The traveling retrospective Joan Brown, which debuted at SFMOMA in December 2022, is now on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA.

Since the late 1990s, Andrew Lenaghan has made a point of capturing the hidden corners of New York City,finding those details most of us miss out on. Whether it be a dead end street of dilapidated warehouses or a busy intersection in downtown Brooklyn, there is a palpable sense of the city through his paintings.

With the opening of Joan Brown at SFMoMA, the long over-due retrospective celebrating the work of the native San Franciscan, we were reminded of Joan’s last solo outing at the museum, just over fifty years ago. During her life and after, there have been several attempts to take a broader view of her work, across the many series’, mediums and periods that defined her. We take a look back at these exhibitions and how they’ve shaped our understanding of Brown and her work.

With Spring at our front door, we’ve been getting out and about in the neighborhood, and there’s much to be seen.

Following the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan, Amer Kobaslija arranged to visit the town of Kesennuma in the Miyagi Prefecture, with the aim of chronicling the aftermath.

In the last decades of his life, Robert Arneson began using bronze both for the versatility of the medium and its usefulness in public installations.

Tony May’s documentary paintings are precisely that: a record of the installations, projects and repairs he’s completed over the years.

Elmer Bischoff was born and raised in Oakland, California and he lived his entire life in the Bay Area. Its landscape is an inescapable force in his paintings.

In celebration of Earth Day this year, we are reminded of the power of nature, as seen in the work of Arnaldo Roche Rabell from the early 1990s.

Andrew Lenaghan’s work lends itself perfectly to today’s empty New York. 

Enrique Chagoya's codices are, in fact, books, in the tradition of ancient Mesoamerican texts. He employs the same amate paper and accordion format, read right to left, while updating the pictorial language with recognizable, contemporary images.

While Jeremy Anderson found inspiration in the ancient civilizations and their artifacts, the map drawings he started in the 1960s laid out his personal mythologies.

An artwork we've been thinking of recently is Amer Kobaslija's Painter's Floor with Chair and Ladder, 2005.

Jack Beal’s relationship to Realism is rooted in his commitment to working from life.
 

As we are out of the gallery and unable to enjoy our current exhibition, another work by Luis Cruz Azaceta comes to mind.