“Looking Back: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography”, installation view. Image courtesy of Pier 24 Photography.
July 1 to April 30– Looking Back: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography at Pier 24 Photography: In its tenth anniversary, Pier 24 Photography showcases photographers and subjects the Pilara Foundation collected in depth before this space opened. Many of these core photographers—including Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange, and Hiroshi Sugimoto—have been instrumental to the medium’s development. Reflecting the Foundation’s significant 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 spans more than 120 years of the medium, presenting the portrait through the lenses of nearly fifty different artists. The exhibition is not meant to reflect the breadth of the collection as a whole but rather to focus on some of the key building blocks of the Foundation’s collection. Pier 24 Photography is located at Pier 24 on The Embarcadero.
(left) Brooks Salzwedel, “Maroon Bells Contained”, 2018. (middle) Kate Shaw, “Gleam”, 2018. (right) Vanessa Marsh, “Landscape #36”, 2015. Images courtesy of SJICA.
Ongoing to September 15– Surreal Sublime: Contemporary Landscapes at the San José Institute of Contemporary Art (SJICA): Landscape as an art historical genre dates back more than a thousand years in both Western and Eastern traditions. The exhibition explores the resurgence of the sublime and surreal in contemporary landscape art with abstracted, exaggerated, and dreamlike interpretations of nature. With the chaotic political climate, onslaught of natural disasters, and pressing threats to the environment, it is not surprising that artists are returning to themes of the sublime as a reflection on our current times. Through a variety of media, the artists represented capture a range of emotions using landscape as a representation of psychic space. While the vast beauty of nature draws the viewer in, themes of darkness and turbulence run throughout the show. The works teeter between the natural and synthetic, seductive and dangerous, calm and chaotic, utopian and apocalyptic. Nature reminds us of the cyclical nature of life and our own mortality, that these environments have existed long before us and will remain long after we are gone. SJICA is located at 560 South First Street in San José.
Elise Ferguson, “June Room”, 2019, installation view. Image courtesy of Romer Young Gallery.
Ongoing to August 3– June Room: Elise Ferguson at Romer Young Gallery: Using pattern and color, along with a range of process-driven approaches and modern materials, Ferguson creates works based on mathematical puzzles and geometric variations that land somewhere at the intersection of painting, sculpture and printmaking. The results are beautiful works that reflect the artist’s intuitive use of geometry and her admiration for the purposely imperfect. Having long employed printmaking techniques in her paintings and frequently making reference to textiles and textile design, this exhibition blends several themes in her work into a single exhibition. Romer Young Gallery is located at 1240 22nd Street.
(left) Helen Mirra, “1–21 May, Overlook—Green Gulch—Redwood Creek—Heather Cutoff—Overlook”, 2017. (right) Sean Thackrey, “Cannaregio V.III”, 2014. Images courtesy of BAMPFA.
July 3 to August 25– No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): No Horizon brings together two Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding. Mirra and Thackrey both have had longstanding engagements with Zen, and their approaches to art reflect the discipline of simplicity and the recognition of the sublime as bare experience. Mirra’s recent art practice is shown in woven wall pieces that capture the nuances of her somatic experience and the conditions of the environments she encounters and moves through. Thackrey’s photographs, which are mounted on specially dyed wood panels, are invitations to seeing inspired by close-up views of weathered walls in Venice, Italy. His compositions reveal the infinitely varied and remarkably expressive details of these weathered slabs of stone. BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street in Berkeley.
Robert Minervini, “Come Quietly”, 2019. Image courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery.
Ongoing to August 17– Robert Minervini: Future Collapse at Rena Bransten Gallery: In conjunction with the unveiling of his large mosaic mural at SFO this exhibition continues Minervini’s exploration of human intervention in the natural world. In these works, screen printed California cityscapes and landscapes are backdrops to arrangements of stenciled classical Roman sculptures, cacti and succulents, Etruscan urns, and Egyptian figurines, all placed on shelves inside tiled vitrines. It is a proposition that both honors and disrupts traditions of still-life and landscape painting. A sense of dislocation and disorientation begins to seep in as forms and landscapes are repeated throughout the work. These objects are disconnected from any cultural significance, reminiscent of a Cabinet of curiosity, and Minervini’s natural spaces are only facsimiles of nature. This constructed world is as familiar as it is foreign. Rena Bransten Gallery is located at 1275 Minnesota Street.
Artist Reception: Saturday, July 13, 5 – 7pm
Views from previous events. Images courtesy of the Headlands Center for the Arts.
July 14 & 28– Summer Open House and Artist Reception at the Headlands Center for the Arts: Open House provides a once-a-season opportunity to roam the various buildings of the Headlands, meet current artists, view works in progress, and attend screenings, performances, and readings. Artists in Residence Rodney Ewing and Kori Newkirk have both been working on installations in their Project Space studios.
Ewing delves into a host of references to explore the topic of race in his work. His installations and works on paper chronicle how the Black Body has had to evolve to move through physical, social, and psychological spaces in the United States, and the continued resilience and defiance required to survive.
Newkirk uses pony beads, hair pomade, bicycle tires, tin cans, and his own sweat and saliva in his whimsical yet thought-provoking sculptures and two-dimensional visual works. His work transforms everyday materials to illuminate the human condition, delving especially into ideas of racialized identity and their connection to place. Headlands Center for the Arts is located at 944 Simmonds Road in Sausalito.
Summer Open House: Sunday, July 14, 12 – 5pm
Artist Reception: Sunday, July 28, 4 – 6pm
View from last years event. Image courtesy of SF Art Book Fair.
July 19 to 21– San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project: The SF Art Book Fair is an annual multi-day festival of artists’ publications. The event is free and open to the public and features artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera, and artists’ multiples. These works are presented by over 100 independent publishers, antiquarian dealers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts. Over the weekend, the fair hosts a diverse range of talks, discussions, book launches, on and off-site special projects, exhibitions and signings. The mission of the fair is to foster the unique art publishing community of the Bay Area while providing a platform for national and international publishers to exhibit their work to a new audience. Minnesota Street Project is located at 1275 Minnesota Street.
Annabeth Rosen, “Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped”, installation view. Image courtesy of The Contemporary Jewish Museum.
July 25 to January 19– Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped at The Contemporary Jewish Museum: Raised in Brooklyn by a working-class Jewish family, Rosen’s process—grounded in resourcefulness, endurance, and a strong work ethic—can be traced to her upbringing. Drawing from the idea that everything broken can always be fixed or re-used, Rosen embraces the impulse to rescue or resurrect broken ceramic fragments. She sees both her studio and the kiln as spaces of invention, where process and chance are equally essential elements in the formation of her art. For over two decades, Rosen has interrogated the medium of ceramics in a contemporary art context. Formally trained in ceramics, yet heavily influenced by painterly gesture, Rosen has expanded her practice to include conceptually-driven sculptural forms. Composed using laborious, additive processes, her works push the medium beyond spectacle and into conversations about contemporary painting, feminist theory, endurance-based performance, and conceptual art. The Contemporary Jewish Museum is located at 736 Mission Street.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 24, 7 – 9pm
Sara VanDerBeek, “Roman Woman XVIII”, 2019. Image courtesy of Altman Siegel.
Ongoing to August 30– Sara VanDerBeck: Roman Women at Altman Siegel: Beginning in 2012 with a residency at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome, VanDerBeek focuses on the Roman statuary as her photographic subject as she documents objects of antiquity in museum collections across the US and Europe. The exhibition invites the viewer to contemplate the changing means and meaning of image circulation over time, and the shifting discourse in which those images are embedded. Though the commonality of white marble as the materiality of both classical and neoclassical sculpture has produced a cultural association, recent art historical research suggests that much of the Roman statuary was once richly colored and embellished. VanDerBeek references this with the vibrant coloration of her photographs which references the ways that images change both materially and culturally over time. The work also highlights the symbolism that has both hindered and elevated the female form since its earliest iterations. Women’s bodied were formed within cultural meanings that defines them as an ideal and a mirror for society at large. In the history of art, they have most often been defined as muse rather than maker, a reality that VanDerBeek has become increasingly interested in countering as she photographs. The works in Roman Women acknowledge and push against these precedents by proposing a new visual language indebted to a lineage of female practitioners. Altman Siegel is located at 1150 25th Street.
(left) Rachelle Reichert, “Mashan”, 2017. (middle) Brianna Tadeo, “Blood Print #01”, 2016. (right) Kija Lucas, “In Search of Home”, 2015. Images courtesy of the artists.
August 2 to 24– Summer Sessions: Part II Fugitive Material at Anglim Gilbert Gallery: This two-part series of exhibitions features the work of six emerging Bay Area artists, each of whom will be showing at the gallery for the first time. The series is conceived as an homage to the gallery’s historic Introductions program, which provided many now established Bay Area artists with their first formal exhibition opportunities. Part two of the exhibitions, Fugitive Material, features photographs, chemigrams, drawings, and sculpture by Kija Lucas, Rachelle Reichert, and Brianna Tadeo. Borrowing from scientific methods of documentation and inquiry, the artists address the precariousness of industrial land use, family history, racial bias, and mortality. Anglim Gilbert Gallery is located at 1275 Minnesota Street.
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 3, 4 – 7pm