We are pleased to share our video series reflecting on Robert Arneson's life and legacy.

"Arnaldo Roche first came to my attention in 1988 when I received the announcement for his first show with the Struve Gallery in Chicago. The images, especially the self portraits, were haunting and unlike anything I had seen before. Not long after I was in Chicago and saw the work in person, first at Struve’s and then on a visit to the artist’s studio where I met Arnaldo for the first time..."

In the summer of 1967, H. C. Westermann began work on a studio for his wife, the painter Joanna Beall Westermann. The couple had recently moved to rural Connecticut, where they were staying in a cottage on Joanna’s family property. Space was tight for two working artists, so building the studio was a priority.

For Amer Kobaslija, location is everything. A self described “stranger,” Amer has lived and worked around the world, from his native Bosnia, throughout Europe, the United States and Japan.

If you spend time with Doug, he'll start taking pictures of you. It just happens.
It was just a thing he did because it was interesting to him and then it became a practice of his, especially after the Sandal Shop series, to just always have a camera. And if you look at all of the boxes and boxes of photos that has all over his house, he documents every single thing.

"In 1991, while on a trip to the List Gallery at MIT to oversee the installation of an Arneson exhibition, I wandered into an adjacent gallery. On view was an astonishing body of work mostly made from tree branches, twine, dirt and paper. The work, fragile, so full of humanity and astonishingly original, captivated me. I asked the List’s curator Katy Kline the identity of the artist: Juan Francisco Elso..."

On the occasion of his two-person exhibition at the gallery, Elmer Bischoff/Tom Burckhardt: A Dialogue, Tom sat down with fellow painter Alexi Worth to discuss the humor in Bischoff’s abstractions, "feeling figurative," and his Ikea Furniture Theory of Art.

Since its “discovery” in 1965, the Slant Step has been the subject of four exhibitions and has become the catalyst for the assembly of works in all media.

In 1962, while George Herms was living in what he referred to as “groove grove cabin isolated in 100 acres Malibu Hills,” the catalyst for a new body of work was the untimely death of his Packard automobile, which he ascribed to “so many dirt road hills.” The Packard, and its contents, then became the source material for a series of assemblages, among them this work, ‘Flag.’

In conjunction with our current exhibition of works on paper by H. C. Westermann: Le Bandeur, we spoke to a range of people who knew Westermann in life or through his work, about who he was as a person, an artist and why his work continues to resonate, thirty years after his death at the age of 59.

The gallery’s legacy going back to 1952 is inextricably linked to  H. C. Westermann. There is no way to overstate his impact on the gallery both in terms of his art and his personality; both are equivalent.

Preparing for our move has given us reason to look back through our archives at the gallery’s many decades in New York.

Though Jeremy Anderson is often placed in a lineage of avant-garde thought which can be traced back to the Cubism and Surrealism of a half-century prior, his own concept of sculpture as an art form went well beyond any physical limitations.

We are pleased to share our video series reflecting on the impact Joan Brown had as a person and an artist, both during her lifetime and after her death.

October 26, 2020, is the 30th anniversary of Joan Brown's death at age 52 in Prasanthinilayam, India, 1990. George Adams recounts organizing her memorial exhibition, which opened at the gallery in September of the following year.

Though it is easy to remember Jack Beal solely for the role he played in re-affirming the figure as a subject of contemporary painting, a more complex side of his legacy is what lead him to the idealized, modeled affect of his best-known works.

"A side of the gallery that is perhaps not well known but no less central to the gallery’s history and reputation is drawings."

Most of the gallery’s relationships with our artists stretch back decades and, while their work is always paramount in our minds, it is often the personal experiences which stand out most. Here, George Adams recalls such moments with Joan Brown.

We are pleased to present our first online viewing room, as part of the ADAA Member Viewing Rooms in collaboration with Artlogic.

When Andy told us he had just completed another sketchbook, we asked him to give us a virtual "tour". This book was started last summer and takes us through vacations, the school year, changing seasons and, in the final pages, the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1991, George Adams accompanied Robert Arneson and his wife, Sandra Shannonhouse on a visit to the Pollock-Krasner House, former home and studio of painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.

As SFAI passed its first centennial in 1971, the experimentation and innovation of years prior was increasingly a defining characteristic of the school.

In 1961, CSFA changed its name to the San Francisco Art Institute. Under this new identity, the school continued to evolve, expanding programming to include the multi-media and conceptual disciplines that were beginning to take form in the arts.

In the early 1980s, Luis Cruz Azaceta was living and working out of a small studio in Ridgewood, Queens. George Adams recalls his first time visiting Luis’ studio and the impression he made.

As we continue to celebrate the history of the San Francisco Art Institute and its alumni, one of the school’s most enduring (and important) legacies has been the fostering of communities that extend beyond the classroom.

With the San Francisco Art Institute’s recent announcement that it may be forced to close, we wanted to take the opportunity over the next few weeks to highlight just how critical the Institute has been in shaping art in the Bay Area and beyond.

Here is the full video of our Online Studio Visit with Luis Cruz Azaceta! Azaceta gives us a tour of his “bunker” as he discusses the beginnings of his career in New York, his history with the gallery and his current exhibition.