Painting Drawing News
Jacqueline Francis: Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America
Posted on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America
University of Washington Press, 2011
Paperback, 256 pages, $40
Jacqueline Francis (Visual and Critical Studies and Painting/Drawing faculty) explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. She specifically looks at the cases of Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, three New York artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the 20th century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices.
Read the rest >>>Summer in New York
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Carol Pitts
New York Studio
Instructor: Linda Geary
June 10—30, 2012
Visiting artists: TBA
(visiting artists in 2011: Polly Apfelbaum, David Brody, Elisabeth Condon, Diana Cooper, Daniel Davidson, Franklin Evans, Joanne Greenbaum, David Humphrey, Brandon Koch, Carrie Moyer, Alexander Ross)
Description
Open to all visual artists, graduate and undergraduate, this three-week studio course set in New York is open to the discussion of interdisciplinary art practices with an emphasis on contemporary dialogues around painting.
Read the rest >>>Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011
Hardcover, 168 pages, $29.95
Tanya Zimbardo (MA Curatorial Practice 2005), SFMOMA's assistant curator of media arts, coauthored this book chronicling and illustrating more than 100 SECA Award recipients from the late 1960s to the present, including CCA alumni Squeak Carnwath, Desirée Holman, Mitzi Pederson, Laurie Reid, Leslie Shows, and Kathryn VanDyke, among others. Featured faculty include Rebeca Bollinger, Kota Ezawa, Thom Faulders, Chris Finley, Donald Fortescue, Amy Franceschini, Clay Jensen, Jordan Kantor, Shaun O'Dell, Maria Porges, and Mary Snowden.
Read the rest >>>2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition Catalogue
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition Catalogue
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011
Paperback, 36 pages, $9.95
The most recent SECA Art Award exhibition showcases four Bay Area artists whose innovative works, while diverse in form and subject matter, reflect overlapping affinities. Representing CCA is Ruth Laskey (Painting/Drawing 1999, MFA 2005), who employs weaving, using a traditional floor loom, to expand on the painterly tradition of geometric abstraction. The other three featured artists are Colter Jacobsen, whose meticulous drawings, watercolors, and installations often incorporate found ephemera to explore reflection and longing; Mauricio Ancalmo, who combines various found mechanical instruments in a film-based installation to form a structural dialogue that is both poetically and philosophically inspired; and Kamau Amu Patton, who synthesizes works in a range of media to investigate the inter-zone of sound, materiality, and perceptual experience.
Read the rest >>>Marci Washington: Selected Works 2005-Present
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Marci Washington: Selected Works 2005-Present
Leeds College of Art, 2011
** Hardcover, 96 pages, $100**
Published for the Marci Washington (Painting/Drawing 2002, MFA 2008) exhibition at Leeds College of Art in November 2011, this book shows most of Washington's output since 2005 in full color along with photographs of her studio, an interview, and a short essay. "Drawing from literature, film, fashion photography, and historical events," the artist writes, "I am building a disjointed fictional narrative with connections to the past as well as to the present. Like illustrations from a novel that doesn't exist, or stills from a film that was never made –- a story which functions as social commentary as well as a haunting multigenerational epic shrouded in supernatural mystery and romanticism."
Read the rest >>>Christopher Brown: A Gardener's Notebook
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
A Gardener's Notebook
John Berggruen Gallery, 2010
Paperback, 50 pages, $20
John Berggruen Gallery presents the catalogue for the exhibition of Painting/Drawing faculty member Christopher Brown. The catalogue features color plates of many of the works in the show, including progression photos of A Natural Cubist and A Short Story. Also included is a complete chronology of the artist's career.
Read the rest >>>"A Great Day in San Francisco" Honors Diversity and Community at CCA
Posted on Friday, November 25, 2011, by Jim Norrena
"'A Great Day in San Francisco' is a picture of faculty, students, staff, alumni, and families and friends of the LGBT community at California College of the Arts," explains Painting/Drawing chair Kim Anno in reference to her latest project, a tribute to Art Kane's 1958 masterful photograph, "A Great Day in Harlem" (1958), that captured the historic gathering of 57 of the century's most influential jazz musicians on the steps of a Harlem brownstone.
Read the rest >>>The Art of Food
Posted on Wednesday, November 23, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
From painter to pastry chef, ceramicist to wine cellar owner, innovative CCA alumni are shaping creative niches across the world of food and drink.
Twenty people stand around a long butcher-block table. The lights above cast a pale glow on its surface, illuminating the ingredients piled in its recessed trough -- lemons, lettuce, flour, eggplants, bell peppers -- without lighting the faces of the diners. They are here for Hands On, a food-making experience in which they use their hands rather than utensils to create a three-course meal.
"Cooking is very much a form of art," says Lisa Mishima (Graphic Design 2005), who concocted Hands On together with her boss, Randall Stowell of the creative production company Autofuss, and friend Yvonne Mouser (Furniture 2006). "Both cooking and art involve concepting, crafting, and presenting a piece. But there is something about consuming one's creation that feels even more personal, immediate, and honest."
Initially, the guests are nervous, even clumsy. Flour falls to the floor. Slowly, the experimental chefs grow more confident. There are giggles around the room, then nods of approval as the dishes take shape. The menu features Caesar salad, handmade pasta with pesto sauce, and tiramisu. Some diners shape vegetables into utensils and use those instead of spoons or spatulas. Maybe there will be a meal at the end of this.
Read the rest >>>2011 R.A.W. Video Contest Showcases Student Life In and Out of the Studio (Including a Burger or Two!)
Posted on Thursday, November 17, 2011, by Clay Walsh
Congratulations to this year's juried R.A.W. Video (real artists at work) contest winners! The contest, open to all current CCA students, challenged contestants to create a two-minute (maximum) high-resolution digital film (including audio) with “In and Out of the Studio" as the required theme.
The goal was to encourage students to pick up their digital camcorders and highlight their community at CCA—whether in the classroom, studio, residence hall—or away from the college altogether. And the goal was definitely met several times over!
2011 R.A.W. Video Contest Winners
Read the rest >>>Faculty-Alumnus David Huffman's "Out of Bounds" at SFAC Gallery a "SHIFT" Toward Dialogue About Race in America
Posted on Monday, November 14, 2011, by Jim Norrena
Alumnus David Huffman (MFA 1998), who is a recently tenured assistant professor in CCA's undergraduate Painting/Drawing Program and Graduate Program in Fine Arts, is one of three featured artists in the current group exhibition SHIFT: Three Projects Constructing a New Dialogue About Race in America at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (through December 10, 2011).