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. Associated with the Beat movement, her work is integral to that part of the history of San Francisco. White Angel (1962), painted in the year of Marilyn Monroe’s death, portrays the actress in a process of devolution. Pictured upright in Vogue at the top-right of the frame, she sinks in stages to its lower left, increasingly engulfed by encroaching layers of paint and paper. Beneath fiery, scribbled, gestural marks and surrounded by foreboding, masked figures, her famous, partially obscured smile looks like a grimace.
Fran Herndon was born in Oklahoma in 1929, then moved to San Francisco in 1957, where she came into contact with Jack Spicer, who encouraged her painting practice by motivating her to study at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). They collaborated on a few important poetry works including Homage to Creeley Heads of the Town Up to the Aether and J magazine. In each instance, Herndon’s graceful, looping, lithographs are not mere illustrations of Spicer’s text, but enter into a mutually enriching dialogue with it.
I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico...
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...
UNHEARD: Hearing Singapore women composers loud and clear | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints Jamie Chan March 3, 2022 By Nicole Toh (825 words, 3-minute read) “When do women get to be heard for who we are?” That was the question raised by Rachel Lim, a Singaporean soprano and UNHEARD ’s founder at the start of the concert...
Fauna is a figurative sculpture by Auriea Harvey that is characteristic of the artist’s practice—both serious and somewhat whimsical...
The title of the painting refers to the fact that the figure’s behind is raised upwards and the face is found at the bottom of the painting, thus inverting the way in which people are normally seen...
Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive...
In this painting made in 2014, which is part of a series started in 2013, the artist dismantles the traditional painting process...