sea levels will rise by 6 feet in the next 30 to 50 years.
Fernandez wanted to make that number palpable, somatic. So she designed the sculptures, with support from Doniece Sandoval of LavaMae, to visually represent how that number feels.
(...)
“It’s important that we listen to the ocean,” Fernandez said. “And we should listen to each other, so that we listen to science, so that we listen to Mother Nature.”
If you missed the temporary installation Sunday, you can view the cylinders at an upcoming exhibition about climate change at the Cliff House beginning Nov. 7, called “Lands End.”
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October 14, 2021
Steers
Save the Date: Behind the Screens with Feminist Animator Stacey Steers Tuesday October 26th, 2021.
By: Patricia Zimmermann
Published on: October 9th, 2021
Behind the Screens: Conversations Unpacking Cinema continues on Tuesday October 26 at 7 p.m. on Zoom with renowned feminist animator Stacey Steers. Dr. Rachel Schaff, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Screen Studies, will conduct the interview.
Register in advance for this meeting here
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, experimental narratives. (...)
Behind the Screens is designed as conversations with major figures in international screen cultures to probe the systems, structures, economics, politics, operations, infrastructures, and practices undergirding cinema across myriad forms such as major Class A international festivals, international art cinemas, documentary, virtual cinema, local art cinema exhibition, experimental animation, and streaming.
Discussion opens up thinking about cinema across many forms and modes, unraveling the complex nexus of production, distribution, and exhibition.
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September 30, 2021
Taylor and Zhang
Up Close & Personal: The Body in Contemporary Art
October 30, 2021 – February 27, 2022; Lightcatcher building: 250 Flor Street, Bellingham, WA 98225
Curated by Amy Chaloupka from the Collection of Driek and Michael Zirinsky, featuring works by Catharine Clark Gallery represented artists Josephine Taylor and Wanxin Zhang.
The extended isolation of the pandemic has undeniably affected our collective consciousness, especially our heightened awareness of the body and its vulnerabilities.
Sharing life “in person” once again is a celebratory moment, but also cause for self-reflection. How will we wish to operate moving forward within our own bodies, and also in caring for and considering the bodies of others?
The exhibition Up Close & Personal examines the human body through the expressive lens of 60 artists. Some explore the many ways we communicate with one another—through facial expression, body language, self-presentation, and performance. Others boldly envision narratives and representations of the self through the use of their own bodies in their work. Artists are acutely aware that all bodies reside at the dynamic intersection of gender, class, race, sexuality, age, and ability. These compelling portrayals of the figure are situated at these crossroads of identity and point toward countless possibilities for human connection and understanding.
See more details of the exhbition here
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September 28, 2021
Birk
Bierstadt to Birk: California Landscape Ideals Versus Realities
By: Emma Acker
Published: September 17, 2021
Sandow Birk, "Fog over San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California" (from the "Prisonation" series), 2001. Oil on canvas, 66 x 90 in (167.6 x 228.6 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, American Art Trust Fund, 2002.7. Photograph Joseph McDonald, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
In Gallery 27 of the de Young museum, visitors will encounter a large-scale and luminous coastal scene. Given the striking visual similarity of the work to many of the nineteenth-century American landscapes exhibited in nearby Gallery 26, viewers may be surprised to learn that the painting was created in the twenty-first century by the contemporary artist Sandow Birk (b. 1962). Although this arresting view of a rocky shore and serene waters readily evokes the picturesque landscapes of Northern California, such as those in nearby Marin County, Birk based the composition of Fog over San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California on Beach at Beverly (ca. 1869–1872), a coastal New England scene by the second-generation Hudson River School painter John Frederick Kensett. Artists associated with the Hudson River School, such as Thomas Cole and, later, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, used idealized views of the American landscape to symbolize the nation’s aspirations and progress.
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September 28, 2021
Saar
Artist Alison Saar on why she gives power to the Black female body
By: Carolina A. Miranda
Published on: September 27th, 2021
Artist Alison Saar at home in Laurel Canyon. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
One of the most searing artistic experiences I’ve ever had came courtesy of Alison Saar in 2017. The Los Angeles artist was part of a group show of Black female sculptors titled “Signifying Form” at the Landing gallery in L.A.'s West Adams district, organized by independent curator jill moniz.
The show was memorable all around. But Saar’s piece, in particular, floored me. The nearly 7-foot-tall sculpture titled “Cake Walk,” from 1997, presented a larger-than-life marionette of a Black woman that the viewer can control via a system of pulleys. The title references a processional dance that originated on Southern plantations during the slavery era and would later be parodied by white performers in minstrel shows. In Saar’s piece, a firm tug on the pulleys could make the figure dance.
On the one hand, it’s an irresistible work. Saar invites the viewer to touch a work in a place where touch is usually forbidden. It’s also one that left me feeling queasy. To engage the marionette is to engage the manipulation of a vulnerable Black woman’s body (she is nude). It is also to engage a whole legacy of manipulation and control over Black women. (...)
There is a lot more where that came from. And some of it is on view in an ongoing two-part survey, “Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe,” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Sadly, “Cake Walk” is not on display, reflecting the need for a comprehensive retrospective devoted to this important artist. But the shows nonetheless offer a broad overview of Saar’s work, which, in deft and profound ways, has engaged myth, spirituality, history and the physical and psychological states of women.
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September 21, 2021
BOXBLUR
‘Night Watch’ transforms San Francisco Bay into art installation highlighting refugees
By: Tony Bravo
Published on: September 20th, 2021
People gather at Fort Mason to view “Night Watch,” a floating media installation created by Shimon Attie that displays portraits of refugees granted asylum in the U.S. on Sept. 17.Photo: Nick Otto / Special to The Chronicle
The collaboration between Boxblur and the Immersive Arts Alliance has been one of the most talked about public art events in the Bay Area since it was announced on June 20, recognized as World Refugee Day. With Leo Villareal’s “Bay Lights” glimmering above and a bright moon and calm waters, the conditions from weather to tides had been carefully considered for the West Coast premiere of the project, a video installation on a 20-foot LED screen affixed to a barge. (...) The sharp quality of the images onscreen juxtaposed against the bay setting, with its mix of technology and natural elements, were a majestic combination. But more important, there was an urgent relevance to the subject matter. How do you look at “Night Watch” in the fall of 2021 and not think about the people presently fleeing Afghanistan and Haiti?
Although the project initially premiered in 2018 in New York during the United Nations’ General Assembly, current events remind us that there will probably always be a news peg for the work.
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September 09, 2021
Paul Rucker and Stephanie Syjuco
'Undoing Time' opens Sept. 10; show is the first one ever to take over entire ASU Art Museum space
By: Mary Beth Faller
Published on: September 7th, 2021
The ASU Art Museum is opening a new social justice exhibit on Friday in which 12 artists have created new works that explore the tragedy of mass incarceration.
“Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration” will run through Feb. 12. The show is the first one ever to take over the entire ASU Art Museum space.
The museum began working on the project three years ago when it received a grant from the Art for Justice Fund, according to Miki Garcia, director of the museum.
“I would say that this is the most ambitious and largest exhibition the museum has ever endeavored, and it’s in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests and of the museum seeing itself as a champion of the community’s well-being,” she said.
“We wanted to take a risk and say, ‘This is what we stand for — putting artists in the midst of these urgent conversations.’”
The exhibit, which is kicking off with a celebration and panel discussion on Friday, will include never-before-seen sculpture, film, paintings and drawings from the artists, whose work combines history, research and storytelling. They are: Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Juan Brenner, Raven Chacon, Sandra de la Loza, Ashley Hunt, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Michael Rohd, Paul Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, Vincent Valdez and Mario Ybarra Jr.
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September 09, 2021
Alison Saar
‘Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe,’ a Survey Spread Across Two Institutions, Presents Female Forms That ‘Activate Legacies of Bodily and Spiritual Survival’
By: Victoria L. Valentine
Published on: September 3, 2021
DUALITY IS A CONSISTENT THEME in the work of Alison Saar. The multidisciplinary artist has long centered the female body and the wonder of nature in her practice, using figurative forms to explore cultural narratives and contemporary events. In her latest exhibition, she considers the binaries of body and spirit, earth and air and the intersections of gender and race, space and time.
The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College are partnering to present “Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe,” in the greater Los Angeles area. On view at both museums, the exhibition features paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations, dating from the early 1980s to 2020.
“Within these works, Saar measures social memory and cultural norms, using sophisticated visual language to bring attention to the gaps where narratives have been forgotten or ignored. Using rough-hewn forms and humble found materials, she creates resilient female bodies that activate legacies of bodily and spiritual survival,” co-curator Rebecca McGrew wrote in “Alison Saar’s Radical Art of Sustenance,” her opening essay in the exhibition catalog.
“Saar measures social memory and cultural norms, using sophisticated visual language to bring attention to the gaps where narratives have been forgotten or ignored. Using rough-hewn forms and humble found materials, she creates resilient female bodies that activate legacies of bodily and spiritual survival.” — Co-Curator Rebecca McGrew
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September 09, 2021
BOXBLUR
Bay Area art spaces back on feet for fall, focusing on the traditionally underrepresented
By: Tony Bravo
Published on: September 8, 2021
Shimon Attie, “Night Watch (Norris with Liberty),” 2018. Originally produced by Moreart.org in New York City.Photo: Shimon Attie‘Night Watch’
Artist Shimon Attie’s floating installation “Night Watch” is slated to visit the San Francisco Bay for three nights, co-presented by Boxblur and Immersive Arts Alliance.
Attie’s piece, which debuted in New York in 2018 during the U.N. General Assembly, consists of a barge with a 20-foot LED screen that displays video portraits of 12 refugees who were granted political asylum in the United States, including members of international LGBTQ communities and people from Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Peru and Russia. At shoreline locations including Fort Mason, Epic Steak, Waterbar restaurant and Warm Water Cove in San Francisco, as well as Brooklyn Basin in Oakland, performances with dancers, musicians and artists will engage with the work, and audiences can view the installation when it docks.
“Night Watch” coincides with the opening of “Here Not Here,” a survey show of the artist’s work at the Catharine Clark Gallery.
“Night Watch”: 6:15-9 p.m. Sept. 17-19. Free. San Francisco Bay and various locations. cclarkgallery.com
“Here Not Here”: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday. Sept. 18-Oct. 30. Free. 248 Utah St., S.F. 415-399-1439. cclarkgallery.com
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August 31, 2021
BOXBLUR
Bay Area Visual Art Exhibitions Not to Miss this Fall
By: Sarah Hotchkiss
Published on: August 30th, 2021
Shimon Attie, ‘Night Watch’
Sept. 17–19, 6:15–9pm
San Francisco Bay and Oakland Estuary"If being indoors isn’t your jam these days, BOXBLUR (a performance program launched by Catharine Clark Gallery) and the Immersive Arts Alliance have organized three nights of waterfront viewing for Shimon Attie’s floating video project: a slow-moving barge boasting a 20-foot-wide LED screen. Night Watch displays silent video portraits of 12 refugees who received political asylum in the United States, images that make tangible what it means to leave one’s homeland in the face of violence and discrimination. The project will be accompanied by live music and dance performances at waterfronts along the barge’s nightly routes, events at over 40 Bay Area partner organizations, and a solo exhibition of Attie’s work at Catharine Clark (Sept. 18–Oct. 30)."
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August 25, 2021
Alison Saar
The DART Board - Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Continuing through December 12 at the Armory Center for the Arts and the Benton Museum, Los Angeles
By: Peggy Roalf
Published on: August 18, 2021
Coninuing through December 12 | Armory Center for the Arts and the Benton Museum, Los Angeles
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, a two-venue retrospective of the work of Alison Saar, features over 30 years of the LA-based artist’s sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings, highlighting her explorations of the duality of body and spirit. Above: Hygiea, 2020
The Armory Center for the Arts focuses on her sculptures of Black, female figures, carved out of wood or hammered out of pieces of scrap tin ceiling. She surrounds them with metaphorical objects like antlers, water jugs, butterflies, invoking mythical histories. The Benton Museum will feature sculptures, paintings, and drawings, as well as a 12-foot-tall figure of the Yoruba goddess Yemaja, mother of all living things who controls the waters.
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA Info. The Benton Museum of Pomona College, 120 W Bonita Avenue, Claremont, ,, CA Info Photo courtesy of Alison Saar
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August 25, 2021
Open Field
Open Field at Catharine Clark Gallery
By Max Blue
Published August, 2021
Image (top): Lenka Clayton, Houseplants Tended by Anni Albers (03/10/2021) in the series “Typewriter Drawings,” 2021. Typewriter ink on paper, rendered with a portable 1957 Smith-Corona Skywriter typewriter, 14 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches framed. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 based on the belief that the study of art was central to education. Over the years notable faculty and students included textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers, experimental composer John Cage, and San Francisco sculpture superstar Ruth Asawa. Although the school closed in 1957 it had an outsized impact on the American avant-garde, which continues today.
Open Field: Nine Artists Respond to the Ideals of Black Mountain College, on view at Catharine Clark Gallery on Utah Street, features contemporary artists working in the tradition of innovation and experimentation, while referencing figures from the school’s history.
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August 25, 2021
Masami Teraoka
See the World Through the Eyes of Artists in Hawai‘i State Art Museum’s New Exhibit, “Altered States”
Masami Teraoka, Lauren Trangmar, Sally French and others contribute never-before-seen works for display alongside some from the state’s collection.
By: Lisa Shiroma
Published on August 24th, 2021
Have you ever wondered what the heck goes on inside an artist’s head? Curator Elizabeth Baxter lets us take a peek with HiSAM’s new exhibit, Altered States. “Artists have always been known and renowned for their unique perspectives and alternative visions of the world,” she says. The way artists take in information and process it through their special filter opens up a creative gateway. “These artworks reflect transformations and changes—as well as critiques, questions and concerns—while delving into such themes as death, spirituality, global warming, politics and the COVID-19 pandemic.” Baxter hand-picked 23 works from the Art in Public Places collection, a mix of never-before-seen pieces as well as older ones, for this exhibition. The newer works were purchased virtually during the pandemic and with the help of Neighbor Island art consultants.
“2nd Ave. Ramen Stop/NY Governor and Pussy Riot” by Masami Teraoka. Photo: Lisa Shiroma
Displayed front and center is Masami Teraoka’s gold-leafed triptych “2nd Ave. Ramen Stop/NY Governor and Pussy Riot.” Created in response to the turbulent times of 2020, the painting features New York’s former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a member of the punk group Pussy Riot, a geisha doing double duty as a nurse, and political commentator Anderson Cooper. The figures appear overwhelmed by the chaos happening around them, with Notre Dame burning in the background and an atomic bomb exploding in a bowl of ramen directly in front of them. The word “vote” in capital letters on the masks of the individuals sends an urgent plea to the viewer, loud and clear. Teraoka says: “In collapsing a wartime past with the calamities of the present day, I want the viewer to reflect on how our seemingly ordered world can be perilously thrown out of balance by forces beyond our control—viruses, fires—as well as those firmly within it, namely our political and governmental institutions, as well as our collective public health response. The composition is meant to inspire humor, perhaps shock, but most importantly contemplation about our responsibility to one another within society.”
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August 18, 2021
Open Field
Listening to Threads
By David M. Roth
August 15th, 2021
Installation view: Open Field. Foreground: Amy Trachtenberg, When I see you the sky is blue — when I don’t see you the sky is blue, 2021, disasembled bras, silk, steel, wire, dye, acrylic paint, glass, 136 x 61 x 13 inches
Within its stable of artists, the Catharine Clark Gallery found much evidence of that influence, and after years of mulling a response, it mounted Open Field: Nine Artists Respond to the Ideals of Black Mountain College. The exhibition doesn’t aspire to capture all that went on there – few galleries could — but it calls forth the spirit of the place with works that demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the college’s learn-by-doing approach. Pioneered by the philosopher John Dewey, it was seen as creating an enlightened citizenry capable of exercising the critical skills required by democracy. Significantly, Black Mountain wasn’t an art school; it was a liberal arts college that employed art education as a means to an end. The wonder of it rests with the fact that it produced so many history-shaping artists. They include John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Ray Johnson, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, David Tudor, Kenneth Noland and Robert Motherwell to name but a few.
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August 11, 2021
Kevin Cooley: Shape Shifting and Controlled Explosions in the Desert Available to view at Laney Contemporary Fine Art, Savannah, GA
By: Author Not Listed
August 8, 2021 7:30 am
"Exploded Views": Available to view through Sept. 18, Laney Contemporary, 1810 Mills B. Lane Blvd. Savannah, GA 31405; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday; by appointment, 912-438-4442 or [email protected]
Photography and video. Los Angeles-based artist Kevin Cooley captures shape-shifting elements as line, curve, and shadow by conducting controlled explosions in the desert under the guidance of a master pyrotechnicist. Working with varied chemical compositions, he creates different shapes, forms, colors, and movements. In this sense, each image depicts time and light exploding in the form of colorful and abstract spirals, clouds, tendrils, and rays, much like the fireworks we see on display this time of the year. Inspired by wildfires, nebulae, jellyfish, the movement trails of distant stars, and smoke dynamics in the atmosphere, Cooley’s work explores the human fascination with natural formations and their shared visual properties.
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March 24, 2020
We are excited to announce the launch of the Catharine Clark Gallery online store via Square.
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March 17, 2020
Catharine Clark Gallery will be closed to the public through April 7, 2020 in respect of city and CDC guidelines regarding COVID-19.
Please note that Catharine Clark will be on-site by appointment Tuesday - Saturday from 12pm - 4pm; please call 415.519.1439 to schedule an appointment.
Over the coming weeks, we will launch a new series of digital programming and exhibitions, including artist talks, curated online presentations via Artsy, and a special online "screening room" of full length video works by represented and affiliated artists. Details to be announced soon.
Visit our inagural online exclusive exhibition for Artsy, Love in the Time of Distancing, by clicking the link here
*Pictured above: Nina Katchadourian, Rapture, 2011 ("Seat Assignment" project, 2010-ongoing). Edition of 5 + 2AP; 24 x 19 inches.
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September 11, 2019
Crossing Culture | 2019 SF Dance Film Festival
Tuesday, November 5, 2019 7-9pm at Catharine Clark Gallery
Crossing Culture, screens eight dance films that examine the concept of dance as a means for personal expression and cultural defiance in an increasingly authoritarian world. The international lineup features films from Iran, Greece, Congo, Singapore, Japan and more.
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July 03, 2019
Summer 2019 Off-Site Exhibiton Listings:
Through July 14: Wanxin Zhang | Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, CA | Wanxin Zhang: The Long Journey
Through July 27: Lenka Clayton | Group Exhibition | New Typographics: Typewriter Art as Print | The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA
Through August 18: Nina Katchadourian | Group Exhibition| Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH | Creatures: When Species Meet
Through September 7: Stephanie Syjuco | Group Exhibition | The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA | What is an edition, anyway?Opening Reception: Saturday, June 1 at 6pm
Through August 9: LigoranoReese (Certainty of Ambiguity) | Group Exhibition | Currents 826, Santa Fe, NM | Stitching and Weaving in the Digital AgeOpening Reception: Friday, May 24 from 6 – 9pm
Related Events: CURRENTS NEW MEDIA Festival, June 7 – 23, 2019
Through September 29: Julie Heffernan & Shelly Mosman | Rockford Art Museum, Illinois | Chance Encounter
Related Events: Art in Bloom, June 25 – 27; Preview: Mon, June 24 from 6 – 8pm; Fashion in Bloom (Cocktail Party), June 27 from 5:30 – 8:30pm
Through September 1: Nina Katchadourian (Seat Assignment) at ProArtibus: Elverket Gallery & Sinne, Finland
Through August 25: Greg Niemeyer, Roger Antonsen, and Mullowney Printing | Group Exhibition | Palo Alto Arts Center, CA | Local Editions: Celebrating Printmaking in the Bay Area
Opening Reception: June 21, 6 – 9pm
Through September 22: Stephanie Syjuco | Group Exhibition | ICA Boston, MA | Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design
Through September 22: Lenka Clayton | Group Exhibition | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY | Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography
Members’ Preview Day: July 2, 10am – 5pm
July 3 - August 3: Kara Maria | Vanishing Fauna | Barry Sakata Gallery, Sacramento, CA
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13 from 6 – 9pm
July 11 – August 30: LigoranoReese's IAMI | Group Exhibition at Ruth’s Table, San Francisco, CA
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 11 from 6 – 9pm
July 25 – December 22: Kal Spelletich | Solo Exhibition with Publication | St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, Moraga, CA | Significance Machines and Purposeful Robots
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 5
Public Programming (time TBD): October 10
August 3 – October 5: Al Farrow: Wrath & Reverence | Southern Utah Museum of Art, Southern Utah University, Cedar City
Opening Reception: Tuesday, August 6
August 25 – October 31: Group Exhibition featuring Sandow Birk, Elyse Pignolet, Mullowney Printing | Maui Arts & Cultural Center, HI | Art & Activism: An Exhibition About Change
August 29 – October 2: Julie Heffernan at Miossi Gallery at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA
Opening Reception (time TBD): August 29
September 2 – October 26: Julie Heffernan: Mending a Reflection | Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ
Opening Reception: September 12 from 5 – 7:30pm
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November 16, 2018
Stephanie Syjuco
THE WOMEN OF PARIS PHOTO 2018
By Alisa Carroll
STEPHANIE SYJUCO'S TOTAL TRANSPARENCY FILTER (PORTRAIT OF N), 2017
Stephanie Syjuco @ Catherine Clark Gallery
Manila-born, San Francisco-based artist Stephanie Syjuco’s work at the fair includes Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N) (2017), an image of a shrouded woman that is emblematic of her practice, addressing issues of race, immigration, and identity. Notes Syjuco, “What I’m doing is absorbing and processing the world around me and it’s becoming political. I don’t think I have a choice anymore, it’s just my reality.” The artist has had a breakthrough year: 2018 has seen her work featured in MOMA’s “Being: New Photography 2018” and on the cover of the April issue of Art in America. -
October 27, 2018
Sandow Birk
Sandow Birk's idealist monuments at Catharine Clark Gallery
By Charles Desmarais
October 25, 2018
Sandow Birk, “Proposal for a Park of Monuments to All of the Countries Bombed by the United States” (2018)Photo: John Wilson White, Catharine Clark Gallery
Sandow Birk’s recent drawings and prints at Catharine Clark Gallery, packed with minute detail and up to 5 feet high,
will not be easily read in reproduction here. That is reason enough to see the exhibition, on view through Dec. 22.
A proposed park full of monuments to all the countries ever bombed by the United States is bound to require close attention.
And a substantially complete Monument to Logical Fallacies might not be taken in at a passing glance.
Birk has made a career of rewriting history and throwing shade on cultural icons. His series “In Smog and Thunder,”
for example, was an elaborate record of a fictional “Great War of the Californias” that pitted San Francisco against Los Angeles.
The current series comprises visions of memorials to democratic ideals, some of them yet to be constructed,
many already badly scarred and precariously unsteady.
“Sandow Birk: Imaginary Monuments II”:
10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Tuesdays-Fridays;
11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays. Through Dec. 22
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September 18, 2018
Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 6:30pm
Catharine Clark Gallery, in collaboration with San Francisco Dance Film Festival, present a program of Art/Experimental films that explore the rich intersection between dance, art, and film.
Featuring an international lineup of five dance films, the program examines the concept of gender and the ever-shifting nature of identity.
The program concludes at 7:30p with a live performance by Alex Jenkins and Nicholas Korkos of AnA Collaborations.
Box Blur Fall 2018 Programming
SFDFF events in the experimental category are part of Catharine Clark Gallery’s Box Blur Fall 2018 programming, which includes multiple exhibits and performances. In the main galleries: Josephine Taylor’s Beside Me, an exhibition of graphite drawings; in the media room, a collaborative video by Josephine Taylor and Jon Bernson titled Dylan Diaries; in the viewing room, an audio-visual installation by Jon Bernson titled Third Eye Moonwalk at Catharine Clark Gallery. Off-site, Box Blur is also presenting Bernson’s companion series of installations at Minnesota Street Project, which includes a full cast performance of his audio drama and a video in the media room titled Awakenment.
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August 28, 2018
Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to host Dance Kaiso and FOLSOM50 for an end of summer celebration on September 1 in conjunction with the closing day of the gallery's group exhibition, We Tell Ourselves Stories...In Order to Live.
Click here to RSVP for this celebration on Eventbrite.
Join us from 4 - 6pm for a performance with Dance Kaiso, a collective founded by Wilfred Mark, Robbin Frey, and Val Serrant that conducts residencies in CA state prisons that culminate in performances of traditional rhythms and dances, group improvisation and original spoken-word, dance and musical compositions, arising from students’ collaborative efforts.
The gallery will also host a book drive for FOLSOM50, a collaboration by Tracy Schlapp and Danny Wilson that engages prison populations through music and narrative-based initiatives. Books from the September 1 drive will be donated to South Fork Forest Camp, a 200-man, low security facility in Oregon that provides training in forest restoration and firefighting.
Bring your reference, non-fiction, and poetry books (art, technology, archaeology, and music titles are a plus), and come support this important initiative.
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May 24, 2018
Deborah Oropallo
Deborah Oropallo’s mesmerizing videos of environmental calamity at Catharine Clark Gallery
By Sam Whiting
May 23, 2018
“Removing Red,” from “Dark Landscapes for a White House” by Deborah Oropallo.
Last October, when Deborah Oropallo smelled the smoke from the North Bay firestorm, she looked out the window on her Novato dairy farm and saw a sky that was dark and orange at 6 a.m.
She is an artist before a farmer, so she realized that this calamity fit perfectly into an ongoing video project about oil and its effect on the climate.
Floods, oil wars, the diminishing polar ice cap and now the wildfire. All of these dire warnings come into play in “Dark Landscapes for a White House,” an absorbing multimedia exhibition with musical soundtrack, which commands the entire floor space at Catharine Clark Gallery, in the “DoReMi” arts district of San Francisco .
The four videos, varying from two to six minutes, are all political in that Oropallo would like to see them decorating the walls of the White House in Washington, D.C., hence the name of the show.
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May 05, 2018
Chester Arnold
Review: Chester Arnold, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco | by DeWitt Cheng | Visual Art Source
Excerpt:
"In “Borderline,” Chester Arnold, whose epic-scale landscapes have often borne ecological messages, takes aim at our current plight. The oil paintings, small and large, are both detail-packed and cosmic, like the world landscapes of Pieter “the Droll” Bruegel the Elder, who combined a wealth of lovingly rendered detail with a tragicomic moral vision. “Borderline” refers to the Mexican border wall beloved of home-grown and unschooled xenophobes. Arnold’s landscapes of crumbling ruins of concrete and brick, defaced with graffiti, and maintained by small, faceless, lumpen workers, are absurd and sad, yet strangely beautiful; indeed, they’re Bruegelian. Think of the antlike figures clambering over the ramps, cranes and scaffolds in the 1583 painting, “The Tower of Babel,” warning of pride and failure; the tower, sporting Colosseum-style columns, invokes both fallen, decadent Rome and its often imperious, unholy successor, the Roman Catholic Church. Arnold writes, “The architectural expression of the will to contain or separate one group from another became the formal structure of many of these works.” So the armored, contested border in his paintings — which we view from above, as if from a high tower, with eagle-sharp vision, in an even, cool northern light — is an obstacle and prison, but one that the human hive chooses to build and repair. In Louis Malle’s 1981 prescient satirical film, “My Dinner with André,” André Gregory described New Yorkers who fantasize about leaving town, but never do, as prisoners in love with their prisons."
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Review: Chester Arnold @ Catharine Clark | by Maria Porges | Squarecylinder
Excerpt:
"In Borderline, his current show at Catharine Clark, Arnold focuses on the greatest monument to folly of our time: the wall at the border between the US and Mexico, and all that building it represents. From the start of the exhibition, it’s immediately clear that the paintings on view are intended as a preview of a future time—perhaps decades from now, perhaps much sooner—when the wall has fallen into a state of decay. The three canvases in the gallery’s front room, for instance, all show a hole through its massive bulk, through which can be seen a desert landscape filled with scrub, cactus and distant violet mountains under a turquoise sky. As we peer through the jagged “window” pictured in Beyond This, the largest of the three (made at varying sizes, like the beds and bowls Goldilocks encountered in the three bears’ house) we see an adult and child scurrying up a steep hillside. They appear to be fleeing south, not north."
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March 09, 2018
Stephanie Syjuco
What’s New in Photography?
Humanism, MoMA SaysA new group show called “Being” moves away from last year’s navel-gazing digital obsession to explore reality-based portraiture, politics and gender.
By Arthur Lubow
March 9, 2018
At the last survey of new photography at the Museum of Modern Art two years ago, the atmosphere was so self-referential and hermetic that a visitor panted for oxygen. Often, the photos were images of images, taken off a computer screen or digitally created in the studio. It seemed as if photography, which continued to engage with the world after modernist painting and literature turned inward, had finally crumpled into solipsism.
A lot can change in two years. In response to the last exhibition and to the intervening political upheavals, the show “Being: New Photography 2018,” which opens on March 18, offers a broader and more stimulating range of work. The rubric of “Being,” which is defined as “notions of personhood and identity,” proves capacious enough to include portraiture, reportage, fashion, and pretty much everything you can turn a camera on. (The museum decided in 2016 to present exhibitions with a theme rather than simply highlighting promising photographers.) The show includes the work of 17 artists — two of whom collaborate as a team — all under 45.
The exhibition was orchestrated by Lucy Gallun, MoMA’s assistant curator of photography, who worked on the last one and agrees that this year’s represents a departure. “The strongest takeaway from the last show was about the dissemination of images and the way images circulate,” she said in a phone interview. “Here it’s a much more personal, intimate approach.” She added that she “tried to emphasize the diversity of approaches.” A sampling of artists included indicates she succeeded in that.
Although questions of racial and gender identity and politics perfume the air, the best photography in the show touches lightly, if at all, on these subjects. One artist who squarely addresses the political predicament is Stephanie Syjuco, 43, a Bay Area resident who was born in the Philippines and immigrated to this country when she was 3. Ms. Syjuco employs diverse formats — installations, performance and photography — to investigate such subjects as the distribution of goods under capitalism and the persistence of neocolonialism.
Her large black-and-white photographs, in which she appears in costume, bring to mind the work of the Samoan-born photographer Shigeyuki Kihara, who also stages self-portraits in the pose of native women in the Pacific islands, reprising how they were depicted in studios decorated with ethnic props by 19th-century photographers.
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March 02, 2018
Kara Maria
Impact of Jim Hodges, Kara Maria gallery shows impossible to reproduce
By Charles Desmarais
March 1, 2018
I have a friend — a well-known artist and critic for whom I have great respect — who says that all people make judgments about paintings based upon what they see in reproduction. I do not, and I am quite convinced others shouldn’t, either.
Reproductions can be useful tools. They remind us of works we have seen in person; they hint at what is in store.
Considered in the light of works we know from direct engagement, they can suggest themes and patterns in an overall body of work. But trying to understand or appreciate art — particularly painting, which relies so heavily upon texture, color and scale — by looking at its photographic likeness is like tasting food from a TV screen.
Kara Maria’s exhibition “Post-Nature” at Catharine Clark Gallery (through March 17) and Jim Hodges’ “Silence Stillness” at Anthony Meier Fine Arts (through March 23) have little in common but their utter irreproducibility in print or pixels. You need to get yourself in front of the actual works.
Both artists do have old-fashioned painterly skills. Maria employs hers with what at first appears to be wild abandon, applying brilliant color using a range of abstract strategies. Upon more careful consideration, however, it’s clear that what looks untamed is precisely planned.
On a single canvas, she might combine daubs and smears, aerosol bursts, and broad, featureless swaths of paint contained within precise hard edges. Forms loop, streak and explode across the picture plane, giving here an impression of flat design, there the illusion of storyland dimensionality.
The visual metaphor of feral versus restrained is suited to the subject of her exhibition. That theme dawns upon us as we pick through the abstract tangle to discover minutely detailed portraits of animal representatives of endangered species. Some are very shy, like the wolf lost in a work on paper called “Moondance.” But even the big-eyed primate (a lemur?) staring out from the center of “Mayday” is lost at first amid the painter’s frenetic sensual assault. It is telling that the animals, in every case, occupy the calm and still moments in a frenzied, decidedly unnatural environment.
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September 16, 2017
Ken Goldberg
In the Future, Warehouse Robots Will Learn on Their Own
By Cade Metz
Septemebr210, 2017
Jeff Mahler, left, and Ken Goldberg have studied ways to help robots figure out tasks on their own at the University of California, Berkeley. Credit Jason LeCras for The New York Times
BERKELEY, Calif. — The robot was perched over a bin filled with random objects, from a box of instant oatmeal to a small toy shark. This two-armed automaton did not recognize any of this stuff, but that did not matter. It reached into the pile and started picking things up, one after another after another.
“It figures out the best way to grab each object, right from the middle of the clutter,” said Jeff Mahler, one of the researchers developing the robot inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
For the typical human, that is an easy task. For a robot, it is a remarkable talent — something that could drive significant changes inside some of the world’s biggest businesses and further shift the market for human labor.
Today, robots play important roles inside retail giants like Amazon and manufacturing companies like Foxconn. But these machines are programmed for very specific tasks, like moving a particular type of container across a warehouse or placing a particular chip on a circuit board. They can’t sort through a big pile of stuff, or accomplish more complex tasks. Inside Amazon’s massive distribution centers — where sorting through stuff is the primary task — armies of humans still do most of the work.
The Berkeley robot was all the more remarkable because it could grab stuff it had never seen before. Mr. Mahler and the rest of the Berkeley team trained the machine by showing it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after that training, it could pick up items that weren’t represented in its digital data set.
“We’re learning from simulated models and then applying that to real work,” said Ken Goldberg, the Berkeley professor who oversees the university’s automation lab.
The robot was far from perfect, and it could be several years before it is seen outside research labs. Though it was equipped with a suction cup or a parallel gripper — a kind of two-fingered hand — it could reliably handle only so many items. And it could not switch between the cup and the gripper on the fly. But the techniques used to train it represented a fundamental shift in robotics research, a shift that could overhaul not just Amazon’s warehouses but entire industries.
Rather than trying to program behavior into their robot — a painstaking task — Mr. Mahler and his team gave it a way of learning tasks on its own. Researchers at places like Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon University, Google and OpenAI — the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk — are developing similar techniques, and many believe that such machine learning will ultimately allow robots to master a much wider array of tasks, including manufacturing.
“This can extend to tasks of assembly and more complex operations,” said Juan Aparicio, head of advanced manufacturing automation at the German industrial giant Siemens, which is helping to fund the research at Berkeley. “That is the road map.”
Physically, the Berkeley robot was nothing new. Mr. Mahler and his team were using existing hardware, including two robotic arms from the Swiss multinational ABB and a camera that captured depth.
What was different was the software. It demonstrated a new use for what are called neural networks. Loosely based on the network of neurons in the human brain, a neural network is a complex algorithm that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By looking for patterns in thousands of dog photos, for instance, a neural network can learn to recognize a dog.
Over the past five years, these algorithms have radically changed the way the internet’s largest companies build their online services, accelerating the development of everything from image and speech recognition to internet search. But they can also accelerate the development of robotics...
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September 16, 2017
Nina Katchadourian
Artist Nina Katchadourian Has a Keen Eye for the Overlooked
by Sheryl Nonnenberg
September 8, 2017
Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #12, from the series Seat Assignment (2010–ongoing)
Nina Katchadourian sees art in the least likely of places. And the least likely of those places, it can be assumed, was in an airplane bathroom.
It was there, during a 2011 flight from San Francisco to New Zealand, that Katchadourian, the Stanford-born artist, started messing around with the paper towel dispenser. She draped facial tissues, paper towels, and toilet seat covers over her head, and fashioned them into a sort of Tudor-style collar. Then she covered the bathroom mirror with a black shawl and posed for a series of cell phone selfies, all taken in the style of 17th-century Flemish portraits. The result is part of an ongoing series of airplane-related works—born of what she calls “curiosity about the productive tension between freedom and constraint”—called Seat Assignment, which will be shown beginning this month in a mid-career survey of her work at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser, organized by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and opening on September 15, is her largest solo museum exhibition to date and includes Katchadourian’s video, photography, sculpture, and sound art, underscoring both her cross-disciplinary interests and her appreciation for life’s minutiae. “I like to put my attention on things that are generally familiar to a fairly wide audience,” Katchadourian says, “so that there might be some initial moment where a viewer thinks, ‘I know what that is.’ But it’s also important to me, in almost every case, to undermine that or second-guess it so that something I bring to the situation prompts a reconsideration or a double take.”
That attention to detail tends to produce a lot of humor. Consider her series Sorted Books (1993), in which she stacked books together so the wording on their spines told a miniature story (How Did Sex Begin? placed atop Uninvited Guests placed atop Human Error). Or take Katchadourian’s Mended Spiderwebs (1998), a series of color Cibachrome prints taken in Finland during a family vacation. Katchadourian found several broken webs and, using red thread, repaired them. By the next morning, the spiders had completely removed the red thread and restored the webs.
Catharine Clark, who has represented Katchadourian since 1999, recalls first meeting the artist through her sister in New York. “It was just this instant love affair,” she says. Katchadourian’s work is “so satirical, but in a way that’s so thoughtful and processed. I love her really sophisticated use of humor to get at issues that are really complex.”
Clark points to one of Katchadourian’s Sorted Books images in particular: “It’s two books: What Is Art? and Close Observation,” Clark says. “I feel like that’s her self-portrait.”
In addition to being her biggest show so far, the Stanford retrospective is also a homecoming of sorts for Katchadourian, who was raised on the farm, where her father, Herant Katchadourian, was a professor of human biology. Nina also served as an artist in residence at the Exploratorium from 2013 to 2016, where she created Floater Theater, a miniature theater in which viewers can see their “eye floaters” dance before them. However, most of her artistic development came on the East Coast. In 1996, Katchadourian was accepted into the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. Her first big New York show was in 1999, and since then she’s exhibited around the world, including at SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2015, she was part of a group show from the Armenian diaspora in the Venice Bienniale.
Much of Katchadourian’s work has a playful side, though some pieces are more direct social commentaries, like The Genealogy of the Supermarket (2005), a sculptural family tree created out of the likenesses of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Gerber baby. Other series include Natural Car Alarms (2002), in which the sounds of birdcalls replace alarm sounds, and Dust Gathering (2016), an examination of dust found on artworks and windowsills at the Museum of Modern Art.
And what to make of Talking Popcorn (2001)? The sculpture connects a computer to a popcorn machine and translates the sounds of popping kernels into Morse code. “Something can be very funny and still be very meaningful,” Katchadourian says. “If you want to cast the funny against the serious, the challenge for me is to get both those experiences to happen within the same piece.”
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June 16, 2017
Political art comes to the fore at Catharine Clark Gallery
By Brandon Yu
June 14, 2017
Stephanie Syjuco’s “Phantom,” created after President Trump’s travel ban, hangs at the entrance of the show “Juncture.”
While all corners of art now seem unavoidably shadowed by politics following the presidential election, the Catharine Clark Gallery was initially unsure about assembling a show focused on political response.
“For us, we were thinking, ‘Well, does it really make sense to have a show that is dedicated to that when so many of our artists are already thinking about these themes?’” says Anton Stuebner, the San Francisco gallery’s associate director.
Yet the seemingly daily intake of “fresh horrors” since President Trump took office, Stuebner says, indicated that many of these existing concerns had come to a head, the culmination of which is now reflected in the gallery’s current exhibition, “Juncture.” The show runs through July 22, featuring work, old and new, in various forms by several artists reflecting on an open-ended theme of politically engaged art.
To start, take Stephanie Syjuco’s “Phantom,” a blackened, thinly transparent American flag that hangs at the front of the gallery’s entrance, created after Trump’s travel ban to express the pall cast over American ideals of inclusivity.
Subsequent works don’t all deal in such political immediacy — though in the Trump era, the tide shifts quickly.
Deborah Oropallo’s “Smoke Stacked,” a video montage depicting a progression of superimposed photos of oil refineries, set to a terrifying score, for instance, adopts an added omen following Trump’s recent move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.
Then there’s Oropallo’s “Made in USA,” a nylon rug lined with images of war weaponry and phalluses that considers not only the hand of patriarchy in warfare, but also the changing history of the Afghan war rug it imitates. The Afghan people “started making these rugs with our weapons in them,” Oropallo explains. “Our drones, our air force, and all of that. And what was happening was, the soldiers were then buying them as souvenirs to take back to America, which I find disturbing.”
On a local scope, Indira Allegra’s “Woven Account” features newsprint detailing Bay Area hate crimes (“People think it doesn’t happen here, but it does,” she says) hand-spun into a stretch of cloth. Another featured Allegra work, “Blackout,” uses a similar form of weaving, but with digital rendering, to explore police violence. The specter of politics in her art, however, saw no dramatic shift following the election, she says.
“My world hasn’t changed,” says Allegra, an African American artist based in Oakland. “The only thing that’s changed is that more people believe me now.”
While “Juncture” might have been spurred by the current Trumpian moment, it is not purely framed by it. The takeaway, Stuebner says, is to consider the ongoing nature of these political struggles and conversations.
Brandon Yu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected]
“Juncture”: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Through July 22. Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah St., S.F. https://cclarkgallery.com
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April 18, 2017
SF Weekly Spring Arts Guide: Art
April 5, 2017
By Jonathan Curiel
Jonathan Curiel writes:
A Nina Katchadourian video project is worth the wait, because the wait often results in laughter and visual hijinks. In In a Room Full of Strangers, Katchadourian — using toilet-seat covers in the bathroom of an airplane — filmed herself as a medieval Flemish subject who lip-syncs to the Bee Gees’ “Nights on Broadway.” That project made its way to Catharine Clark Gallery in 2014. This time at Catharine Clark, it’s The Recarcassing Ceremony, a 25-minute work that uses Playmobil figures and Katchadourian’s remembrances of a childhood ritual she had with her brother. Some of the figures die. In one scene, we see close-ups of the happy, colorful girls with this caption: “I was overcome with grief.” Katchadourian is adept at odd juxtapositions. As she told SF Weekly in 2014, she loves “this idea of what can you make out of nothing.”
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March 28, 2017
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Edge of Alchemy, the new film by Stacey Steers, will screen at the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival as part of the program "Shorts 3: Animation." The film will be featured at two screenings at the historic Roxie Theatre on Sunday, April 9 at 8:30pm and Sunday, April 16 at 3:15pm.
You can purchase your tickets through SFFILM here. -
March 22, 2017
Don't miss Nina Katchadourian's Curiouser on view at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX, March 12-June 11, 2017.
"The Blanton presents Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser. This mid-career survey will explore approximately ten major bodies of work by celebrated Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), including video, photography, sculpture, sound art, and a live performance. Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is organized by Blanton curator of modern and contemporary art, Veronica Roberts, and will be the first touring museum exhibition of Katchadourian’s work. Accompanying the exhibition is the first substantial catalogue devoted to the artist’s career, to be published in partnership with UT Press.
Katchadourian’s practice is at once conceptually rigorous and alluringly accessible. Her work reveals the creative potential, to use the artist’s words, that “lurks within the mundane” and underscores the remarkable freedom and productivity that can come from working within limitations. Using ingenuity and humor, her work encourages us to reinvigorate our own sense of curiosity and creativity, and to see our everyday surroundings as a site of discovery and possibility."
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March 14, 2017
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March 07, 2017
Curiouser and Curiouser: The Art of Nina Katchadourian
i-D: The Fifth Sense
March 6, 2017
By Jodi Bartle
"Remember those aeroplane selfies of a woman draped in paper toilet seat covers and collared by hand towels looking uncannily Vermeer-esque that went viral a few years ago? Those portraits by American conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian are part of an ongoing project that uses only objects available on a flight to examine boredom, time and constraints, documented via her mobile phone. Seat Assignment (2010) also takes in covert photos of sleeping co-passengers, peanuts rephotographed to look like giant public sculptures, packaged salt spilled onto magazines to resemble Victorian phantasmagoria and photographs of a sweater shaped into a gorilla. In Katchadourian’s other works, she has pioneered the art of reworking book titles into pithy phrases, delved into dusty MoMA corners, DJ’ed at on-hold music dance parties using only music sourced from when she’s been stuck on hold, and mended broken spiderwebs with red thread."
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February 28, 2017
Catharine Clark Gallery at Art on Paper NY 2017
Art on Paper 2017 | Booth C4
Pier 36 | 299 South Street | New York City
March 2 - 5, 2017
NEW YORK: Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art on Paper 2017. The gallery’s presentation at Booth C4 will feature new and recent works by Josephine Taylor and Stacey Steers that expand the boundaries for works on paper.
Booth C4 features stunning acrylic and graphite works from Josephine Taylor’s 2016 exhibition, Teenagers are Beautiful. Inspired by everyday scenes near a public San Francisco high school, these drawings explore the physical proximity, sense of place and intrinsic beauty of teenagers. With a nod to adolescent tagging and graffiti, Taylor’s portrays her subjects with acrylic inks sprayed through an airbrush gun, using both freehand technique and hand-cut stencils.
Many of the figures are rendered at life size, lending a sense of gravity to a world of backpacks and purses, dirty corners, clutter and wild messes of an adolescent milieu. Taylor’s new body of work illuminates everything adults forget about teenage life. The hierarchy of needs is narrow: sex, romance, friendship, drugs and music. The desire for intimacy reigns supreme. Experience trumps landscape, and love eclipses logic. Instead of criticizing teenage desire, Taylor’s work encourages viewers to be galvanized by the potential of living in a more purely visceral, emotional space, and her works on paper depict a glimpse into the raw and beautiful landscape of contemporary adolescence. For Taylor’s presentation at Art on Paper, Catharine Clark Gallery will also debut a series of new limited edition monoprints produced in collaboration with master printer Paul Mullowney.
Booth B4 will also feature a new film by Stacey Steers, Edge of Alchemy, as well as a series of handwork collages used for the film’s production. A Creative Capital project with additional support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Edge of Alchemy concludes a trilogy of films including Phantom Canyon (2006) and Night Hunter (2011) that examine the psychological terrain of women’s inner worlds. By way of a painstaking and labor-intensive process, Steers assembled over 6,000 handworked photo collages, re-imagining American silent film actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor in a phantasmagoric narrative of creation and monstrous hybridities inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Fragments of historical etchings and photographs are combined to construct surreal settings: dreamlike topographies where barren fields are covered with dead bees and chartreuse flowers, and dark recesses where laboratories lost in time are outfitted with strange ironwork and ominous red beakers.
Steers’ collage technique is layered, intimate and suggestive, and the fantastastical lifeworlds her collages embody reflect upon “the way we process experience and form memories subliminally,” as noted by the artist. Edge of Alchemy also reveals the startling emotional immediacy in early silent film performances by lingering over “fleeting expressions and extend(ing) them in a way that” richly expands what Steers cogently defines as “a state of interiority.” The film is accompanied by an original score by Lech Jankowski (Brothers Quay). Catharine Clark Gallery is also pleased to exhibit a series of curtains and scarves produced in collaboration with OPEN EDITIONS, which incorporate floral motifs from Edge of Alchemy.
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February 16, 2017
Deborah Oropallo @ Catharine Clark
Squarecylinder.com
February 10, 2017
by David M. Roth
"Since taking up digital painting in the late 1990s, Deborah Oropallo has developed an arsenal of visceral imagery that grabs viewers and leaves them questioning whether her intent to terrorize, enlighten, empower or all three. Where fairy tales once served an equivalent function, Oropallo’s art, which draws on modern and ancient fables, warns of dangers lurking in the darker recesses of the Internet. More recently, with the right-wing takeover of American government, her work has turned pointedly political, all the while retaining the tantalizing visual provocations and post-feminist themes that have elevated her to her present position. All are thrillingly encapsulated in her current show, Bell the Cat."
Read the full article here. -
January 31, 2017
"Floating Realities" explores globalization
The Daily Titan
January 30, 2017
Goliath snakes and pale ghosts fill the space of Masami Teraoka’s watercolor painting “Makiki Heights Disaster” in his “Study for AIDS” series.
Using snakes as a symbol of fear and taking inspiration from the flood that hit close to home, Teraoka was able to depict the effect AIDS was producing in 1980s culture in this 1987 painting.
Teraoka’s art is displayed in the CSUF Begovich Gallery “Floating Realities.” Teraoka took inspiration from the Japanese wood block art called Ukiyo-E.
Click here to read the full article.
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January 18, 2017
Catharine Clark Gallery will be closed on Saturday, January 21, 2017 in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington.
To participate in a Women's March in the Bay Area, click here.
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January 05, 2017
Oropallo breaks mold of happily ever after
SFGate
By Charles Demarais
January 5, 2017
Unlike many artists who achieve regional and national notice early in their careers, then copy themselves forever after, Deborah Oropallo, at 62, continues to push herself and her process.
Oropallo was first celebrated for her facility as a painter — her work was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 1998, and a retrospective organized in 2001 by the San Jose Museum of Art traveled to two other West Coast museums. She has since adopted a hybrid technique of digitally tweaked photography and hand-worked paint that answers questions — about real and image, depiction and imagination — that we didn’t know we had.
The artist will give a talk about her work this weekend in conjunction with the opening of her latest exhibition, “Bell the Cat,” at Catharine Clark Gallery.
“‘Bell the Cat’ draws inspiration from fairy tales like Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood,” says a gallery press release, “as iconic texts that have shaped how we relate to ‘femininity’ in our culture.”
From all appearances, it will be the perfect foil for this inaugural season.
The show, which also includes the artist’s first work in video, “White as Snow,” runs through Feb. 18.
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January 04, 2017
Top 10 visual arts events of 2016
San Francisco Chronicle
By Charles Desmarais
December 23, 2016
“Stephanie Syjuco: Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime)”: When Stephanie Syjuco showed at the Catharine Clark Gallery, she pretty much took over. Her (faux) carpets were on the floor, her (rigged) photographs on the wall, her (two-dimensional) sculpture in the middle of the main room on a large platform. The media gallery in back? Yes, that became hers, too, to screen a new video work. The commandeered space referenced the takeover of colonial cultures by modern commercialism, American- and Western European-style. Sardonically funny, the exhibition prompted guilt and giggles in equal measure.
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December 21, 2016
Catharine Clark Gallery Holiday Hours
The gallery will be closed from Saturday, December 24, 2016 to Monday, January 2, 2017. We will re-open on Tuesday, January 3, 2017.
Happy holidays and have a wonderful new year!
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September 08, 2016
Dancing Around the Art at Catharine Clark Gallery
San Francisco Chronicle
by Sam Whiting
September 7, 2016
An exhibition of photographs and video inspired by dance marathons of the Great Depression will be accentuated by a modern dance marathon on a spiral platform built in the center of her gallery. The art is by Kambui Olujimi, whose sculpture and works on paper provide a backdrop for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Together they will present “Box Blur: Dance Word and Performance in Concert With Kambui Olujimi’s ‘What Endures.’”
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August 30, 2016
Catharine Clark Gallery special hours
Closed: Saturday, August 28 - Friday, September 9
The gallery will be closed as we prepare for Kambui Olujimi's site-specific installation What Endures. The gallery re-opens during regular hours on Saturday, September 10, 11 am - 6 pm.
Open by Appointment only: Saturday, September 17The gallery prepares for a Margaret Jenkins Dance Company ticketed performance Site Series (Inside Outside): A Response to the Work of Kambui Olujimi. The performance is on Saturday, September 17, from 3 - 6 pm. Tickets available on Eventbrite. Please call ahead if you would like to make an appointment to visit us: 415.399.1439.
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August 13, 2016
Tickets on Sale Now
Dance Programming at Catharine Clark Gallery
September 12: Words on Dance and Catharine Clark Gallery co-present Beyond the Proscenium
Time: 6 - 8 pm
Purchase tickets : $75
In concert with the Kambui Olujimi's exhibit, What Endures, on view at Catharine Clark Gallery September 10 - October 29th, Words on Dance and Catharine Clark Gallery co-present a conversation with dance professionals on the topic of dance outside the theatre. We are delighted to engage Damian Smith, My-Linh Le, Margaret Jenkins, Julia Adam, Amie Dowling, Weston Krukow, and Kristine Elliott in conversation on Beyond the Proscenium, a compelling topic that highlights dancers and choreographers who have stepped outside the theater to create performances and experiences in unexpected places. This event is part of Box Blur, a six week program of dance, word, and performance in response to the work of Kambui Olujimi. Wine and hors d'oeuvres will be served prior to the conversation between the dancers.
As quoted by Lin Manuel Miranda, “the ability of words to make a difference," gives reason, and resonates the notion of why Words On Dance was created. What happens beyond the stage and beyond the theater? How do dancers relate and react to life transitions? With their performance life often constrained by the proscenium, the boundaries of time and space are restricted. Box Blur explores the themes that these circumstances present, and the beauty of stepping out of the idea that dance performance only happens in a theater. Beyond the Proscenium gives dancers and observers a new and unique understanding of the art form in an expanded field.
Proceeds from this special evening further Catharine Clark Gallery's ability to collaborate and present future programming in dance at the gallery.
*Cultural partners:
500 Capp Street Foundation: The David Ireland House, Julia Adam Dance, Words on Dance, Mud Water Theatre, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, The Gugulethu Project, Athletic Art Productions
Image: Julia Adam Dance, The Woodland Project, David Briggs, 2015
September 17: Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Catharine Clark Gallery co present Site Series (Inside Outside): A Response to the Work of Kambui Olujimi
Time: 3 - 6 pm
Purchase Tickets: $75
Catharine Clark Gallery and Margaret Jenkins Dance Company present a commissioned performance in dialogue with Kambui Olujimi’s exhibition, What Endures. Inspired by dance marathons of the 1930’s, Olujimi’s work, in part, serves as the stage for multiple encounters during Box Blur, a six-week program of performance, word and dance, which includes this unique event.
Commencing at 3pm with a prologue in the main gallery space, the choreography unfolds organically with a series of dance solo, duets and trios performed on Olujimi's platforms and amidst the audience.
The event promises an exceptional afternoon of art and dance, complimented by hors d'oeuvres and wine, and is an opportunity to witness the conversation between MJDC and Olujimi's What Endures, on view at Catharine Clark Gallery September 10 - October 29, 2016.Photo composite: MJDC Dancers, Site Series (Inside Outside) and Kambui Olujimi, "Just Because We're Magic Doesn't Mean We Aren't Real," from What Endures, 2016.
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July 21, 2016
"Political Art in a Fractious Election Year"
The New York Times
By Randy Kennedy
In 2008, when the artist Shepard Fairey created the graphically striking “Hope” portrait to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, it seemed as if a rich tradition of American political imagery reaching back at least to the middle of the 20th century — on posters, buttons, bumper stickers — was still very much alive. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called the “Hope” poster “epic poetry in an everyday tongue.” Read more.
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July 15, 2016
Benefit Evening | Hillary for America
San Francisco, CA: Join us for an evening in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, featuring a talk by Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis, a video stream of work by the artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese (LigoranoReese), and more.
Tuesday, July 19, 7 - 9 pm
Click here to RSVP
Catharine Clark Gallery
248 Utah Street
San Francisco, CA
94103
415.399.1439
Former Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Kounalakis, will speak at 8:00 pm. Appointed in 2010, Kounalakis was sworn into office by Hillary Clinton while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State. Ambassador Kounalakis has served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention four times. Additionally, she served for nearly 10 years as a trustee of the World Council of Religions for Peace, and was awarded the medal of St. Paul by the Greek Orthodox Church in recognition of her work. Appointed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Kounalakis has also served as a trustee of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center.
In conjunction with the talk by Ambassador Kounalakis, the evening will feature a streaming of The American Dream project, a 30-foot wide public art installation of words carved in ice by LigoranoReese. The American Dream will be melting on the grounds of Transformer Station, minutes away from the sculpture site, during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. More information on the artistic duo's temporary ice sculpture installations here.
Suggested Donations
Any level of contribution helps the campaign. If you would like to contribute but cannot attend the event, you can do so here.
$5000 Co-Host (includes invitation to a future event with Hillary or President Bill Clinton)
$1000 Fighter
$500 Advocate
$250 Supporter
$100 FriendDonors who give $500 and above will receive a gift from Catharine Clark of a gallery tote, designed by artist Charles Gute and produced by Open Editions, as well as a selection of LigoranoReese and HumanKindCo postcards.
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June 21, 2016
Syjuco discovers the colors of ‘neutrality’
By Charles Desmarais
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, June 10, 2016
There is a technical concept in photography and film of “neutral gray,” a tone that most of us would perceive as halfway between black and white. Stephanie Syjuco wants you to know that, physics aside, images are never neutral.
Born in the Philippines — first a colony of Spain and then of the United States — Syjuco has shown in her work a continuing interest in the kind of cultural subjugation that inevitably accompanies colonialism. That would include both historic, military imperialism and the current form of, mostly, economic neocolonialism. Rather than preach or harangue, however, she brings to her art a sense of humor and an acute understanding of the often barely visible remnants of those systems.
In “Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime),” a tightly structured exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, Syjuco examines the notion of neutrality from, literally, various angles. A large installation in the central room is a sculptural paradox: a three-dimensional structure built up, you soon realize, mostly of overlapping cutout pictures, propped up together on a platform. The images become characters — some human in form, others not; in flat monochrome, black-and-white or full color; ranging from life-size to minutely reduced — all actors together on a stage.
From the entrance it seems substantial. Walk around to backstage, though, and you see how flimsy it all is: a child’s toy theater; the proverbial Potemkin village. From the rear, everything is coated with paint of the same 18 percent gray — neutral gray.
The falseness of it all so blatantly exposed. What were those actors purported to be? The exotic. Oriental. Ethnic. Worn-out words for tattered notions of difference, matched here by the artist’s choices of found examples and images of sculpture, carpets, furniture, plants. Visual material that once had authentic cultural value, stripped of spirit and genuine function, demeaned by its ubiquity in inhospitable settings, lifted from Internet posts and auction sites, recopied from loss-y reproductions.
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May 31, 2016
NEWSWEEK
CULTURE"SANDOW BIRK’S FEARLESSLY POLITICAL ART TAKES ON ISLAM'S HOLY BOOK"
BY ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
POSTED ON 5/30/16 AT 9:04 AM
Read full article: newsweek.com
It is audacious for any artist to treat as his subject the sacred texts of a faith to which he does not subscribe. It is especially so if you’re an atheistic Southern California surfer who decided he would create an illustrated version of the Koran, despite the long-standing Islamic tradition of not depicting the human form. But that is precisely what Sandow Birk set out to do. And did. His American Qur’an, recently published, is an unbeliever’s tribute to the message of Muhammad.
A few years ago, it occurred to Birk—who lives in Long Beach, California—that Americans knew very little about Islam, even while many of his countrymen bore so much enmity toward it. His search for the perfect break had taken him to Muslim countries like Indonesia and Morocco, and left him with the awareness that Islam wasn’t the religion depicted on Fox News. He knew he wanted to say so with his art, but he didn’t know how. Then came a 2004 surfing excursion to Ireland and, while there, a visit to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, where a number of illustrated Korans were on exhibit. There, in a Catholic country, Birk realized what his Islamic project would be.
Published this fall after nine years of toil, The American Qur’an is Birk’s take on what he calls “the most important book in the world” in the past two decades. Though he readily concedes that he is “not an Islamic scholar,” Birk worked from nearly a dozen translations of the Koran, transcribing each of its 114 suras, or chapters, by hand. The text is in English, the font borrowed from both Islamic tradition and the famed graffiti culture of Los Angeles. Each page is illustrated with a scene from modern American life, fusing the words of Muhammad with contemporary tropes in a way that is unique and transgressive, especially considering the aniconism that marks Islamic art (Birk never depicts Muhammad in the book).
“I got sick of people telling me what Islam was,” Birk said one recent afternoon during a presentation at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. In front of me sat several fashionable blondes, including Birk’s gallerist. Next to me were several women in the hijab, listening as Birk—who looks well-kept and healthful, more Los Angeles than La Bohème—spoke about their faith. Worlds were colliding, in the famous words of George Costanza. But in a good way.
Birk says he studiously avoided Islamic scholarship while working on his American Qur’an. “I’m in the wilderness, and I receive this vision,” he told me over a beer after his museum talk. And wherever the vision took him, he went. For example, for the sura concerning Noah’s Ark, he drew a scene of Hurricane Katrina; another page shows the Oklahoma City bombing; yet another (Sura 44: “Smoke”) has the World Trade Center aflame on 9/11. But there are everyday scenes too, of ordinary Americans, Muslim and not, going about their works and days. For example, a sura on the Resurrection shows a busy operating room; part of the story of Joseph shows an immigration raid near the Mexican border.
Birk says he wanted to create a “Pan-American book” that represents all 50 states. So there are images of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia (Sura 18: “The Cave”) and of religious Jews in New York City (Sura 45: “Kneeling”). There’s even a NASCAR-style race. This is a holy book that is very much lowercase-c catholic, challenging the notion of Islam as a foreign, inscrutable faith.
Most of Birk’s work has focused on wars both foreign and domestic, real and imagined. In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias (2000) was an installation “depicting an imaginary war between San Francisco and Los Angeles,” with paintings, maps and even a 45-minute mockumentary. The relentlessly referential Birk created war posters that harked back to patriotic World War II imagery (“Bomb the Bay!”); one painting is an obvious reference to Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women, thus tying the fate of California to that of ancient Rome.
A page from Sandow Birk's illustrated American Qur'an. CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
Birk can be accused of an algorithmic approach to art: the depredations of American life today filtered through the tropes of yesteryear, with his draftsmanship leaning on the vocabulary of painters past. Reviewing a show of his in 2002, New York Times art critic Ken Johnson warned that Birk “risks imprisonment by his own conceptual formula.” This critique ignores the fact that the formula is extremely effective and its results immensely pleasing to behold. In 2001, for example, Birk exhibited a series calledIncarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century, for which he painted all 33 of the state’s prisons. The faux-bucolic paintings recall the dramatic landscapes of 19th-century naturalists like Albert Bierstadt, except the eye inevitably drifts away from fields and streams toward the barbed wire and guard towers of the Pelican Bay State Prison or the California Institution for Women. The point is obvious, but the paintings are too pretty to be preachy. (He subsequently executed a project on the prisons of New York, which was the subject of Johnson’s tepid review.)
Birk was disgusted by the presidency of George W. Bush and its forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, he exhibited The Depravities of War, 15 woodcuts he created at a studio in Hawaii. Recalling The Miseries of War by Jacques Callot and The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya, the woodcuts depict the burning oilfields of Iraq, the humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and injured American veterans waiting for help outside a medical center.
“It would be fittingly ironic to say that more planning went into this project than into the invasion it chronicles,” Birk wrote, “but it was actually equally spontaneous.”
During his San Francisco presentation, Birk showed a photograph of an exhibition of several of his suras from The American Qur’an at the PPOW Gallery in Manhattan. In the image, a group of Muslims have genuflected, praying on the gallery floor, a show of faith that also, more subtly, has turned into performance art.
Not that Birk has any self-serious illusions about his work, which is art about religion, not religious art. For example, he had his wife, Elyse Pignolet, a ceramic artist, fashion a mihrab, or prayer niche, in the shape of an ATM, thus honoring the notion of faith while subverting it. If this art is blasphemous, it is respectfully so. As Islamic scholar Zareena Grewal says in her introductory essay to The American Qur’an, “Birk’s aesthetic sensibilities are simply too weird and too different” from that of many Muslims “for them to enjoy his work.” Grewal wrote that reading The American Qur’an “is a thought-provoking and enjoyable experience, but not exactly a religious one.”
When Birk first started to exhibit completed suras in 2009, some Muslims were skeptical, with a spokesman for a Los Angeles mosque telling The New York Times, apparently without having seen the work, that Birk was “misrepresenting the Koran.” Birk says that such concerns quickly subsided and that he’s received many thanks from American Muslims, who have felt maligned as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz compete to out-demagogue each other. In The American Qur’an , Birk says, these modern adherents of Islam find affirmation and inspiration, a surprising and welcome guidepost for their faith.
After his presentation at the Asian Art Museum, Birk stayed behind to sign copies of The American Qur'an. Later, he and I walked to the SFJAZZ Center, where he and Pignolet created three murals paying homage to the history of jazz, with its sorrowful themes of oppression, migration and homeward longing. The experience of black Americans escaping the Jim Crow South was far from Birk’s own. But that wasn’t going to stop him.
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May 13, 2016
KVIE ARTS SHOWCASE
Al Farrow
Aired: 04/18/2016
25:31
Rating: NRDiscover more questions than answers in the secret details of artist Al Farrow’s creations, designed to capture the audience’s attention and inspire them to look deeper. From reliquaries made of weapons to sculptures in different styles, unlock hidden treasure in the artist’s collection.
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May 03, 2016
In San Francisco, the art tribes and clans celebrate
San Francisco Chronicle
By Leah Garchik
May 1, 2016
Full article here
Installation photograph, Under Pressure, by Nina Katchadourian, at SFMOMA.
No T-shirts and fanny packs for these visitors. European spectacles perched on their noses, suitcases stuffed with architect-designed glad rags, art dealers, artists and art lovers from all over the country converged in San Francisco over the weekend, mostly for festivities surrounding the opening of the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (In my next column, I’ll write about the bash Friday night, April 29, at the as-yet-unopened museum — see story by Tony Bravo and Carolyne Zinko.)
There were so many artist/gallerist/curator parties around town on Thursday night, April 28, that many guests arrived at Jeffrey Fraenkel’s Mission Bowl soiree in cocktail attire. Some switched identities upon entering, rising immediately to the challenge of re-utilizing skills that had peaked in middle school, doffing high heels in favor of bowling shoes. Artist Katy Grannan, whose photo portrait of President Obama would be on Sunday’s New York Times magazine cover, was one of those in heels, which she gamely removed for barefoot bowling. In Big Lebowski circles, this would no doubt be taboo; in art circles, however, flouting the rules is mandatory.
Barry McGee, whose early career was about tagging, bowled too; so did designer Stanlee Gatti; art dealer Jessica Silverman; art collectors Cathyand Ned Topham, Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein and Randi and Bob Fisher; restaurateurs Lindsay and Michael Tusk; and Berkeley Art Museum Director Larry Rinder and David Winton, president of the San Francisco Film Society board, who claimed that he had the top score not only of anyone in his lane but of anybody there. Who was to argue?
The individual “players,” that is, anyone who stepped up to the lane for a whole game or a few frames, were artists; they stayed up there all evening, no matter who stepped up to the alley. On the lane in which I was to bowl,Tiffany Harker of the Fraenkel Gallery had good reason to take pride in bowling a strike. She was bowling in behalf of “Diane Arbus,” and it’s her job at Fraenkel to be a liaison to the photographer’s estate.
P.S. As to the non-bowlers, it was said that the father of Helen Schwab, pillar of the San Francisco art community, owned a bowling alley in Midland, Texas.
For weeks, events quiet and splashy have given fellow travelers/cousins not often in touch the chance to clink glasses or share a meal as part of the art family. At Fort Mason Center for the Art Market San Francisco preview on Wednesday night, April 27, which benefited the Fine Arts Museums, I learned that Max Hollein, set to become museums director on June 1, had been in town the week before and had attended a donors’ dinner at SFMOMA, accompanying museums board chair Dede Wilsey.
The Art Market, at which so many local and out-of-town galleries were together in one place for the weekend, enabled visitors in one fell swoop to visit the galleries that have migrated from the once-centralized Union Square district to the Tenderloin and DoReMi (Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, Mission).
At Wednesday’s preview, many of the San Francisco galleries (Ever Gold, Brian Gross, Rena Bransten, Nancy Toomey, Catherine Clark, one of the first to migrate) were exultant about their new digs. Some artists were doubly represented, by San Francisco dealers and New York galleries. (In one multi-institutional example, the artist Hung Liu was shown by Rena Bransten and by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, which in September will exhibit her work based on Depression photographs, many of which she found in the Dorothea Lange archives at the Oakland Museum of California.)
We paused for Michele Pred’s “My Body My Business” vanity at Hoffman; Dave Eggers’ “Crucial Artwork Involving Animals and Politics,” droll drawings at the Jules Maeght Gallery; and Nina Katchadourian’s “Under Pressure,” a selfie video installation shot in an airplane restroom, in which the artist, posed as an image from a Flemish portrait, responds to the Queen song of the same name. Strolling through the exhibition, it was inevitable to cross paths with grim-faced Stephen Whisler, walking the aisles pulling a cart on which rested a brushed metal sculpture of a bomb.
Early in the evening, Whisler refused to respond to stares from surprised onlookers. Later on, he loosened up. “I’m sort of trying not to break character too much,” he said, pausing to reflect on that challenge. “But who cares?”
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April 26, 2016
Catharine Clark Gallery celebrates Art Market San Francisco's 6th season at Fort Mason/Festival Pavilion. Look for our curation of water and reflection themed work in Booth 401, On The Sea & The Mirror. Work by Sandow Birk, Rob Carter, Kevin Cooley, Chris Doyle, Scott Greene, Julie Heffernan, Nina Katchadourian, Ellen Kooi, Kara Maria, Deborah Oropallo, Masami Teraoka and Wanxin Zhang features in our booth. Please email the gallery if you need a VIP pass: Allison Stockman, [email protected]
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March 24, 2016
Anthony Discenza
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
248 Utah Street
February 27–April 16Posted March 24, 2016
View of “Anthony Discenza Presents a Novel: An Exhibition by Anthony Discenza,” 2016.
Anthony Discenza’s meta-exhibition takes up the literary trope of framing devices and translates it into a problem of material information. The conceit of the show is an artist namedAnthony Discenza attempting to curate an exhibition based on an unrealized exhibition by another artist with the same name. To add an additional layer of complexity and uncanniness, the unrealized exhibition was, according to the catalogue essay, based on a novel called The Disappointments that does not in fact exist.
The works in the show are suggestive of the documentation of an artistic practice as it stalls out—either being literally blocked, as in Floor Study: Impedance, a floor installation of wheel chocks used to prevent movement, or remaining hypothetical, as in the vinyl wall text Materials List for an Unrealized Artwork No 2, both 2015. The convoluted heft of the exhibition concept, in contrast with the ontological flimsiness of the actual work, generates surprising pathos around the real and the fictionalAnthony Discenza, who seem to be drowning under its weight.
What pushes this show beyond an exploration of fictional identity is the way that the artist grafts these motifs onto his long-standing interest in the flow of information. Here, the focus is on its decay and degradation, literalized in the form of fading found posters of lost cats, as in the 2015 “Lost Cats” series and washed-out ink-jet prints in Composition 010, 2016. Even the exhibition catalogue is printed on newsprint, a dissipating medium that makes the disappearance of the artist’s half-realized ideas seem like a foregone conclusion.
-Monica Westin
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February 26, 2016
Anthony Discenza Presents a Novel: an Exhibition by Anthony Discenza opens this Saturday, February 27 from 3:00 - 5:00 pm. Exhibit walk through at 2:30 pm. San Francisco Chronicle teaser review.
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February 05, 2016
San Francisco Chronicle
January 28, 2016
By Kimberly Chun
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January 26, 2016
"American Qur'an Is An Old/New Masterpiece"
Washington Post
By G. Willow Wilson
January 22, 2016
Images are the easiest way to lie. Images enter our minds as infallible: Few of us wonder whether the carpet on the floor is true or false, whether the person who smiles at us on the subway is real or unreal. Daily life would be impossible without this visual credulity. But the same instinct that tells us everything we see is true makes us intriguingly vulnerable to distortion and suggestion in art.
It is this visual vulnerability that prompts most schools of Islamic thought to prohibit images of sacred figures — prophets, angels, Allah — and in a few extreme cases, images of any living being whatsoever. In a religious context, images tempt us to worship the concrete rather than contemplate the abstract. It’s far better — or so the bulk of Islamic thinking goes — to leave the unseen, unseen.
That being the case, artist Sandow Birk’s massive, richly illustrated “American Qur’an” would seem, at the outset, to represent a contradiction. Birk prepared for this project — a full-size Koran, transcribed entirely by hand according to the exacting medieval tradition, but in English instead of Arabic — by carefully studying the rules of the art form. The margins must be a certain width; the medallions that mark one’s progress through the holy book placed at specific intervals.
But rather than leave the margins empty or decorate them with abstract geometric patterns, as is customary, Birk frames each page with lush, mural-like depictions of American life: farmers in their fields, clerks at their checkout counters, congregants at Sunday church; migrant workers, homeless people, hunters, surfers, men, women, children, along with cars, garbage, floods. An undertaking that could veer easily into sentimentality or cynicism does neither. Birk depicts the beauty and mess of Americana with the detachment of a photographer. And he marries the result — in a way that is at once baffling and oddly intuitive — to an English interpretation of the holy book of Islam. It is a masterpiece, and its flaws only serve its virtuosity.
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December 11, 2015
Sandow Birk's 'American Qur'an' Makes a Sacred Text Familiar
The Atlantic
By Katharine Schwab
Posted November 6, 2015
Read Article on Atlantic.com
Sandow Birk spent the last nine years creating an illuminated manuscript of the Koran in English. He didn’t do it for religious reasons—he’s not a Muslim. Instead, the American artist wanted to undercut cultural prejudices about one of the world’s most important religious texts, which Americans tend to associate with the Middle East and with violent extremists like ISIS. (The situation hasn’t been helped by negative portrayals of Muslims in the media.) Birk’s American Qur’an, which was exhibited in several gallery shows before being released this week in its entirety as a book, places translated passages next to cartoon-like illustrations, connecting the work with some of the most quotidian of American experiences: shooting hoops after school, fixing a flat tire, burying a loved one.
“You could make the argument that the Koran is the most important book in the world right now, and it has been for the last 20 years,” Birk says. “And for Americans to not know what it says is a mistake.” While Christianity is seen as a universal message, he says, despite its Middle Eastern origins, Christian Americans don’t see Islam in the same way. The urge to unpack this paradox ignited Birk’s interest in the Koran. His version can’t be considered authentic because it’s not in Arabic; but his main goal was to create a cultural, not religious, text. He hand-transcribed the entire book using a calligraphy inspired by graffiti from his neighborhood in Los Angeles. But he kept the traditional formatting and structure, including margin size, ink color, page headings, and the medallions marking each verse. For the illustrations themselves, he flouts one of the fundamental laws of Islamic art: no representations of humans or animals. Instead, his illustrations feature an array of people who reflect the diversity of America.
For Birk, maintaining harmony between his own drawings and the passages was one of the most vital aspects of the project. To do that, he had to focus on the words themselves. He found that many of the Koran’s stories and morals resonated with his knowledge of the Bible, which he studied in art history class. or Birk, maintaining harmony between his own drawings and the passages was one of the most vital aspects of the project. To do that, he had to focus on the words themselves. He found that many of the Koran’s stories and morals resonated with his knowledge of the Bible, which he studied in art history class.
For Birk, maintaining harmony between his own drawings and the passages was one of the most vital aspects of the project. To do that, he had to focus on the words themselves. He found that many of the Koran’s stories and morals resonated with his knowledge of the Bible, which he studied in art history class. As the Yale professor Zareena Grewal writes in an essay that opens American Qur’an, Birk is driven in part by the question, “Why can’t Islam be an American religion?” In one illustration, two Muslim men kneel on prayer rugs on the street in New York next to a vendor selling “I Love NY” t-shirts. Their faces are hidden, their ethnicities ambiguous. With this scene, Birk asks his audience to disentangle stereotypes of racial and religious identity. As Grewal notes, “Birk insists that we cannot know who is or is not Muslim just by looking at the people who populate the American Qur’an; the same holds true for the people who populate America.” Other illustrations comment on American foreign policy. Birk paired parts of the Koran that discuss preparing for war—passages often cited as proof Islam is violent—with scenes of Americans invading Iraq or of prisoners detained in Guantanamo Bay. In doing so, Birk wanted American readers to recognize the double standard implicit in the assumption that Islam condones fighting more than any other religion. Another particularly haunting image depicts the Twin Towers on 9/11—Birk acknowledged that the project wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t address the attacks.
The chapter, titled “Smoke,” includes a passage about “a day when the sky will bring forth a smoke which will overwhelm the people,” and focuses on the reactions of people on the ground. The scene, one of his earliest drawings, stretches across two pages. “I’ve been more hesitant and self-doubting about this project than anything else I’ve ever done,” Birk explained to The New York Times in 2009. “I think the consequences of it being misunderstood are extreme.” Now, however, he’s less worried because the project has been generally well-received in the Muslim American community, especially among teenagers and young adults. He recalled how a group of Muslims was looking at his work in a gallery during mid-day prayer time, so they prayed on the floor beside his illustrations.
Still, some Muslim religious leaders have spoken out against the project, including Mohammad Qureshi of the Islamic Center of Southern California, who refused to visit the California gallery where Birk was showing several pages of American Qur’an in 2009. “The Koran is accessible the way it is,” Qureshi told Art Daily. “It's been accessible for 1,400 years.” Usman Madha, the director of public relations at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, told The New York Times in a critique of Birk’s work, “There is no such thing as an American Koran, or European Koran, or Asian Koran.” But for Birk, the project is more than just a conversation starter or political statement. It fundamentally questions the role of a painter in the 21st century: to create something that is meaningful, relevant, and thought-provoking.
“The idea of making an entire illuminated manuscript like the monks did in the Middle Ages—it’s something that only an artist can do,” he says. “My occupation is 500 years old: All my neighbors work in Hollywood, and here I am transcribing ancient texts. I’m very aware of the irony of that.”
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December 04, 2015
"American Qu'ran by Sandow Birk"
Posted September 25, 2015
Review by David D'Arcy
San Francisco Chronicle
Sandow Birk’s new book makes the Quran look like familiar territory. The scenes that surround the text on its huge pages show ordinary people at ordinary tasks — harvesting fields, boarding planes, cutting apart sides of beef, visiting the dentist, unloading snowboards and surfboards from cars. There are Hasidic Jews in the streets, and political protests. There are NASCAR races. There are also tanks and troops in the desert, and a street scene from the 9/11 attacks. Given the ecumenical spirit, you could call “American Qur’an” a Noah’s ark of images. The figures in those images look inspired by the early years of San Francisco’s underground comics, minus the sex and satire. The calligraphy — if that’s the word — reaches for the feel of a graffiti scrawl. Yet this is the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, although Birk’s illustrations, organized by suras, or chapters, are populist, and pop. Reach for your descriptions — an odd cocktail, a contemporary vessel for a venerable text, a gimmick? It’s a bit of each. This ambitious book, a project of 10 years, is also an exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art, where Birk’s original pages are on the walls.
Mix project and place, and you have an odd cocktail indeed — odd, but deeply respectful toward the text, and toward the believers who honor it, although we shouldn’t expect all of those believers to agree. “American Qur’an” is also the farthest thing from what art-speak calls appropriation — the deployment of objects, imagery and language in the service of another work of art. Birk’s version is modern, however, depicting women as undiminished people and pairing an ancient text with scenes of contemporary life. And, as its title says, it is American. The assumption here is that Islam is at home and, if not integral, at least integrated into the America that Iranian mullahs used to call the land of “the Great Satan.” (In the Islamic world, you’ll hear far worse terms than that.) Still, Islam is in America and, despite the fiery rhetoric from some of our presidential aspirants, it’s here to stay. Birk’s soft landing (so far) with mostly gentle images confirms what is already a demographic fait accompli. Acceptance of Muslims, especially now, is another thing. Looking at “American Qur’an” from our nativist other side, that gentleness feels like naive wish fulfillment. Birk has lived for years with the label “visionary.” It fits here. The reader who doesn’t open “American Qur’an” out of devotion will be drawn to its images. Birk has created pictures to accompany classic texts for years, and these painted scenes seem like real America, circa 2015 — more America than Quran. When you look closer, the same ordinary scenes pull on your attention like delicate illuminated manuscripts from the 14th century. The landscapes are detailed, but dreamy. The ordinary figures are iconic, as they would be in Persian miniatures or in a late-medieval Book of Hours. More humane than heroic, they build on the notion that the divine reaches into every aspect of life. But whose life? On the adjoining pages dealing with divorce, a man stands by his truck on the right, and on the left a woman, presumably his wife or ex-wife, holds a baby by the hand. The picture could be an album cover for a Nashville duo, but the inscription reads: “When someone is conscious of God, God provides him with a way out of unhappiness, and provides for him in unexpected ways.”
For better or worse, Muslim Americans do just about everything that other Americans do. That said, “American Qur’an,” published just in time to put under the Christmas tree, is full of paradoxes to savor. It’s the art of a surfer from red-blooded Orange County, where the Rev. Robert Schuller created his drive-in Church of Tomorrow and the airport is named after John Wayne. Text dominates its picture planes, so most of the images are partially blocked from view — the unfulfilled promise of peace? And those images, standing by themselves, would give you no clue that there’s anything Islamic about them. Birk forces the connections on readers and viewers. And the ambiguities of any work of art won’t always sit comfortably with revealed truth. Fortunately, as Reza Aslan notes in his brief preface, “there is no Muslim Pope, no Muslim Vatican, no single source or authority who defines who is and is not a Muslim.” Bear in mind that the worst ferocity of the Islamic State has fallen on other Muslims who preach what zealots view as heresy. Birk, who says he is not particularly religious, spoke in interviews of watching the 9/11 attacks, and finding that he knew nothing about Islam, the religion in whose name the attacks happened. Eventually, after long thought and travel, he made the Quran the subject of an ambitious project, as he had done with Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Jacques Callot’s series of prints, “The Depravities of War,” which Birk situated in Iraq in his version. His hope here seems to be to take the reader on a similar journey.
Yet at $100 and what feels like 100 pounds (much less, actually), this is a book whose impact will be felt more in the debate that it generates than in the readers who spend the time that it demands. All that reassuring talk and imagery go only so far in the shadow of the recent Paris attacks and other killings in the name of Allah. Birk’s olive branch is sure to be attacked by those who take a proprietary view of Islamic teaching, from jihadis who preach violence to scholars and those in the faithful who believe that the only legitimate version of the book is in Arabic. Don’t tell Amazon. There are dozens of Qurans available in English on Kindle, many of them for free. From the Washington side, Birk will be pummeled for his lack of toughness in a time of threat. But if a surfer dude can’t be tolerant, who can? Think of Woody Guthrie or of Frank Sinatra’s warmhearted 1945 rallying cry against bigotry, “The House I Live In” (later sung by Paul Robeson). Will America warm to Islam in an American idiom? Now it’s time to pray.
David D’Arcy is a correspondent for the Art Newspaper, a London monthly. E-mail: [email protected] American Qur’an By Sandow Birk (Liveright; 443 pages; $100) |
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December 01, 2015
New York Times Gift Guide | November 2015
Art Books
"HEFTY AND BULKY, these are not books that travel well. But that doesn’t mean they won’t transport you to places you will want to visit time and again. This year’s crop of art books includes a detailed analysis of Picasso’s sculptures, an examination of Africa’s early cultural exchanges with Renaissance Europe and handy volumes on two American originals, Helen Frankenthaler and Agnes Martin. The New York Times’s art critics weigh in about these and other gift ideas.
BY HOLLAND COTTER AND ROBERTA SMITH
Holland Cotter's Review of American Qur'an
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November 19, 2015
Happy Holiday Season to you and yours. The following is a list of our Holiday Hours and Special Closings.
CLOSED 11/26 & 11/27 & 11/28
CLOSED EARLY 12/18: 2:00 pm
CLOSED 12/19 for Private Event
CLOSED 12/24 through January 1, 2016
OPEN January 2, 2016
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November 06, 2015
Sandow Birk's epic project, American Qur'an opens in a solo exhibition at Orange County Museum of Art tomorrow, Saturday, November 7. The exhibit, coinciding with the W.W. Norton publication, a full-color and to-scale reproduction of the entire project, is generating buzz in the press. This week:
Publisher's Weekly named American Qur'an one of the Best Books of 2015 (Nov 2)
Feature in ARTILLERY Magazine (Nov 3)
Review in The Atlantic (Nov 6)
Copies of American Qur'an availble now at the gallery. Join us for a book-signing with Sandow Birk on November 21, from 5 - 7 pm.
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October 23, 2015
Join us for the opening of Sandow Birk's exhibit, Imaginary Monuments, Saturday October 24, from 3 - 5 pm. Our media room features Urbanism, three videos by artist Rob Carter. Kimberly Chun reviews Sandow Birk in SF Gate.
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October 15, 2015
Join us tonight // 248 Utah Street // 5 - 7 pm
Closing Celebration with Kara Maria, Andy Diaz Hope and Jon Bernson
Drop by for a drink and a tour!
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September 25, 2015
Kara Maria @ Catharine Clark Gallery
by David M. Roth
September 24, 2015
San Francisco painter Kara Maria has long used the graphic language of comics to air her views on world events. Mixing it with abstraction and realism, she’s developed an enviable (and sometimes epic) body of seriocomic works that have pitted man-made maladies against cataclysmic natural forces. These she renders in a pastiche of art-historical styles.
Read the full review here
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September 24, 2015
Don't miss Kara Maria's exhibition, Haywire, on display in our Viewing Room at CCG. Take advantage of our late hours every Thursday (we are open until 7:00 pm) to see Kara's new paintings, inspired by her Recology Residency, earlier this year.
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Kara Maria and collectors at the opening of Haywire on September 12, 2015.
In addition, Kara's paintings are currently on display at the restaurant Aatxe, part of the Ne Timeas Group Restaurants, which include the outstanding establishments Flour + Water, Salumeria and Trick Dog. Aatxe is located at 2174 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94114.
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September 17, 2015
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September 09, 2015
Join us this Saturday, September 12, from 2 - 5 pm for the opening for Andy Diaz Hope's exhibition, Content Void Content, and Kara Maria's exhibition, Haywire. Both artists will be present for the opening reception, and will give an artist talk and walk-through at 3:00pm.
Kara Maria, Western Lowland Gorilla (2015), acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches.
Andy Diaz Hope, Beautiful Void: Entropy (2015); mirror, glass, solder, brass; 42 x 42 inches in diameter.
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September 01, 2015
Catharine Clark Gallery is closed to the public through September 7 for gallery inventory. From September 8 - 10, the gallery is open, but engaged with installing upcoming exhibitions, featuring the work of Andy Diaz Hope and Kara Maria, which will be up and ready for preview on Thursday, September 10, from 5 - 7 pm. The gallery will be open for regular business hours on Friday, September 11, 2015. The opening reception for Andy Diaz Hope | Content Void Content and Kara Maria | Haywire will be Saturday, September 12, from 2 - 5 pm.
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August 27, 2015
Join us this Saturday, August 29, 2 - 5 pm for the closing of Scott Greene's exhibit, Deep State, and Kevin Cooley's exhibit in the media room, Fallen Water.
Scott will be joined by artists Kara Maria, Deborah Oropallo, Chester Arnold and Don Farnsworth from Magnolia Editions who will discuss various issues related to scale. We look forward to seeing you, and toasting the end of these engaging exhibits with a cold glass of rosé this Saturday, August 29, at 248 Utah St.
Image Caption: Scott Greene, Timberline (2015), Oil on canvas on panel, 22 x 18 inches.
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August 14, 2015
This summer our interns had the opportunity to visit several art spaces in San Francisco, including Alter Space in SOMA and Fraenkel Gallery at 49 Geary. Both galleries were kind enough to give CCG staff and interns a tour of their current exhibitions--thank you to both Kevin Krueger, Owner/Director at Alter Space, and Emily Lambert, Associate Director at Fraenkel Gallery.
As part of our program, our interns were asked to complete write-ups on their experience, focusing either on the content or media presented in the exhibitions.
Originally from Los Angeles, Bonnie Mata is a recent graduate from University of California, Berkeley where she majored in English and Comparative Literature.
Two seemingly unrelated San Francisco galleries offer comparable provocations in both of their latest shows. At first glance, the 18-artist exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery’s cozy yet refined photography space couldn’t be further removed from the mere 3-person show at Alter Space, itself a converted BDSM club fit with an underground jail cell now used for artist residencies. Despite obvious initial differences, Fraenkel’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Alter Space’s Awkward Threesome both present powerful displays of creativity from a diverse range of artists largely concerned with issues of performativity and intimacy, desire and vulnerability, and artistic production. To read the full article, click here.
Originally from Berkeley, Lesdi Goussen is a Senior at New York University where she is majoring in Art History.
While an artist’s vision is inherently informed by the medium in which the artist works, the consideration that the medium is the backbone both conceptually and physically of an artwork is often overlooked by the viewer. When confronted with a work of art, one is often preoccupied with interpreting the figurative representation of a composition, rather than stepping back to consider how the medium of the work informs its meaning. However, by considering the medium, the internal, emotional, and upmost personal underpinnings of an artist’s practice are revealed. To read the full article, click here.
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August 04, 2015
This past weekend marked the inaugural Seattle Art Fair. Catharine Clark Gallery earned notable press coverage from local and national publications. Below is a selection of articles that featured Catharine Clark Gallery at the Seattle Art Fair.
The Seattle Art Fair Arrives, with Dealers on the Hunt for Tech Money
By Erin Langner
"San Francisco dealer Catharine Clark deliberately picked works for her gallery’s booth with a connection to either the West Coast or to the fair experience. Among the most compelling was Nina Katchadourian’s Under Pressure, a video the artist created of herself lip synching to the Queen song of the same name inside an airplane bathroom. “It points to the anxiety of travel,” Clark said. While fairgoer travel doesn’t bring much pressure in most cases, all of the tensions flying now evokes—threats of attack, racial profiling, immigration restrictions—still permeate any trip, making Katchadourian’s piece move quickly from the lighthearted to the deeply serious."
Read the full article here
Seattle Art Fair Receives a Boost From Tech’s Big Spenders
By Melena Ryzikaug
"Catharine Clark, a dealer from San Francisco, had her eye on infiltrating the Seattle market. “Like many people, we were hoping to educate the growing number of people involved in art and technology on the West Coast,” she said. “Everybody’s curious about this money.”
Read the full article here
Inaugural Seattle Art Fair opens to public Friday
By Michael Konopasek
"It's really important for the work to get out of the region in which it was conceived," said San Francisco art historian Catharine Clark.
Read the full article here
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July 31, 2015
Catharine Clark interviewed by Seattle's Channel 5 News at Seattle Art Fair.
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July 29, 2015
Join Catharine Clark Gallery for Seattle Art Fair, opening this Thursday, July 30 at CenturyLink Field Event Center in Seattle's SODO district. Booth 209 will feature work by Wanxin Zhang (below), Chester Arnold, Nina Katchadourian, Deborah Oropallo and Masami Teraoka. Follow us on Instagram to see the latest photos of install, opening night, and the satellite pop-up show, A Singularity, at Living Computer Museum, featuring work by Chris Doyle and John Slepian.
Press in Bloomberg Business, ARTFORUM,& Architectural Digest
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July 23, 2015
Scott Greene
Catharine Clark, San Francisco, California
Recommendation by Cherie Louise Turner
Continuing through August 29, 2015_2.jpg)
Apocalyptic, trash-laden, desperate landscapes make up “Deep State,” a solo exhibition of new paintings and prints by Scott Greene. These narrative works — one can’t help but immediately begin to create the backstory that renders the worlds we’re looking at — are somewhat loosely painted, which adds to the sense of things falling apart, being oh so tentatively, just barely, held together.
The large, horizontal (144 x 48 inches) “Trading Post” features a cell tower camouflaged like a tall pine tree that’s leaned over (thus the horizontality of the work, which adds to its off-kilter feeling) and filled with supplies such as gas cans and animal pelts. A man toward the top of the “tree” is stashing wood and a lamb is falling to the ground. The rest of the landscape appears chaotic, disheveled.
Providing an element of comic relief to the serious subject of our compromised environment, which is the central focus of the show, is “Cavalier,” which depicted a Napoleon-like figure raising an arm up and forward, a sign that says, “Let us go forth and conquer!” He is astride a sheep, rather than a horse, and our Napoleon has a smiley-face plastic grocery bag stuck to his head, covering part of his face, and a large brown blanket covering his blue and gold uniform, which peaks out beneath. The sheep rears up, a surprised look on its bridled face, on a trash-strewn cliff overlooking the landscape below.
These works exemplify the feel of the show: the “advanced” world (wo)man has created or is attempting to create via technology or bravado and ambition comes with a cost. The natural world, which feeds us and makes our lives healthy and abundant, will ultimately deliver us back to times of primitive hunting and gathering and extreme filth, times we’re worked long and hard to advance from. Green environmentalist nightmare is that the world we take for granted will revert as a result of humanity’s hubris. These works depict an unpleasant yet possible future; they’re beautiful to the eye even, as a political statement, they mean to help sound a serious warning. - See more at: visualartsource.com -
July 02, 2015
Seattle Art Fair: July 30 – August 02, 2015 (Booth 209)
Still photograph, Under Pressure from the series Seat Assignment, 2014
Two-channel video
Edition of 8; 1/8
Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to announce participation in the inaugural Seattle Art Fair seattleartfair.com from July 30 – August 2 2015, at CenturyLink Field Event Center, in Seattle, Washington.
A collaborative project between Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen and Art Market Productions, Seattle Art Fair builds on the region’s existing momentum by creating a truly unique, innovative art event that will further establish Seattle as an influential player in the global art landscape. Catharine Clark Gallery (Booth 209) features work by five gallery artists working across disciplines and media:
Chester Arnold
Nina Katchadourian
Deborah Oropallo
Wanxin Zhang
Masami Teraoka
Seattle Art Fair | Booth 209
July 30 – August 2, 2015
CenturyLink Field Event Center Seattle, WA
Benefit Preview:
July 30, 6 – 10 pm (ticketed)
Regular Fair Hours:
Friday, July 31 11:00am to 7:00pm
Saturday, August 1 11:00am to 7:00pm
Sunday, August 2 12:00 noon to 6:00pm
Contact Catharine Clark Gallery at the fair: 415.519.1439, [email protected]
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June 23, 2015
Scott Greene: Romanticism with a dystopian twist
by Kimberly Chun
SF Gate
Thursday, June 18, 2015
In the hands of San Francisco Art Institute alum Scott Greene, dystopian grotesques are both elegantly wrought — and black-humored. The artist, who now lives in Bernalillo, N.M., bends the imagery of Romanticism — its epic landscapes and aggrandizing portraiture — to his own ends, to make lacerating points about the nature of power and its devastating effects on the environment.
In “Deep State,” Greene’s fourth solo turn at Catharine Clark, the devil’s in the details and debris of the paintings and prints, as plastic gyres whirl and obsolete technologies teeter against sickly blue skies. Satellite dishes set sail in “Clear Channel,” shredded wads plug a skyscraper’s gaps in “Corporate Cutback,” and a pants-free, clown-nosed Mitt Romney overlooks a realm of rubble in “How You Like Me Now?” How indeed.
— Kimberly Chun
Scott Greene: “Deep State.” 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday and Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Thursday. Through Aug. 22. Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah St., S.F. (415) 399-1439. www.cclarkgallery.com.
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June 16, 2015
Join us this Friday in Palo Alto where we'll be celebrating with artist Walter Robinson. His exhibition, Home Grown, opens this Friday evening with food truck fare and speciality cocktails at the Palo Alto Art Center. Follow us on Instagram to see pictures from the evenings festivities. Details, address and directions to Palo Alto Art Center.
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June 11, 2015
Anthony Discenza and Peter Straub—nationally renowned horror novel author—delve into the history of the obscure 19-century artists' movement known as Das Beben. The duo researched this movement for their collaborative "In That Case" installation, "Beyond the Veil of Vision: Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement." Click the picture below to link to a youtube video interview with the two artists. Visit Discenza's exhibit in person at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, through July 14, 2015.
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June 09, 2015
June will bring us a much anticipated visit and show by our beloved gallery artist Walter Robinson.
Home Grown: Walter Robinson is the largest solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the native Palo Alto artist to date. The show features works created during the past ten years from public and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Opening Celebration is Friday June 19, 7 - 10 pm. Address: 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303. Free and open to the public.
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June 03, 2015
Join us for an artist walk with Scott Greene and Kevin Cooley this Saturday at 2:30 pm. Cocktail reception from 3 - 5 pm.
Scott Greene
How You Like Me Now?
2015
Oil on canvas on panel
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May 28, 2015
Just two more days left to see Kal Spelletich | Intention Machines. Show closes Saturday at 6pm. Visit us at 248 Utah Street for a walk-thru of this interactive exhibit.
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May 19, 2015
There's been a flurry for press for the opening of Drifting in Daylight : Art in Central Park, a free exhibition of eight site-specific works installed in the north-end of Central Park in New York City. Catch all the exhibits, including Nina Katchadourian's Lampost Weavers on North Drive (pictured below), through June 20th, 2015.
The New Yorker (print & online)
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May 15, 2015
Wave Hill Puts Spotlight on Art to Celebrate Its Gardens and Lure Visitors
By WINNIE HUMAY
May 13, 2015
Summer has come early to a public garden in the Bronx: Dragonflies skim over clusters of lily pads in a lush aquatic garden in full August bloom. But only at night.
In the evening, an outdoor installation at Wave Hill brings the garden to life with vivid animation and ethereal music. But during the day, the aquatic garden returns to its barren, postwinter state.
The installation by Chris Doyle is the centerpiece of a new $250,000 exhibition, “Night Lights at Wave Hill,” commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hudson River estate in Riverdale that is celebrated for the artistry of its gardens. “Night Lights,” which runs through May 24, pays homage to the destination art shows that Wave Hill was known for in the late 1970s and ’80s, when works by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi and Keith Haring were displayed on its grounds.
The new exhibition aims to raise the visibility of the 28-acre public garden and cultural center, which for the first time is holding regular night hours, three times a week, for the exhibition. Though the number of visitors to Wave Hill has been growing steadily — reaching a record 155,000 last year — it is often overshadowed by its neighbor a few miles away, the 250-acreNew York Botanical Garden, which has 900,000 visitors annually. Or as Wave Hill’s supporters like to say, it is like the Frick Collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more
