San Francisco - Alison Bing [20]
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top picks
MUST-SEE GALLERIES
49 Geary
77 Geary
Catharine Clark Gallery
Gallery Paule Anglim
Luggage Store Gallery
Creativity Explored
Ratio 3
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Social Commentary
The social realist movement of the 1930s had a major impact on San Francisco, and original work by muralist Diego Rivera graces several interiors in the city, including the San Francisco Art Institute’s Diego Rivera Gallery. The Depression-era Work Projects Administration (WPA) sponsored other painters who worked in the mural tradition, and you’ll find fine examples at Coit Tower and Rincon Center. Their bold figures and leftist leanings are reprised in works by Mission muralistas from the 1970s to today; Precita Eyes offers tours of some of the most historic, or you can wander along Clarion Alley and Balmy Alley on your own time. Another artist you may begin to recognize from his many San Francisco public works is Beniamino Bufano, whose smooth, rounded granite and steel structures include a tribute to Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen in Chinatown’s St Mary’s Square and patron saint of the everyman St Francis of Assisi.
To offset all this serious, high-minded revolutionary art, San Francisco artists have brought the art scene crashing back down to earth with gutsy, irreverent satire. In the ’70s Tom Marioni scandalized gallery audiences who were expecting highbrow entertainment with performances where he would urinate from a ladder and drink beer (not necessarily in that order). Tony Labatt’s disco balls dangling from his nether regions pretty much summed up the ’70s era of Travolta testosterone, and Mads Lynnerup’s vigilant camo-clad surveillance of San Francisco from the sunroof of a cardboard-armored SUV seems a fitting response to today’s ‘orange alerts.’ Provocative performances by these and other artists can be witnessed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and New Langton Arts. Political satire is not a passing fad here, and San Francisco provocateur Enrique Chagoya serves comic relief piping hot for those economic crisis hunger pangs with his cans of ‘Mergers, Acquisitions and Lentils’ soup at Electric Works.
Abstract Thinking
Art schools in San Francisco attracted major abstract expressionist talents during the vibrant postwar period, when Clyfford Still, David Park and Elmer Bischoff taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Still and Park splintered off from antiseptic mainstream abstraction to become leading proponents of the somewhat misleadingly named Bay Area Figurative Art, an elemental style often associated with San Francisco painter Richard Diebenkorn’s fractured, color-blocked landscapes and the luminous, slippery figures of Oakland painter Nathan Oliveira.
San Francisco’s Wayne Thiebaud tilted Sunset street grids into giddy Bay Area abstract cityscapes, but the abstract artist who made the biggest impact on the San Francisco landscape in terms of sheer scale is Richard Serra, as you can see in the rooftop sculpture garden at SFMOMA Click here. With their massive scale, Serra’s spare metal shapes begin to take on other dimensions: a prow of a ship, say, or a Soviet factory second. To see what Bay Area abstractions have morphed into lately, check out 49 Geary, 77 Geary, Ratio 3 Click here and Hosfelt Gallery.
High Concept, High Craft
San Francisco’s peculiar dedication to craft and personal vision can get obsessive. Consider The Rose, the legendary painting Beat artist Jay DeFeo began in the 1950s and worked on for eight years, layering it with 2000lb of paint until a hole had to be cut in the wall of her apartment to forklift it out. Ruth Asawa also began weaving her suspended wire cocoon sculptures back in the 1950s, finding sublime proportions and mind-altering light refractions in base metal. Lines