SFAA Newsletter April 2021
We are an independent non-profit organization run by San Francisco Art Institute alumni. We build upon SFAI's 150-year alumni legacy with a commitment to SFAI's core values of critical thinking, exploration, and expression.
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Lonnie Graham. Photo by Erin Hall
Dear Alumni,
We at SFAA are aware that many of you have questions about what is happening at SFAI and the changes with the new Board Chair, Lonnie Graham, Vice Chair, John Marx, and the new Treasurer, Stephen Mangum. All three have joined the board in the past six months. These past two months the Board of Trustees have been engaged in a Listening Tour in an attempt to hear the concerns of the faculty, staff, students and community of the Art Institute.
SFAA would like to hold several Town Halls a year with the Board of Trustees to promote transparency about what direction the school is heading. We hope that they will honestly share their goals and tell alumni their successes and failures and how they plan to meet their goals.
Our first meeting with Board Chair, Lonnie Graham will be held in the next two weeks via zoom that will be posted on our website. We hope the SFAI alumni and overall community will send in their questions. If you have specific questions, you are welcome to submit them and we will do our best to get them answered. Send them via email to SFAA2News@gmail.com.
The Editors, SFAA Newsletter
Read more:
Statement Against Intolerance. From Lonnie Graham, SFAI Board Chair.
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Steve Hurd’s housewife magazine design apocalypse, then (1995) and now (2021)
“Steve Hurd is one of the most interesting painters to come from Los Angeles in the last 30 years, and criminally under appreciated - not that that’s such a rarity among artists coming from Los Angeles, or painters in general. Recently he began posting familiar - looking images on social media: giant, drip-laden, painterly renditions of circa late 80’s Woman’s Day type magazine covers - which at the time were in the midst of a graphic design orgy of seizure-level overstimulation.” Doug Harvey
“For me in the world of objects, a painting operates as a sign, a flat thing that informs the viewer, it’s not merely a representation of something else but a thing unto itself, it is what it is, literally. So, what a painting can do best is operate as a sign of something that can only be said in the form of what is, a painting.” Steve Hurd
View Video:
Steve burning his scupture on the roof over the cafe at SFAI, 1978.
"As a painting major at the SFAI he made sculptures and burned them." Doug Harvey
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PHOTOALLIANCE 2021 INTERNATIONAL LECTURE SERIES
Image: The Situation Room (Four figures with blue hair)
Collage with archival inkjet print and gouache painted paper, 2014 © Ruth Van Beek
PhotoAlliance is delighted to welcome back photographer Ruth Van Beek, who gave a lecture with PhotoAlliance in December 2016, for an online lecture and presentation of her unique practice and current work via Zoom from her studio in the Netherlands.
Ruth Van Beek is widely admired for her inventive and enchanting photographic collages, in which oddly endearing abstract forms take on a life-like presence. Her works on paper combine fragments of painted color washes and cut-outs with images from the artist’s collection of printed archival materials that teeter between the toylike and monstrous, enlivened with a joyful use of color and careful attention to how conventions of photographic rendering can blend fantasy and reality.
The PhotoAlliance 2021 International Lecture Series is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Francisco Artists Alumni.
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The installation Society of 23’s Trophy Game Room is on view at Mattress Factory through November 14, 2021 as part of Factory Installed 2021 featuring all-new installations by five resident artists: Meir Tati, Luftwerk, Andréa Stanislav, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, and Jeffrey Augustine Songco.
For over a decade, Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s project, Society of 23 has been a vehicle for him to explore America’s preoccupation with competition, sexuality, racism, identity and representation. His latest iteration Trophy Game Room at Mattress Factory.
Society of 23’s Trophy Game Room, brings together beauty pageants and the problematic notions of MAGA within a game room. It’s an invitation for us to examine rituals of competition through sport, beauty and politics. We see members of the brotherhood wearing sashes and crowns in photos accompanied by memorabilia. Songco plays the multiple characters in the performative photographs, which complicates the notion of audience, performance and identity. A photographic banner of brothers, adorned in team MAGA baseball jerseys, rally behind a player holding up a trophy in the moments following a win. Trophies and medals decorate the gold and black metallic foil fringe curtains. A foosball and bocce ball set up invites us to a realm of competitiveness that we know all too well.
Songco’s installation is an example of an exhibition planned and mounted on the momentum of an entirely remote artist residency. It’s likely that much of the artworld will experience this project remotely, as travel both domestic and international is currently tenuous, at best.
As a gay, Filipino-American, Songco’s work has been culminating in social acuity, and we see it boil over in Trophy Game Room. Still, the installation reminds us how even the best-planned and conceived artworks can slip as the political and social contexts shift. While an overt recognition of the American Presidential elections is embraced and explored by the exhibition, no one could have anticipated the spate of anti-Asian American hate crimes that have occurred. Arguably instigated by phrasing the SARS-COV-2 pandemic as the “’China Virus” by Trump, and the rise of crimes against Asian Americans–often the elderly–has skyrocketed 1,900% in New York City alone, according to the NYPD. Songco’s exhibition is timely but also enduring through its examination of larger social mores. Jeffery Songco is an American artist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His exhibition Society of 23’s Trophy Game Room is on exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh through November 14, 2021.
Read more:
Fictional frat life plays out in Mattress Factory’s “Society of 23's Trophy Game Room”
Related events:
Virtual Factory 500 Happy Hour with Jeffrey Augustine Songco
Thursday, October 22, 2:00 PM PST
*Text dedicated by Donald Hải Phú Daedalus (MFA 2010)
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Portrait of Marina Abramovic (2019), film still from Body of Truth © Indi Film
As part of WeTransfer’s WePresent series, Marina Abramović has shone a light on a selection of performance artists she feels are evolving the art form. As the project’s inaugural guest curator, Abramović has chosen Ana Prvački, Maurício Ianês, Regina José Galindo, Terence Koh, Yiannis Pappas from around the world.
In May, WeTransfer will premiere a “digital manifestation” of The Abramović Method – the school of performance art designed to help artists become more in touch with the here and now. Following that, A Time Capsule in September will allow viewers a glimpse into Abramovic's artistic method, as she curates “an everlasting body of references, ideas and objects to inspire all that will succeed her.”
Read more:
Marina is offering Cleaning the House Workshops 2021 on May/June in Greece
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EXHIBITIONS/EVENTS
SFAI 150 | A Spirit of Disruption
On View March 19 - July 3, 2021
*Please SCROLL RIGHT on SFAI 150 | A Spirit of Disruption page to view the exhibition
SFAI 150 | A Spirit of Disruption celebrates the ethos and expansive ecosystem of the San Francisco Art Institute. As the title suggests, the exhibition disrupts the bias to preserve and celebrate an art world that has been predominantly white and male. With a breadth of perspectives, the exhibition illuminates the distinct and diverse voices of SFAI which includes alumni, faculty, staff, and the community who have made an enormous contribution to its legendary history. This 150th anniversary marks a beginning for yet another era at SFAI, one that aspires to deepen and grow a more inclusive support for the kind of work that continues to disrupt.
Meet Margaret and Leila, the co-hosts of this podcast series and the co-curators of A Spirit of Disruption.
This first episode is an introduction to acknowledge the scope of SFAI's legacy and the indescribable amount of histories, people, and works of art surrounding it.
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Image: The River Project -
Communal Passages, 2021
photos by featured artists.
SF Artists Alumni (SFAA) has launched an online project, an original idea by our Portugal liaison Francisco Pinheiro, about rivers and waterways seen as the “veins” of our plane.
We encouraged our community to share photos and videos of the rivers and waterways where our alums are living and delve deeper into thinking about the idea of environmental sustainability. Waterways are still regarded as symbols of life and connectivity. Waterways are also a metaphor for the way we connect through social networks, using an iconic symbol of connectivity, when in fact rivers are fragmented, controlled and regulated by dams,
reservoirs and many other sorts of engineering.
This project seeks photos & commentary to feature on our SF Artists Alumni Instagram that respond to this topic. The project was curated by Southern California liaison Toban Nichols.
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Untitled (Day #6), 2020 - 2021
Kai Chen
Leo Gallery is proud to present Supernova, the debut Hong Kong solo exhibition of emerging Chinese artist, Kai Chen. Featuring a new series of abstract paintings.
To Chen, the expression of abstract art is inseparable from Romanticism. In “Day/Night” and “Untitled (Supernova I, II)” series, Chen uses classic liner brushes, stippling techniques and colour dots to condense a state of infinite and energy:
“For me, the power of stippling and brushstrokes lies in its tension. The similar brushstrokes vary greatly due to the strength of my hands, the shape, size, and texture of the dots. The countless bright colour dots are the same, but yet they are different, as they condense into a strong visual tension onto the dark canvas.” - Kai Chen
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LIAISON EVENTS
SFAA Global Alumni Meetup
Saturday, May 1, 2021, 10:00 AM PST
We're hosting a global meetup on May 1 (International Workers' Day), and the theme is Labor and Immigration.
The meetup will be hosted by Rocky Mountains & High Plains liaison Shokai Sinclair and Greece liaison Eleni Exarchou with guest speaker Zeese Papanikolas.
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SFAA US Alumni Meetup
Saturday, April 3, 2021, 10:00 AM PST
Rocky Mountains & High Plains liaison Shokai Sinclair is hosting the SFAA USA Alumni Meetup on Saturday, April 3, 10am PST.
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SFAA NorCal Alumni Meetup
Sunday, April 25, 2021 10:30 AM PST
Northeast California liaison Ruth Chase and Northwest California liaison Adrian Card are hosting the SFAA NorCal Alumni Meetup on Sunday, April 25, 10:30am PST.NorCal meetup is on every forth Sunday of the month.
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SFAA LA Alumni Meetup
Saturday, April 17, 2021, 4:00 PM PST
Our first LA alumni meetup will be hosted on April 17, 4:00pm by South California liaisons Toban Nichols, Jackie Buttice, and Michal Wisniowski.
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FROM JEFF GUNDERSON'S SFAI ARCHIVE
Howard Becker is still around today. He studied at SFAI with Phil Perkis and Jerry Burchard in the early 1970s.
Here is 1972 photo of student Howie Becker by Steve Gach. Poster by Lex Calip, 2017, “Just Ask Howie”.
Howie Becker played jazz piano on Chicago's South Side as a teenager in the 1940s. He then received his Phd in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where he published the first scholarly article on marihuana use rather than marihuana’s abuse titled, "Becoming a Marihuana User," American Journal of Sociology (November, 1953).
He also curated the 1982 exhibition Exploring Society Photographically at SFAI’s Emmanuel Walter Gallery… Howie lives part time in Paris but most of the time on Lombard Street around the corner from the School. In 2017, as noted above, in the wonderful "Just Ask Howie" poster by Lex Calip, Becker offered his 4/20 thoughts about Jazz, sub-cultures, sociology, and his key book for artists, Art Worlds (UC Press).
Read more:
Adam Gopnik’s profile about Howie Becker “The Outside Game” in the January 12, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.
Art Worlds: 25th Anniversary Edition (University of California Press, 2008).
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Beeple's Everydays - The First 5,000 Days (2021)
A non-fungible token minted on 16 February, Courtesy of Christie's
"Thanks to a flurry of eye-watering bids that almost crashed Christie's website, a digital work Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021) has sold for an astonishing $60.25m ($69.3m with fees). It is now both the most expensive NFT (Non-Fungible Token) work of art as well as the first standalone NFT work of art to be sold by an auction house." Kabir Jhala, The Art Newspaper
Check out this short video explaining what is NFT:
What is NFT art? The Art Newspaper explains
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Many thanks to Lonnie Graham, Steve Hurd and Doug Harvey, Jeffrey Augustine Songco and Don Daedalus, PhotoAlliance, Marina Abramović and Dale Hoyt, Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur, Toban Nichols, Maria Theresa Barbist, Shōkai Sinclair ,Eleni Exarchou, Zeese Papanikolas, Ruth Chase, Adrian Card, Jackie Buttice, Michal Wisniowski, Jeff Gunderson, The Art Newspaper, Linda Connor and the SFAA Boardmembers.
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Editors: Annie Reiniger-Holleb & Joyce Burstein
Coeditors: Xiaopeng Liu & Marian Wallace
To contact the Editors at SFAA Newsletter email: SFAA2News@gmail.com
Or send letters to our address: Editors SFAA Newsletter 3019 Ocean Park Blvd. #123, Santa Monica, CA 90405
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