San Francisco visual arts
Encyclopedia
San Francisco Bay Area contemporary art
is known for its cross-disciplinary artists like Bruce Conner
, Bruce Nauman
, and Peter Voulkos
as well as a large number of non-profit alternative art spaces including New Langton Arts
, Intersection for the Arts
, and Southern Exposure
. San Francisco Bay Area
Visual Arts
has undergone many permutations paralleling innovation and hybridity
in literature and theater.
via Alan Watts
and the literary and poetic irreverence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
, Allen Ginsberg
, and others, visual artists such as Bruce Conner
and Jay DeFeo
diverged from the Abstract Expressionism
of the east coast to make connections between sculpture and painting. Connor's found material assemblages, collages and experimental films make him an early cross-disciplinary pioneer.
Painter Wayne Thiebaud
's paintings of commonplace products such as toys or gumball machines paralleled the pop influenced Funk style. Involving bright colors, humor and word-play, Funk is most often associated with the ceramic work of Robert Arneson
, and the paintings of William T. Wiley
. All three, along with Roy De Forest
and Manuel Neri
taught at UC Davis in the 60s and 70s. (Artist and educator Peter Voulkos
set the stage for Funk by reengaging ceramics as part of contemporary studio practice.) Bruce Nauman
, who is often credited with dissolving the medium specific practices of previous generations, went to UC Davis and studied under William Wiley.
By the end of the 1960s Conceptual Art
and Minimal Art were reforming the aesthetics and values of visual art. Bay Area artists responded to the dominance of the white cube, and transitioned from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented practice inspired by Marcel Duchamp
. In the Bay Area, starting in the 1970s, Artists such as Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, Howard Fried
and Terry Fox
, explored the intersection of performance and sculpture. Also picking up on conceptualism, with an added materialist strain, was David Ireland
.
In 1967 The Experimental Television Project (later renamed the National Center for Experiments in Television), housed at KQED studios was one of the first programs in the nation to give artists access to television studios and equipment. Groups like Ant Farm, Video Free America, and T.R. Uthco working in the same moment were video recording "happening" performances, and experimenting with light sound and time.
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
is known for its cross-disciplinary artists like Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
, Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
, and Peter Voulkos
Peter Voulkos
Peter Voulkos popular name of Panagiotis Voulkos, was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his Abstract Expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art....
as well as a large number of non-profit alternative art spaces including New Langton Arts
New Langton Arts
-About:New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the US, New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art, and involving artists in the...
, Intersection for the Arts
Intersection for the Arts
Intersection for the Arts, established in 1965, is the oldest alternative non-profit art space in San Francisco, California. Intersection's reading series is the longest continuous reading series outside of an academic institution in the state of California....
, and Southern Exposure
Southern Exposure (art space)
-About:Southern Exposure is a not-for-profit arts organization and alternative art space founded in 1974 in the Mission District of San Francisco, California....
. San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
Visual Arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
has undergone many permutations paralleling innovation and hybridity
Hybridity
Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture...
in literature and theater.
Artists 1950-1970
Paralleling a new interest in eastern philosophy and ZenZen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
via Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
and the literary and poetic irreverence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, and others, visual artists such as Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
and Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....
diverged from the Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
of the east coast to make connections between sculpture and painting. Connor's found material assemblages, collages and experimental films make him an early cross-disciplinary pioneer.
Painter Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
's paintings of commonplace products such as toys or gumball machines paralleled the pop influenced Funk style. Involving bright colors, humor and word-play, Funk is most often associated with the ceramic work of Robert Arneson
Robert Arneson
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at UC Davis for four decades.- Career :...
, and the paintings of William T. Wiley
William T. Wiley
William T. Wiley is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as Funk art....
. All three, along with Roy De Forest
Roy De Forest
Roy De Forest was an American painter known for his comic-like patchwork regionalist style, often depicting dogs & other figurative content in his art....
and Manuel Neri
Manuel Neri
Manuel Neri is an American sculptor, painter, and printmaker and a notable member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.- Biography :...
taught at UC Davis in the 60s and 70s. (Artist and educator Peter Voulkos
Peter Voulkos
Peter Voulkos popular name of Panagiotis Voulkos, was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his Abstract Expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art....
set the stage for Funk by reengaging ceramics as part of contemporary studio practice.) Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
, who is often credited with dissolving the medium specific practices of previous generations, went to UC Davis and studied under William Wiley.
By the end of the 1960s Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and Minimal Art were reforming the aesthetics and values of visual art. Bay Area artists responded to the dominance of the white cube, and transitioned from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented practice inspired by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
. In the Bay Area, starting in the 1970s, Artists such as Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, Howard Fried
Howard Fried
Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.He lives and works in Vallejo, California.-Biography:...
and Terry Fox
Terry Fox
Terrance Stanley "Terry" Fox , was a Canadian humanitarian, athlete, and cancer research activist. In 1980, with one leg having been amputated, he embarked on a cross-Canada run to raise money and awareness for cancer research...
, explored the intersection of performance and sculpture. Also picking up on conceptualism, with an added materialist strain, was David Ireland
David Ireland
David Ireland may refer to:* David Ireland , American conceptual and installation artist* David Ireland , Australian novelist* David Ireland , Union Army colonel in the American Civil War...
.
In 1967 The Experimental Television Project (later renamed the National Center for Experiments in Television), housed at KQED studios was one of the first programs in the nation to give artists access to television studios and equipment. Groups like Ant Farm, Video Free America, and T.R. Uthco working in the same moment were video recording "happening" performances, and experimenting with light sound and time.
Art Spaces
- New Langton ArtsNew Langton Arts-About:New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the US, New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art, and involving artists in the...
- Southern ExposureSouthern ExposureSouthern Exposure may refer to:*Southern Exposure - a San Francisco non-profit art space.*Southern Exposure - a 2007 album released by FireHouse guitarist Bill Leverty...
- Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsYerba Buena Center for the ArtsYerba Buena Center for the Arts is a multi-disiplinary contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California, United States. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse...
- The LABThe LABThe LAB, located in San Francisco's historic Redstone Building, is a not-for-profit arts organization and performance space founded in 1984.The Lab "supports interdisciplinary artists in the development and exhibition of new visual, media, literary, and performing art, with a focus on emerging and...
- Intersection for the ArtsIntersection for the ArtsIntersection for the Arts, established in 1965, is the oldest alternative non-profit art space in San Francisco, California. Intersection's reading series is the longest continuous reading series outside of an academic institution in the state of California....
- The BoxShop
External links
- http://books.google.com/books?id=E1DWC54P-MoC&dq=epicenter+san+francisco+bay+area+art+now&pg=PP1&ots=99s_yba4__&sig=HJx5qB4vKysZ2lQWwPJH6AZ8iFY&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=epicenter:+San+Francisco+Bay+Area+Art+Now&spell=1&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnailEpicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now (google books)]