Went to the annual Yerba Buena gallery walk on October 16th, and I was really disappointed, not by the art on view, although I didn’t see as much as I would have liked, but by the fact that the galleries were basically empty. It looked to me like the gallery walk drew a pretty sizable crowd of art lovers in the past, but this year, I was often the only one looking. Also, a few of the galleries I always look forward to checking out, such as SculptureSite on 3rd Street, have disappeared. The economy must be really tough on independent galleries.
I started at the Cartoon Art Museum and saw the excellent show
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women co-curated by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman, loosely based on an article about confessional comics written by Kaminer for The Forward (a weekly Jewish newpaper). The drawing styles & storytelling vary widely from underground comix pages of the 60’s to more contemporary work in watercolor. It was like having a glass of wine with interesting and opinionated friends. See the impressive list of artists represented on the CAM site
here.
A few blocks away at Crown Point Press, I enjoyed the current
Significant Others show, but found myself mesmerized, as usual, by the
prints by Wayne Thiebaud in the hallway (
Dark Cupcakes and Donuts, 2006 on the left). Even In tones of grey, his compositions vibrate off the paper. He continues to amaze me. I hope I can make it to see his retrospective at the newly re-opened
Crocker Museum in Sacramento before it ends. Catherine Clark Gallery had an astonishing show of the recent work of Masami Teraoka, both his politically charged and erotic ukiyo-e style paintings and his
The Last Supper/Pope's Mega Squid Thrust, a very graphic commentary on the weird sexual politics of the Catholic church, done in the style of a gothic altarpiece.
