- Living as Form (The Nomadic Version)
Living as Form takes on the formidable challenges of connecting social practice to the real world and presenting documentation as an aesthetic medium.
[April 8, 2012]
- Landscape Update
Landscape Update is a display of potential rather than a fully resolved exhibition. Considering that nearly all the works in the show were made in the past three months, it's clear that Shaw is dedicated to her practice.
[April 1, 2012]
- San Francisco 1964
During the short time Arthur Tress spent photographing San Francisco in the spring and summer of 1964, he amassed more than nine hundred negatives, from which curator James A. Ganz has selected seventy-one for the exhibition Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964.
[March 25, 2012]
- Fred Wilson
In his current exhibition, Fred Wilson explores the idea that Black is not only beautiful but also philosophical. Wilson is an expert at producing conjunctions of historical objects that expose the racist undertones in the history of art.
[March 18, 2012]
- Warhol's Polaroids and Warner and Johnson's Tables of Content at BAM
Two new Matrix exhibitions, Andy Warhol: Polaroids and Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive, present these artists side-by-side, in a single gallery space separated by a sheer black screen.
[February 19, 2012]
- Excerpts from Silver Meadows
The full-color prints by the California-based photographer Todd Hido at Stephen Wirtz Gallery depict decaying and deteriorating suburban developments and the mysterious people inside them.
[February 12, 2012]
- Flannel and Fur
Keith's repeated subject matter demonstrates a similar devoted, prolonged engagement, and his formal use of repetition within the brushwork and composition of each portrait symbolizes this emotional connection.
[February 5, 2012]
- Residency Projects II
Assembled under a programmatic directive, select works in Residency Projects II resonate surprisingly well with one another, suggesting sly curatorial vision or a fluke of consistency and coincidence.
[October 15, 2011]
- From Bologna: Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi
Recently, the Museo Morandi invited Wayne Thiebaud to exhibit fifteen smaller works alongside eleven by Morandi in two of its galleries. Almost all of the works in this exhibition are small, making for intimate visual encounters.
[August 21, 2011]
- Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light
Elaine Buckholtz's Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light is an exhibition of prints, kinetic and interactive sculptures, and video installation that coheres into a single meditation on the activity of seeing.
[August 14, 2011]
- Architecture of Narrative
In three of the videos, individuals are arrested in position and held captive in a Sisyphean interlude, while space, sound, and time slip past them.
[July 31, 2011]
- This, This, This, That
Chris Johanson's work makes you feel good, great even, like walking out into sunshine. This, This, This, That, Johanson's solo show of recent work at Altman Siegel Gallery, expectedly includes some real mood lifters.
[July 17, 2011]
- Marco Breuer: Line of Sight
Breuer's studio practice engages the technological apparatus of photographic image-making without participating in the act of photography itself.
[July 10, 2011]
- Zombie-Proof House
Quiet and complex reflections on fear, anxiety, and survival permeate the current group exhibition at di Rosa, in which eleven artists search for and sort through the abundant and very real environmental, political, and social issues facing contemporary communities and individuals.
[July 3, 2011]
- Train of Thought
Michael C. McMillen's paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculptures, and installations are placed throughout the Oakland Museum of California as interventions that dialogue with museum's freshly reinstalled collection of California art.
[June 30, 2011]
- Create
Create, an exhibition curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA), is an astonishing exercise in line and pattern.
[June 19, 2011]
- Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa
Ochoa and Appel employ different methods and materials to arrive at the same goal: a gentle interrogation of the supposed idealism of the western United States.
[June 5, 2011]
- Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?
Catalyzed at the onset of World War II and during the height of the Holocaust years, the frenetic artistic activity that resulted in Life? or Theater? embodies not only Salomon's race against insanity but also her sense of impending doom.
[May 29, 2011]
- Degausser
Hunter Longe's new body of work, Degausser, is a meditation on the literal and conceptual manifestations of magnetism and polarity.
[May 22, 2011]
- Performing the Personal and Political: The Art of Wafaa Yasin
Wafaa Yasin utilizes stark symbolism and corporal discomfort to assert Yasin's own belief in the interrelatedness of art and politics.
[May 1, 2011]
- Interview with Guillermo Gomez-Pena
How do you deal with the fact that we have been fully accepted by academia, and theorized about, and taught, and therefore de-fanged?
[April 24, 2011]
- Interview with Jonn Herschend
That's a goal of mine: to create a theatrical moment without the guise of theatre.
[April 17, 2011]
- Hiding in Plain Sight
These days surveillance gets a lot of play in San Francisco. But for street cred, it's hard to beat artist Hasan Elahi, who was detained at the airport and turned over to the FBI for six months of interrogation in 2002. His work is part of the current exhibition at Intersection 5M.
[April 3, 2011]
- La Llorona Unfabled: Stories to (Re)tell To Little Girls
On view at Galería de la Raza, La Llorona Unfabled utilizes this parable to re-examine Latina archetypes and posit strong, confident, if still melancholic, subjects.
[March 31, 2011]
- E is for Everyone: Celebrating Sister Corita
The exhibition presents a selection of key works from the late 1960s, perhaps Corita's most fertile studio period, together with two exemplars from the early and late '70s, respectively. Although they total less than twenty, the exuberantly color-rich, text-driven prints are arguably compelling enough to hold the space.
[March 20, 2011]
- Dad and Mom, Don't Worry About Us, We Are All Well
As expressed by the title, it is the notion of family that carries the greatest significance in the work of Song Dong, one of the leading figures in Chinese contemporary art.
[March 14, 2011]
- Wider Views of Urban San Francisco
Painter Randy Beckelheimer's current show at ArtZone 461 Gallery focuses on San Francisco's Hunters Point, a decaying naval shipyard, the former home of a nuclear laboratory, and a federal Superfund toxic cleanup site.
[February 27, 2011]
- The Marvelous Museum: A Project by Mark Dion
With his series of artistic interventions in the newly re-installed Gallery of California Art at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), Mark Dion posits that a museum is a dynamic site, the history of which is as worthy of investigation as the didactic exhibitions on view there.
[February 20, 2011]
- Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Artist Christine Wong Yap contemplates her recent move to New York and elaborates those features that make the Bay Area function as a free space for experimentation and a secure place for risk-taking.
[February 6, 2011]
- Boulevard
The twenty-five large-format photographs that make up Katy Grannan's exhibition Boulevard demonstrate her complete mastery of the medium, while the treatment of the subject matter is much more ambiguous.
[January 31, 2011]
- Art Basel Miami Beach 2010
The various art fairs during the week of Miami Art Basel kept bringing to mind De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
[January 23, 2011]
- Interview with Steven Leiber
I'm a private art dealer, but in addition to selling art, I sell art books, artists' books, and documents concerning contemporary art. I also publish editions under the imprint Right Editions.
[January 9, 2011]
- Interview with Julio Cesar Morales
I think at the core of everything you mentioned, I'm an artist, and everything I do is an extension of an artistic practice for me. So even teaching is a performance.
[January 2, 2011]
- Hard Edges for Hard Times
Hard Edges for Hard Times makes some intriguing claims, both explicitly and unintentionally, about the relationship between medium, subject, and tone and about greater trends in the art world -- even the real world.
[December 19, 2010]
- Mirror 5
While the paintings look improvisational, they are in fact very deliberate works, carefully constructed from hundreds of Fazzolari's black-and-white ink drawings.
[December 12, 2010]
- Audience as Subject, Part I: Medium
Audience as Subject, Part I: Medium, the first of a two-part exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, brings together a group of artists whose work complicates and calls out the participatory exchanges within spectatorship and the visual landscape.
[December 5, 2010]
- Dinner Discussion
Once a month for the past two years, Leif Hedendal has invited and cooked dinner for a changing group of guests in his Mission district apartment. Although "discussion" is in the title, no formal talks occur.
[November 28, 2010]
- In Defense of Food: Recent Explorations in Contemporary Art
Check out Art Practical's handy guide to nearly a century's worth of food-related art projects.
[November 21, 2010]
- Until Today: Spectres for the International Hotel
Review of Until Today: Spectres of the International Hotel, a solo exhibition by Jerome Reyes at the International Hotel
[October 24, 2010]
- The Joy of C-prints
Mariah Robertson's C-prints at NOMA Gallery are tactile, warped celebrations of the physical process of color photography rooted in the medium's tradition of experimentation.
[October 17, 2010]
