... the Garden Grows at Dominican University

Went to the opening reception for Karrie Hovey's show ... the Garden Grows at Dominican University (San Rafael, CA) last night. It was absolutely gorgeous: gardens, bamboo forests and other "natural" environments created from an astonishing array of recycled materials. According to Hovey she used primarily "plastics, paper, cardboard and display materials that have been cast aside by retailers ... upon closer examination the construction materials emerge to reveal their origins in the brand name goods we recognize and covet."

Included in the show was a wall of "violets" Hovey created while doing an artist residency in Spain. "I was surprised they had such pretty lavender and purple trash bags over there," she said with a smile, "all we get here is black and white." We were happy to see a good turn out for this lovely show in spite of the horrible traffic caused by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge (grr... arg... thanks for driving, Denise).

There's an artist talk, Wednesday, November 4, 2:30 - 4:00 p.m. The show is installed at the San Marco Gallery, Alemany Library at Dominican. Hours: Monday - Thursday: 8:00 a.m. - 10:30 p.m.Friday and Saturday: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Sunday: 2:00 - 10:30 p.m through December 23. Directions: www.dominican.edu/directions info: 415-485-3251 event page with installation photos on facebook.

Yerba Buena Gallery Walk 09

The annual Yerba Buena Free Gallery Walk was this past Saturday (11/24) in San Francisco. This year 14 SOMA galleries opened their doors and provided drinks and munchies to wandering art lovers. SF photographer Wendy Crittenden joined me in having a look at about 80% of them.

We started at SF institution Crown Point Press and once we dragged ourselves away from their addictive bookstore, we found lots of interesting art. Among the works on display was a special exhibition by London based painter Tomma Abts, who had done a two week residency at CCP in the fall. Her etchings with color aquatint were gorgeous.

From CCP, we went downstairs to 871 Fine Arts, who had a special exhibition of paintings, watercolors and books by June Felter. We oooed and ahhed over a lot of her work. She often did still lives that include a newspaper open to a comic strip in the middle of the table, in this case Calvin & Hobbes, although I’ve seen pieces that feature Krazy Kat and other strips.

Around the corner from these two galleries was the Sculturesite Gallery which featured a joint show of works by Bella Feldman and JP Long. Neither Wendy nor I had ever been to this gallery before, and we were impressed by the range of sculptural works on display both inside and out in the courtyard.

Next we worked our way through the cluster of galleries around Mission and 3rd Street. We stopped at Chandler Fine Art and Baer Ridgeway across from SFMOMA. At BR, we enjoyed Brendon Lott’s quirky oil paintings, and were fascinated with the sound/film installation by Maurico Ancalmo in the downstairs gallery (still on the left). In the center of the room was a sculpture constructed from old film projectors, which cast 3 movies amongst the stills. Alternating between a group of traditional African singers and footage of classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, we were both taken by the contrast. We also loved their bookstore! A great selection of artist made books in all price ranges.

Catherine Clark Gallery was host to Sandow Birk’s impressive American Qur’an series, an ongoing project to hand-transcribe and illuminate the Holy Qur'an with scenes from contemporary American life. These are intricately detailed and colorful, sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking. There were also a few works from Birk’s Disasters of War series, commenting on the Iraq War (with a nod to Goya, of course).

We were blown away by the exhibition upstairs at SF CameraWorks, An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area - Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself. Wendy and I both agreed that it was one of the best we had seen there. I’d like to point out 2 artists doing work on labor themes that really stood out: Jona Franks Uniforms series (photos of workers in uniform immediately after finishing their shift) and Ken Light’s mid-1970’s series of workers in heavy industry.

We had a look at Topher Delaney’s model train installation at the UC Berkeley Extension Art and Design Center Gallery, and then went on to the Modernism Gallery. The featured artist in the front gallery was Jerry Kearns, whose large acrylic paintings depicting Jesus in ironic situations really cracked us up. Here is his Lowland Drifter ( 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 112) on the left. Among the other works on display were some by Kasmir S. Malevich, and a selection of small works by Le Corbusier. We were most fascinated, however with the gallery office, which was basically a large desk ringed with towering stacks of art books. Reminded me of home, although we are a little better at hiding the piles (ignore all that research piled in laundry baskets under the dining room table…). After this we toasted the Pied Piper mural at Maxfield’s (Sheraton Palace) and fortified ourselves with wine and cheese.

Marc on KRON Best of Bay

Marc appears in a featurette for KRON's Best of Bay for Boulevard Cafe (Daly City) in the "family restaurants" category. I'm in there too, stuffing my face with a wonderful shrimp cocktail. Yummm...

Poplaski Exhibition in Paris

Thanks to Jim Danky, I can share with you these wonderful photos of comic artist Peter Poplaski's exhibition and opening reception at the Galerie 9e Art in Paris. Along with the photos is a 3 page English language article from the Paris Herald-Times which not only provides an excellent account of the show itself, but also who came, what they said, what they drank, what was sold, and what they all had for dinner afterwards. I felt like I was there! Don't miss the slide of the 4 part Marvel Monsters drawing, which was the hit of the show.

Poplaski's latest publication is The Sketchbook Adventures of Peter Poplaski (more info here and here). He also is an expert on Zorro, and there is a YouTube video of him in costume showing a French reporter through an exhibition in Ganges, France (he is talking in English, with a French translation dubbed in). It looks like it was an interesting exhibition, and the video shows close ups of his sketchbooks and other drawings.

Morrie Turner at SFPL

Morrie Turner, Creator of Wee Pals Cartoon: a 45 Year Retrospective, an exhibition produced by the AfroSolo Theatre Company at the San Francisco Public Library (August 15 - October 15, 2009), showed an impressive range of work by this award winning cartoonist. Large display cases clustered in three locations within the library explored not only his best-known work, the Wee Pals comic strip, but also Turner’s Soul Corner panels and the social/political cartoons he created in the 1960’s & 70’s for publications like Black World and Ebony.

Turner, a life-long resident of Oakland, California, was born in 1923. He was a self-taught artist, and some of his first publications were strips he drew for military magazines while serving in WWII. After his service was completed, he continued drawing, supplementing his income with a job as a police clerk.

With the encouragement of Charles Schulz, Turner became a full-time cartoonist in 1964. In 1965, he developed a racially-integrated comic strip called Dinky Fellas that ran in five newspapers, which was renamed Wee Pals. By 1966, Wee Pals could be seen in over 70 newspapers in the US and abroad. The strip gained true nationwide acceptance after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when it’s publication expanded to over 100 newspapers nationwide, making it the first nationally syndicated racially-integrated comic strip.

The library exhibition, curated by Kheven Legrone, devotes several display cases to Wee Pals. Outside the Children’s Center, on the library’s second floor, two cases featured Wee Pals books and memorabilia, and paintings that were used as background slides for a children’s concert series, A Journey Into Jazz, performed by the Oakland Symphony at the Paramount Theatre. These slides featured portraits of famous jazz musicians, and child characters demonstrating dance moves in different styles. Turner would attend these concerts, sketching the children that attended and giving them the drawings.

The heart of the exhibition, upstairs in the African American Center, focuses on the development of the Wee Pals characters (some based on Turner, his son, grandchildren and friends), his production methods on the Wee Pals strip, and his political cartoons. Many of these single panel “civil rights cartoons” (as Turner called them), drawn with pen, ink and watercolor, found humor in irony. For example, one drawing depicts a White panhandler saying “Thanks, Boy” to a wealthy Black gentleman that had just deposited a dollar in his cup (Turner says this really happened to him). Also featured in this part of the exhibition was a series of cartoons Turner created in 1969, when he was invited with five other cartoonists by the National Cartoonist Society to travel to Vietnam to entertain the troops. He spent twenty-seven days on the front lines and in hospitals sketching more than 3,000 caricatures of service people.

Turner’s drawings for the Sunday Soul Corner panels were prominently displayed in the third floor main lobby. These drawings, originally meant to fill up the "drop out panel" in Turner's Sunday strips, illustrate the accomplishments of famous persons of color.

Turner (shown in conversation with Belva Davis at the SFPL 11/15/09) still lives in Oakland in the house his father bought in 1941, and continues to reach out to children through small cartooning classes and guest lectures at schools. Turner’s life was the subject of the 2001 documentary, Keeping the Faith with Morrie, produced by Angel Harper for Heaven Sent Productions Inc.

Griscom Gets a Rave!

SF photographer Tom Griscom's labor landmarks photos recently got a rave review on Jen Bekmen's Hey Hot Shot blog. Tom started this body of work while we were both finishing up our programs at San Francisco State, which sort of culminated in the Syndicate collaboration with the Labor Archives at SFSU for Bay Area Now 5. Some of this work has also been included in the SFSU 2009 MFA show and as part of Laborfest:Art & Labor Today. Griscom has continued to build on the framework of this narrative and done some beautiful work. To the left is Griscom's photograph of Beale Street in San Francisco.

Griscom has also been assisting photographer David Maisel on his latest series, the X-Ray Project, which is based on x-rays of artwork taken during Maisel's residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007.

Update on Pittsburg Trip

Here I am in Pittsburgh, after speaking at the Union Label and Service Trades Dept. -AFL-CIO's 68th convention. I spoke on the label department's history (and label history in general) to commemorate their 100th anniversary. Thanks to ULSTD president Richard Kline for inviting me (that's him in grey) and to Greg Kenefick of Kenefick Communications (in tan) for all his help.

My labels project is currently featured on the ulstd's web site and was also featured in the newsletter of the International Labor Communications Association (thanks to Steve Stallone and Fred Glass). You can see the presentation on my labor history slideshow page.

Maybe it's my Northern Michigan upbringing, but I am also a huge football fan. I was so focused on the details of my trip to Pittsburgh and New York, that I completely spaced out on the fact that the NFL season kickoff game was happening in Pittsburgh the same day I was flying in (Sept 10). I flew Jet Blue with a short stop over at Kennedy in NY. On the NY-PIT leg of the flight, almost everyone on the plane was wearing a black & gold Steelers jersey. On arrival, the city was crawling with fans. There was a free concert with the Black Eyed Peas and Tim McGraw. The Steelers won, and there were happy fans in the streets.

I didn't have a lot of time in Pittsburgh, but I did make it to the Warhol Museum. The range of Warhol's work never ceases to amaze me. The museum did a good job of representing it. There are 7 floors, each representing a different theme in Warhol's career. There was a floor dedicated to his celebrity pieces (including an entire gallery on the Rolling Stones), the factory era, to his record cover illustrations and advertising work, to Interview magazine, and other experiments and installations. The photo on the left is an installation of Silver Clouds, which I totally enjoyed; an entire gallery filled with these floating silver pillows.

Warhol also collected taxidermied animals (lions, dogs, etc...) which are displayed around the museum. He did "time capsules," a nice art historical way of categorizing his habit of throwing all the paperwork and other ephemera he didn't want to deal with in cardboard boxes and sealing them up when they got full. Apparently, there are hundreds of these, and the museum has a major project in sorting them out. It's hard, looking at it in hind-sight, to remember what a radical visionary Warhol was when he first appeared on the scene. The museum makes a real effort to put Warhol in the context of his time and influences, and I think they did a good job of it.