Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot. The arrows and directional lines suggest movement, but the forms they point to intertwine, prohibiting a straightforward reading. The shapes are as illustrative as a Rorschach inkblot; in their confounding, simple indeterminacy, they depict nothing and everything at once.
Born in Berkeley and educated at California College of the Arts, John McCracken was a pioneer of American Minimalism and is often associated with the Light and Space movement. His plank pieces—high-gloss, lacquered, monochromatic monoliths that lean against the wall—defy the boundary between painting and sculpture, object and viewer. Their bases rest in the observer’s space, and their varnished surfaces reflect the surrounding environment. Though best known for his bright colors and polished aesthetic, McCracken’s body of work is diverse, ranging from minimalist sculpture to abstract painting. The work is consistently characterized by a search for simplicity, beauty, and the sublime.
Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Ojih Odutola uses a distinctive visual style to capture members of her family, rendering them one pen stroke at a time, until their skin resembles ribbons woven into the contours of a face, neck, or hand...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...