Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner. Its tiled effect can perhaps be seen as a vertical Carl Andre work and also bears some resemblance to another work in the Kadist Collection, Jedediah Caesar’s JCA-25-SC. McGee’s installation also echoes the votive altars in the chapels he visited during his residency in Brazil in 1993.
The video “Shangri-La” refers to the mythical city of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” written in 1933 and is exemplified in a film by Frank Capra which speaks of eternal youth in a city of happiness. In 1997, a small town in an agricultural region of central China near the Tibetan border was proclaimed as the place that inspired Shangri-la. Thereafter, a dozen other cities in the same area have claimed to be paradise on earth, prompting a marketing battle without mercy, raging on until the government’s intervention.
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook. Donnelly’s interest in the waveform–visually, aurally, and perceptually–is made manifest in works across multiple media, including photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance.
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. For Untitled (Men) (2011), he snipped from magazines and textbooks pictures of handsome or famous men, from the ancient Greek to the modern. Arranged in a tableau, lit theatrically, and rephotographed, the two-dimensional figures have an embodied presence.
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity. Matt Lipps created this diptych by photographing a single arrangement of cutouts. As in his analogous portrait of men, the middle section appears twice, on either side of the split, signaling a stutter, a caesura, or a schizophrenic break.
The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California. Reenacted here is Vallejo’s acquiescence to Americans who were attempting to overthrow Mexican governance of the region. When a small militia arrived at Vallejo’s house to arrest him, he invited them in and shared a meal.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.
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. 27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978 (1978) is representative of a series of photographs by Conner, whose subject became a fascination for the artist.
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.
let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.
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. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.
The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime. Both dimly lit scenes are dominated by an eerie feeling. Taken by a road, these painterly photographs suggest the uncanny character of the transient.
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.
San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves. Elements used in various stages of photographic processes (color filters, glassine, and prints themselves) are integrated back into the artwork either as part of the sculpture or as collage elements that are later added to the print. In some of the works, Maisel cuts into the prints themselves.
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 video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage.
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining.
Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.
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. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock. At first glance, due to the oversimplified silhouettes Ezawa employs, the connection between his animation and Namuth’s film may not be obvious. However, when seen side by side, Ezawa’s piece is a faithful reproduction of the scene—up until a point in which his sequence begins playing in reverse, effectively unpainting every brushstroke.
Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.
In his practice, Pio Abad looks into the social and political significance of objects usually consigned to the sidelines of history...
Since the early 1980s, Cuban-born Tony Labat has been an important participant in the California performance and video scene...
California-born and internationally recognized, Nao Bustamante cut her teeth as an artist between 1984 and 2001 in San Francisco where she studied in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute...
Robert Zhao Renhui’s multimedia practice questions fact-based presentations of ecological conservation and reveals the manner in which documentary, journalistic, and scientific reports sensationalize nature in order to elicit viewer sympathy...
Originally from Chicago, Richard Gordon was a self-taught photographer best known for his intelligent and masterfully printed black-and-white photographs...
Futurefarmers is an international, trans-disciplinary network...
The artistic entity “leonardogillesfleur” is the alliance between two artists, Leonardo Giacomuzzo (b...
Collaborative approach fuels rise of San Francisco’s Friends Indeed gallery Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Art market news Collaborative approach fuels rise of San Francisco’s Friends Indeed gallery Founder Micki Meng shows that working with like-minded gallerists can be an art trade superpower Julie Baumgardner 12 February 2024 Share For Meng, collaboration means sharing artists with other galleries, as well as sharing information on collectors and dealers with trusted colleagues Photo: Mike Egan Although some dealers seem to have adopted collaboration as merely their latest business strategy, it is an inherent practice for Micki Meng, the founder of what she calls her “gallery-cum-institution” Friends Indeed...
As part of the 8-bridges and KADIST joint initiative, KADIST will dedicate a portion of its annual budget to acquire a work by an artist not yet represented in their collection from one of the galleries exhibiting on 8-bridges...
Andrew Berardini on FOG Design Art – Artforum Read Next: EXPO CHICAGO ANNOUNCES PARTICIPANTS FOR 2024 EDITION Subscribe Search Icon Search Icon Search for: Search Icon Search for: Follow Us facebook twitter instagram youtube Alerts & Newsletters Email address to subscribe to newsletter...
The First Known Photograph of the San Francisco Opera | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer upper waypoint Arts & Culture Newly Unearthed: The First Known Photograph of the San Francisco Opera Sarah Hotchkiss Feb 8 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Email A detail from an October 1923 photograph of the San Francisco Opera company in the Civic Auditorium shows performers and family in pre-performance street clothes...
The Best Late-Night Crab and Garlic Noodles in San Bruno | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer upper waypoint The Midnight Diners Some of the Bay Area’s Best Garlic Butter Crab Is Served in San Bruno After Midnight Luke Tsai Thien Pham Feb 8 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Email The Dungeness crab and garlic noodles at San Bruno’s A-One Kitchen hold their own against any restaurant in the Bay — and they’re available until 1 a.m...
Game on: Museums in Kansas City and San Francisco face off in Super Bowl duel Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Sport news Game on: Museums in Kansas City and San Francisco face off in Super Bowl duel While California law prevents SFMoMA from wagering the loan of a work on the outcome of the NFL’s championship game, officials there and at the Nelson-Atkins Museum have found a creative solution Benjamin Sutton 7 February 2024 Share Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash The 2024 Super Bowl matchup between the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers is sure to be one of the most watched sports matches of the year—due in no small part to the sudden interest of legions of Taylor Swift fans —and members of the art world will be watching closely, too, to see who will emerge victorious in the latest iteration of an industry tradition known as Museum Bowl...
LA artist Patrick Martinez captures the passage of time | Wallpaper (Image credit: Yubo Dong / ofstudio...
Fairs, Films and a Touch of Goth: Alternative Ideas for Bay Area Holiday Events | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer The Do List Fairs, Films and a Touch of Goth: Alternative Ideas for Bay Area Holiday Events Nisa Khan Dec 14 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link San Francisco's Union Square, lit up during holiday season (Ei Katsumata/Getty) The last weeks of December 2023 are almost upon us...
Forget Tamales: Venezuelan Hallacas Are the Best Christmas Dish | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer ¡Hella Hungry! Sorry, Tamales: Venezuelans Say Hallacas Are the Ultimate Christmas Dish Alan Chazaro Dec 15 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link Victor Aguilera demonstrates his technique for tying up Venezuelan hallacas at a KQED live event on Dec...
A New Flea Market Brings Holiday Spirit to Downtown San Francisco | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer Frisco Foodies The Downtown San Francisco I Loved Was a Holiday Wonderland Rocky Rivera Dec 14 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link A young Rocky Rivera (right) poses with her beloved wheat color Timberland boot...
James Patterson Awards Bonuses to Bay Area Bookstore Employees | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer Arts & Culture James Patterson Awards $500 Bonuses to Bay Area Bookstore Employees The Associated Press Dec 14 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link Inside Green Apple on Clement Street; the bookstore has two additional locations, Green Apple Books on the Park and Browser Books...
Ed Ruscha's Poetry of the American Experience | Art & Object Skip to main content Subscribe to our free e-letter! Webform Your Email Address Role Art Collector/Enthusiast Artist Art World Professional Academic Country USA Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua & Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Ascension Island Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia & Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory British Virgin Islands Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Canary Islands Cape Verde Caribbean Netherlands Cayman Islands Central African Republic Ceuta & Melilla Chad Chile China Christmas Island Clipperton Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia Comoros Congo - Brazzaville Congo - Kinshasa Cook Islands Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curaçao Cyprus Czechia Côte d’Ivoire Denmark Diego Garcia Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Heard & McDonald Islands Honduras Hong Kong SAR China Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao SAR China Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar (Burma) Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands North Korea North Macedonia Norway Oman Outlying Oceania Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Islands Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Réunion Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Sint Maarten Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka St...
These Photos Capture the “Gay Paradises” of 1980s America | AnOther As his new book is released, Nicholas Blair talks about capturing the heat and hedonism of the queer communities in 1980s San Francisco and New York November 29, 2023 Text Madeleine Pollard In the late 70s, gay life began to spill out onto the streets of San Francisco’s Castro District, rapidly eclipsing the hippies as the most visible counter-culture movement of the day...
Beauty and Danger in the Art of Ambreen Butt Skip to content Ambreen Butt, "Arsenal of Ambiguity" (2023), tea, coffee, watercolor, and collage on tea-stained paper, 44 x 30 inches (all images courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris) SAN FRANCISCO — Ambreen Butt: Lay Bare My Arms at Gallery Wendi Norris combines collage and text with traditional South Asian miniature painting to create energetic works that radiate delicate beauty, underpinned by a pervasive threat of violence...
SF Composer Andy Guthrie Finds Poetry in the Everyday | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer The Do List With a Field Recorder and French Horn, Andy Guthrie Finds Poetry in Everyday Surroundings Daniel Bromfield Dec 11 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link Andy Guthrie performs in Paris in March 2023...
Exploring The Other California: A Photographic Journey by Peter Turnley - Artcentron Home » Exploring The Other California: A Photographic Journey by Peter Turnley ART Dec 9, 2023 Ξ Leave a comment Exploring The Other California: A Photographic Journey by Peter Turnley posted by ARTCENTRON Portrait of a Farmer in The Other California, 1975 by Photography by Peter Turnley The Other California , 1975, a photography book by Peter Turnley, celebrates migrant workers, hobos, and everyday heroes, and challenges the prevalent stereotypes of the state...
Cityscapes, Landscapes, and Figure Paintings by Mitchell Johnson on View in Menlo Park Skip to content Mitchell Johnson, “Brooklyn Bridge (Martha)” (2023), oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches Flea Street restaurant in Menlo Park, California, presents an exhibition of paintings by Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson ...
Greta Gerwig Wants to Make Two More Movies About Sacramento | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer Arts & Culture Greta Gerwig Wants to Make Two More Movies About Sacramento Olivia Cruz Mayeda Dec 5 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link Director and actress Greta Gerwig poses on the red carpet at the 2023 SFFILM Festival Awards at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Monday, Dec...
The Best Art I Saw in 2023 | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer Arts & Culture The Best Art I Saw in 2023 Sarah Hotchkiss Dec 5 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Facebook Share-FB Twitter Share-Twitter Email Share-Email Copy Link Copy Link It’s that time again — time for a hyper-specific superlative-laden list of the best art experiences I had this year but didn’t get a chance to write about...
The San Francisco residence of Chara Schreyer, one of the world’s leading collectors of contemporary and modern art, has hit the market for $4.9 million....
Pier 24 Pilara Foundation Changing Philanthropic Focus - Pier 24 Pilara Foundation Changing Philanthropic Focus January 28, 2023 Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP#455 (San Francisco) , 2010...
Lori Dunlap and Charlie Biendenharn say you can boost the local art scene and the ambience of your home with local art (even if you don't want to spend a ton of money)....
As the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture debuts, its founder hopes to inspire a renaissance in a region of California lacking public arts funding....
Pier 24 Looking Forward reviewed by SF Examiner - Pier 24 Looking Forward reviewed by SF Examiner August 23, 2022 Daniel Postaer, San Francisco, University Club , 2018...
Pier 24 Pier 24 Photography listed as top SF destination in San Francisco Chronicle - Pier 24 Pier 24 Photography listed as top SF destination in San Francisco Chronicle August 15, 2022 John Chiara, Bay Panel , 2020 (installation view from Looking Forward: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography , August 8, 2022–May 31, 2023)...
SO, where to begin? At the beginning, of course...
Pier 24 Upcoming Lecture with Jonathan Calm - Pier 24 Upcoming Lecture with Jonathan Calm October 1, 2019 Jonathan Calm, Green Book (Jackson II), 2016 Pier 24 Photography announces an upcoming lecture by artist Jonathan Calm, the 2019 recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award...
Contemporary Muslim Fashions de Young Museum, San Francisco Opens September 22 On September 13, New York state will hold its primaries for the midterm elections, and on the Democratic ballot for governor is Cynthia Nixon: longtime activist, early supporter of mayor Bill de Blasio, and actor...
In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...
Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works...
Drawing & Print
Untitled (Disneyland Opens) is a collage by Jess that refers back to the inauguration of Disneyland in Anaheim, California in 1955, and suggests an alternate, more sinister version of events...
Working independently, Herndon experimented at the forefront of a now-canonical method—appropriation—by painting additions into found images from magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated in a way that imbues the resulting works with mythical significance...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
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...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
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...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Drawing & Print
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Drawing & Print
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
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...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA...
The archive proposes to examine the difference between helping others in the context of an artistic project and in the context of social work in order to question authorship...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Drawing & Print
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
Drawing & Print
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Leonardogillesfleur describes Myself as a Fountain : “The couple kissing in the park...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
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...
Drawing & Print
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...
Drawing & Print
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
Drawing & Print
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work...
Drawing & Print
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work...
Drawing & Print
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
Drawing & Print
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977)...
Drawing & Print
Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
Francisco Herrero Peñuela uses old forms to make his elaborate, richly textured surfaces...
Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr...
Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, the photographic grid features a selection of some 6,000 members from single family of flies –hoverfly– identified over the last 25 years by Sacramento-based Dr...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives...
Comprising two sculptures, one photograph and one video, the installation Malakas & Maganda (1986 – 2016) questions the mythological iconography of the Filipino conjugal dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and thus addresses the construction of propaganda representation and the role of art facing current events...
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
Advanced Technology
The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes...