SECA Art Awardees: Top row- K.r.m. Mooney, Alicia McCarthy, Lindsey White; Bottom row- Sean McFarland, Liam Everett. Images courtesy of SFMOMA.
July 15th to September 17th – The 2017 SECA Art Award exhibition at SFMOMA: The 2017 SECA Art Award exhibition highlights five Bay Area artists, each with a dedicated gallery, in their first major museum presentations: Liam Everett, Alicia McCarthy, Sean McFarland, K.r.m. Mooney, and Lindsey White. Everett’s paintings reveal traces of their making, evidence of deliberate and repetitive actions focused on movement and materials. In her intricately patterned compositions, McCarthy transforms surfaces into bursts of line and vibrant color. Using made and found photographs, McFarland reckons with the challenges of representing the landscape. Mooney incorporates natural, industrial, and hand-crafted elements in sculptures that explore the relationships between bodies and objects. In her most recent work, White takes humor seriously, making photographs and sculptures inspired by stage performers such as comedians and magicians.
Installation view of “Our Love Will Still be There”. Image courtesy of Romer Young Gallery.
Ongoing to July 29th – Chris Duncan: Our Love Will Still be There at Romer Young Gallery: Our Love Will Still be There combines a series of earth rubbings the artist made during a recent trip to Zion National Park as well as a series of long term sun exposures made in and on windows, skylights, and rooftops in Oakland and Los Angeles, California. The works are steeped in processes reliant on the passing of time and the effect of natural forces as primary mark making devices. Delicately layered with the artist’s own subtle interventions – hand-painting and sewn areas – the poetic works allude to historical aspects of painting and mark making, while at the same time, honoring the power and humbling nature of time, the sun, the wind and the rain. Romer Young Gallery is located at 1240 22nd Street, in San Francisco.
Last year’s SF Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project. Image courtesy of Minnesota Street Project.
July 21st to 23rd – San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project: This year, the expanded SFABF will occupy both floors of 1275 Minnesota Street, presenting over 100 exhibitors selling a unique selection of artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera, and artists’ multiples. SFABF will feature a diverse range of talks, discussions, book launches, on and off-site special projects, exhibitions and book signings. For a complete list of exhibitors, check here.
Hong Hao “Reflection No. 15”, 2016, oil, molding material on canvas. Image courtesy of Pace Palo Alto.
Ongoing to August 20th – Form Through Narrative: New Chinese Art at Pace, Palo Alto: Form through Narrative is a survey of leading Chinese artists whose multi-generational practices explore themes of place, identity and tradition. For the contemporary Chinese artists in this exhibition, art is rooted in storytelling and the narratives surrounding their lives. Form through Narrative features recent works by artists who were educated in conventional, representational modes of picture-making but gradually abandoned them. While narrative becomes apparent in the process, background and content, the artists on view purposely departed from representational aesthetics to reach complete abstraction. Pace Palo Alto is located at 229 Hamilton Avenue.
Claire Fontaine “Foreigners Everywhere (Arabic), 2005. Image courtesy of Kadist, SF.
Ongoing to August 19th – What We Know That We Don’t Know exhibit at Kadist, SF: What We Know that We Don’t Know draws inspiration from poetic tendencies in Persian literature, where metaphor, irony, and paradox are understood as devices that allow artists to encode their opinions in complex cultural and political circumstances. In a cultural context, this is best illustrated through the concept of ta’arof, which designates a set of social behaviors defining how people should live in society and treat each other. A host is obliged, for example, to offer anything a guest might desire, while the visitor, in equal measure, is obliged to refuse it. Kadist, San Francisco is located at 3295 20th Street.