Wallace Berman was one of San Francisco’s more important avant-garde artists and is considered by many to have been the father of the Californian assemblage movement (a title he could probably dispute with Edward Kienholz). Characteristically unruly, Berman was an active member of the San Francisco and Los Angeles Beat communities in the mid-1950s. In 1963 he settled in Topanga Canyon and started to develop the body of work for which he would become most famous. The verifax machine, a precursor of the photocopy machine, lent the name to the series of collages with which Berman experimented until his death in 1976. The structural compositional element that unifies the series is the image, appropriated from a magazine, of a hand holding a transistor radio. By photocopying and reproducing the image in sequential form on top of the canvas, Berman mimics the pattern produced by an old film reel. Inside the frame of each radio, the artist superimposed imagery—people, objects and symbols, often taken from pop culture—pertinent to that particular sequence of the work.
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
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...
The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...