Past
Chuck Close has revolutionized both contemporary portraiture and printmaking. He made his first print as a professional artist in 1972, and printmaking soon became an important and perhaps the most fruitful, experimental aspect of his artistic endeavor.
Ansel Adams was a giant in the field of photography and an early environmentalist. Many viewers are familiar with the heroic landscapes and popular high-contrast prints that Adams made to order beginning in the 1970s.
Alexander Calder (trained as an engineer) challenged the long-held notion that sculpture was static and monumental. His inventive, colorful, animated “mobiles” epitomize the innovative, optimistic spirit of early 20th-century modernism.
Todd Schorr: American Surreal is the first mid-career retrospective of the Los Angeles-based artist. Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoon-based movement, dubbed “Pop Surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. Schorr’s astonishing, highly polished realism, (inspired by Bosch, Brueghel and Dali), sets him apart from his best-known peers such as Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman, and Mark Ryden. The exhibition, curated by SJMA’s Senior Scholar and Curator of Collections Susan Landauer, is accompanied by a book published by Last Gasp, San Francisco.
Variations on a Theme is an expansive presentation of works by more than 30 contemporary artists (most based in California), organized in thematic groupings, which tentatively include the environment and sustainability; the urban landscape; stories of people and the body politic; labor-intensive artistic techniques; and faith and spirituality.
This exhibition presents a broad range of prints from the past 35 years by some of the foremost contemporary women printmakers at work in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Collectively, the fifty-six prints that comprise the exhibition testify to the innovative breadth and variety of printmaking approaches taken by women since the early 1970s. Women’s Work makes known a variety of stylistic formats that address overlapping issues of gender, the body, and personal fantasies of desire, as well as more recent concerns of identity, politics, and the environment.
Ceramicist Jun Kaneko was born and raised in Japan and moved to the United States to study at the Chouinard Art Institute. He studied with ceramics pioneers Paul Soldner and Jerry Rothman in California during the time now defined as the contemporary ceramics movement. Now based in Omaha, Nebraska, he works primarily with graphic, yet painterly, lines and dots to create rhythmic designs that correspond with Japanese Shinto concepts.
Perhaps the best-known leader of the Pop art movement, artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol created iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Elizabeth Taylor. Drawing from a background in commercial art, he shocked the 1960s art world by elevating the mundane—comics, advertisements, and kitchen staples such as Campbell’s tomato soup—to the sublime. Fame was his elixir of choice. He originated the phrase “15 minutes of fame,” and, in his relentless pursuit of celebrity, Warhol wound up becoming famous in his own right. This exhibition, culled from the extensive collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, provides an overview of the artist’s career through more than sixty lithographs and screen prints dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.
For the past 100 years, artists have increasingly focused on the process of making art. They have explored unconventional materials and invented new art-making techniques. This exhibition challenges visitors to pay close attention how artists have manipulated everything from generic ballpoint pens to unusual found objects like snake bones.
Stuppin’s recent paintings, some of which will be on display in this exhibition, defy those who persist in calling Stuppin a traditional plein-air artist. In these works there should be little doubt that Stuppin is an artist of his time. Like the most interesting art of any era, there are contradictions and ambiguities that speak to all of us, to the complexities of both our outer and inner worlds.
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