Curators Hedi Zuckerman, Courtenay Finn, and George Adams join Rail contributor Hearne Pardee for a conversation on Joan Brown. 

We had a conversation with Matjames Metson, the artist whose work is currently on exhibition in our back gallery, exploring his artistic origins, his creative "vocabulary" and what separates his practice from today's trends.

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

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.

In October of 1964, ground was broken on what would be the Whitney Museum’s third home, on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 75th Street.

Fifty years ago, Peter Saul’s first two major history paintings went on view at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. The pair, one based on Edgar Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand and the other after Picasso’s Guernica, were the culmination of an evolving line of thinking that Saul underwent in the years prior.

During the opening for his current exhibition Borderless at the gallery, Enrique Chagoya joined curator Jennifer Farrell to talk about his work. The wide-ranging and insightful conversation that ensued touched on everything from his formative childhood experiences to his own genetic makeup and impressed us all with his skill as a storyteller.

Curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy spoke with us about her vision for the exhibition, how Funk has evolved since 1967, and what this means for ceramics moving forward.

Without a doubt, Peter Selz’s 1967 exhibition, Funk at the University of California Berkeley, Art Museum made waves. It was an ambitious, era-defining group show by the recent California transplant (by way of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), seeking to set the tone for his tenure at the museum going forward.

Ahead of Moments of Being, our first exhibition of Brodsky’s paintings, we sat down with Maya to learn more about her beginnings as a painter, why she considers family a “worthy” subject and how painting her experiences helps her remember.

Roche’s most important and frequent model was his mother, María, to whom he was very close. Their collaborations are an expression of his love for her, of her trust in him and the familial bond they share.

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.

"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 late 1950’s, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) began a series of exhibitions under the heading of ‘The Arts of San Francisco.’ Occurring roughly every four years, the Summer of 1971 marked the fourth such undertaking.

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.

Sue Coe sat down with long-time ally and collaborator Peter Kuper, artist and founder of the activist periodical World War 3. Their good friend John Carlin, who has long been a supporter of politically minded art, joined them for a wide-ranging conversation asking, what does it mean to be a political artist?

In the winter of 1951, a young, aspiring art dealer traveled to Europe. With an eye to opening a gallery in his home city of Chicago, he familiarized himself with a generation of surrealist painters and sculptors, meeting an international cohort of artists in Paris, Rome and beyond.

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.

Group exhibitions have been a summer staple of the New York art scene for decades - an opportunity for lighter fare during the hottest days of the year.

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.

In 1958, the sculptor Jeremy Anderson showed two of his students a catalogue of work by H. C. Westermann, whose sculpture Anderson was familiar through their shared dealer, Allan Frumkin. The experience was revelatory to the two young artists, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley and would impact their careers in different ways.

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

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.

With a major survey of Luis Cruz Azaceta’s paintings, sculptures and drawings finally on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, we asked the exhibition’s curator Bradley Sumrall and Luis to tell us about how it all came together and the impact of seeing the breadth of a lifetime of work. 

"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..."

The 1968 season reads as a who’s who of Northern California art, with the addition of the two recent arrivals of Nutt and Nilsson.

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.

Gregory Gillespie began at Cooper Union in 1954 - initially to study commercial art but the attraction of painting and fine arts eventually lead him to enroll as a full time student.

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.

We sat down with Amer Kobaslija on the occasion of his eighth exhibition at the gallery, In Passing, to discuss his adopted home state of Florida and how his current body of work came to fruition.

In 1975, Maryan shot a black and white film with the help of Kenny Schneider, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. Titled Ecce Homo - as he called a series of sketchbooks begun in 1971 - the film is a highly personal meditation on the “world of hatred and violence” he witnessed first hand.

Sixty years ago this month, Peter Saul’s debut exhibition of ten recent paintings (and some drawings) opened at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago, IL.

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.’

Our exhibition Shapeshifters includes ceramic sculptures by Cathy Lu, that explore themes of immigration, assimilation and cultural hybridity. We sat down with Cathy to discuss how she came to ceramic sculpture, and how she incorporates her personal heritage into her work.

Terri Friedman makes intricate and tactile weavings, some of which will be included in our exhibition Shapeshifters, opening October 28th. We chatted with her ahead of the show, to learn about her background in sculpture, how she came to work with textiles, and her love of neon colors.

We are pleased to be showing paintings and drawings by San Francisco-based artist Craig Calderwood, as part of our exhibition "Shapeshifters" opening October 28th. In advance of the exhibition, Craig spoke to us about their use of textiles and other materials, influences from video game illustrations to PBS docu-series, and how "genderless-ness" manifests in their work.

Our upcoming group exhibition “Shapeshifters“ will include paintings by the California-based artist, Cate White, who we've so enjoyed getting to know. By way of introduction, Cate sat down with us to talk about how she found her way to painting, her YouTube show, “How Do You Paint,” and the “mystical visions” that inspire her work.

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.

Since the start of his career, Lenaghan has chosen to do most of his painting from life - and as his subject has long been the city of New York, his studio is the sidewalk.

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.

When making the decision to move the gallery in 2005, it was both a simple and difficult choice. For decades its home had been on 57th Street, moving between three locations around the intersection of 57th and Fifth avenue since opening in New York in 1959.

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

A sudden and significant increase in studio space in the mid-1980s meant that Azaceta was not only able to paint on a much larger scale than before, but also allowed him to explore the themes of his paintings and drawings in three dimensions.

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.

Arneson began experimenting with himself as a subject in the early 1970s – by 1975 the artist in various guises and expressions had become a defining aspect of his career.

A year after her first exhibition at the gallery, with a pandemic in between, we spoke with Katherine Sherwood about her ongoing series of “Brain Flowers,” working in lockdown and what to expect from her in the coming year.

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.

Sims, the recently appointed curator of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art paid a visit to Westermann’s Connecticut studio in December of 1976 to look at new work.

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.

Joan Brown’s handwritten checklist of drawings sent to Frumkin/Adams Gallery in March of 1990 for an exhibition in the fall of that year.

With summer turning into fall, the “back to school” season is on us though under radically different circumstances than ever before. Last spring, those of our artists who are also full-time professors had to make the abrupt and difficult transition to online teaching.

We asked photographer Kija Lucas to share some insights on her collaborative process and specifically the work from her series, Collections from Sundown which are part of our current exhibition Documents.

In December of 1981, the gallery mounted its sixth exhibition of Wiley's work, including new paintings, drawings and sculpture completed since his first retrospective at the Walker Art Center a year prior.

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.

An enduring focus of the gallery has long been self-portraits and indeed many of the artists who have shown here over the years, both regularly and occasionally, have experimented with the format if not made it a staple of their practice.

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

For Documents, we invited Kevin Frances to create an installation in the side gallery, of the (totally impressive and detailed) scale models he uses as a basis for his photographs and prints.

Grooms' wide-ranging activities coalesced in the late 60s with the formation of his production company, Ruckus Construction Co with his then-wife, Mimi Gross. One of the company's first major undertakings was an immersive, 25 foot square sculptural installation of the city of Chicago.

Tony recently took a break from construction on his latest endeavor to speak with us from his painting studio.

For his installations at the gallery, Jose Bedia would either work directly on the wall or large rolls of canvas, as he is here, and often with little to no preparatory 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.

In the summer of 1949, Elmer Bischoff, David Park and Hassel Smith presented their recent paintings in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

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.

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

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.

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 the fall of 2005, after 45 years on 57th Street, the gallery moved to West 26th in Chelsea. One of the first exhibitions at the new location was of new paintings by Roy De Forest.

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

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.

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.

While isolating at home with his family, Amer Kobaslija has discovered inspiration in the experience, painting away in a self-described "fever state" expanding on his recent series of figures set in the Florida landscape and revisiting an old subject: his own studio.

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

In 1975, Peter Saul relocated from California to Chappaqua, New York. This photo was taken during a studio visit soon after his move, while Peter was working on his version of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Square Cylinder reached out to artists and writers, to talk about life during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. As part of the series, Enrique Chagoya shares his thoughts while sheltering-in-place at home with his wife, artist Kara Maria. 

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.

We recently checked in with Diane Edison who is adjusting to working from home in Athens, GA.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes the best way to look at art is with the artist’s words in mind. For decades Gillespie kept a regular journal, filling it with his thoughts about life, painting and being an artist.

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.

Galleries are communities: this photo from our archives encapsulates that better than most.

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.

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

We checked in with Chris Ballantyne, who is away from his studio but hard at work nonetheless.

Our first Online Studio Visit brings us to San Jose, California where Tony May shows us how to REALLY work from home.

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