Luis Estrada, Untitled, mixed media on canvas. Image courtesy of NIAD Art Center.
Saturday, March 5 – WIN WIN 10 NIAD Art Center’s Annual Fundraiser and 40th Anniversary Celebration: NIAD Art Center is a progressive art studio in Richmond, CA. Frequently remarkable, surprising, and engaging, work by NIAD artists garners attention from the contemporary art world on a global scale. WIN WIN 10 is their annual fundraiser that this year also commemorates their 40th anniversary. The fundraiser includes a fun afternoon of games, music and a live auction of extraordinary artwork donated by NIAD artists and our art community friends, followed by an in-person celebration in the NIAD courtyard. For tickets visit this link.
Dionne Lee “Casting” 2022, gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of Et al Gallery.
Ongoing to April 2 – Dionne Lee: Castings at Et al Gallery: Dionne Lee works in photography, collage, and video to explore power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Castings continues her interest in place, ancestral memory, and survival. Moving away from found images sourced from wilderness manuals and how-to’s, she looks to the body, and the land itself, as primary sources. Through the camera, a tool that affirms the experience of witnessing, she engages with how the body holds and carves through its memories. Following the shadow of a fallen tree branch turned divining rod, rotating the sedimentary joints of the body, and gazing into the eye of a dandelion or the black hole of a rock overturned; are all modes of research to consider the relationship between the self, the past, and the landscape in which they meet. Et al Gallery’s Chinatown location is at 620 Kearny Street in San Francisco.
Left: Andrea Bowers, Right: Chelsea Ryoko Wong. Images courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery
March 11 to April 23 – Andrea Bowers and Chelsea Ryoko Wong at Jessica Silverman Gallery: Over the last twenty-three years, Andrea Bowers has built an international reputation for her drawings, videos, and installations, which deal with social issues ranging from women’s’ and workers’ rights to climate change and immigration. Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist whose vibrant figure compositions reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Through the use of watercolor, gouache and acrylic techniques, Wong creates busy scenes of co-mingling people drawing from real-life events and her imagination. Jessica Silverman Gallery is located at 621 Grant Avenue in San Francisco.
Brett Amory, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Pt. 2 Gallery.
March 12 to April 1 – Brett Amory at Pt. 2 Gallery: Brett Amory’s practice explores the mundane themes that structure daily life. He’s interested in the everyday experiences that define our engagement with the world, and how our habits often prevent us from paying attention to our surroundings. For the past twenty years, He has worked on a body of work titled Waiting. Drawing attention to everyday aesthetics, the series portrays isolated figures caught in routine, passive activities directed by existing circumstances—waiting in line for a bus, waiting to cross the street, riding the train—and conveys feelings of confinement and banality. By defamiliarizing the familiar, his work draws attention to the economic and social conditions of the changing urban landscape, touching on issues of gentrification, class, ethnicity, and community. Pt. 2 Gallery is located at 1523b Webster Street in Oakland.
Artists as curators – Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, and John Zurier. Image courtesy of BAMPFA.
March 19 to July 17 – The Artist’s Eye: Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, John Zurier at BAMPFA: Curated by established Bay Area artists Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, and John Zurier, this exhibition centers the artistic vision of each artist and engages the space where the artist—as curator, collector, and maker—meets the museum. For The Artist’s Eye, each artist was invited to organize a section of the exhibition, using artworks and archival material from BAMPFA’s collection, as well as select works from their own collections, that range across diverse media, approaches to making, and historical time periods. BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street in Berkeley.
Installation view at Pier 24 Photography.
Ongoing to March 31 – Looking Back: 10 Years of Pier 24 Photography: Pier 24 Photography is open again and visitors can see the current exhibition before it closes at the end of the month. Looking Back features photographers and themes collected before the space opened. Many of these photographers—including Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange, and Hiroshi Sugimoto—have been instrumental to the medium’s development. Reflecting the collection’s focus on the genre, the exhibition’s opening galleries highlight a wide range of portraiture, ranging from mugshots and works by unknown photographers to iconic images by celebrated figures in the history of photography. The main gallery—entitled “About Face”—spans more than 120 years of the medium, presenting the portrait through the lenses of nearly fifty different artists. Located at Pier 24, The Embarcadero in San Francisco.