SFAA Newsletter March 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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Left: SFAI News, Jay DeFeo and Hayward King, October 15, 1962.
Right: 150th Curators Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur at SFAI’s historic Chestnut Campus, 2020.
Photo by Alex Peterson. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute.
The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2021 with A Spirit of Disruption, an exhibition that reflects on the school’s profound and sustained influence on contemporary art and highlights the contributions of generations of diverse artists and individuals often overlooked in the historical narrative of SFAI. Curated by Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur.
“The underpinning of the exhibition is to spotlight artists who have not been included in the larger historical narrative of SFAI, which has primarily been cisgender, white men,” says Weefur. “We took special care to make sure the majority of the works included in the exhibition are by BIPOC / LGBTQ+ artists and vary in career length and exposure, pairing young and emerging artists with mid-career and established artists. The spirit of disruption is the conceptual force behind this curatorial method, which is to disrupt the history and bring forth the diverse approach that best represents SFAI’s legacy.” The exhibition is on view in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries.
SFAI 150 A Spirit of Disruption on view:
March 19 - July 3, 2021
Walter and McBean Galleries and Diego Rivera Gallery, SFAI Chestnut Campus
Galleries hours:
Tuesday 11:00 am - 7:00 pm
Wednesday - Saturday, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm
SFAI’s galleries are free to the public. For general information and updates on gallery access, please visit sfai.edu or call (415) 749-4563.
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SFAI Public Education 2021 Spring
SFAI alumni receive a 20% discount with code ALUMNI@SFAI.EDU
Public Education is now offering Spring 2021 course schedule online. SFAI alumni receive a 20% discount with code ALUMNI@SFAI.EDU.
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Image: Trauma series 2018-2020 © Joan Fontcuberta
PhotoAlliance is delighted to welcome photographer Joan Fontcuberta for an online lecture and presentation about his prolific artistic practice and current work. This lecture is free and open to the public.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” - Antonio Gramsci
Gramsci’s words provide the launching point for Fontcuberta’s talk with PhotoAlliance, titled Photographic Monstrosities. The lecture will focus on two new projects: Trauma and Prosopagnosia, which the artist describes respectively as poetic and disruptive. Both series address the idea of an old world (analog, light and chemistry based photography) dying, a new world (AI-based, photorealistic images) struggling to be born, and the monstrosities that emerge in our new terra incognita.
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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ALUMNI EXHIBITIONS/EVENTS
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America
Just Opened Through June 6, 2021, New Museum, New York
Cover Image: Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, 2021.
Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Grief and Grievance, originally conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor (1963 - 2019), is an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance are further considered, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. The exhibition comprises works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made within the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ellen Gallagher, and Theaster Gates is included.
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Okwui Enwezor, Venice, 2015
In advance of the 2021 exhibition, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” join us for a discussion on Okwui Enwezor’s vision and life’s work. This discussion will feature Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Professor, NTU School of Art, Design and Media; Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami; Terry Smith, Professor of
Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh; Octavio Zaya, independent art critic and curator; and moderator Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum.
A recording of this conversation is available HERE.
Okwui Enwezor served as Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at SFAI From 2005 to 2009.
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We're hosting a global Zoom meetup of SFAI alumni on March 6, and the theme is environmental sustainability. We're showing the works from alums related to this theme. Whether you use sustainable materials or your art deals with conservation or climate justice, we'd love to see your work.
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Alumni Exhibitions/Events
Geometric Break, 2020
Mary Heilmann
In accordance with recent government guidance, the gallery is temporarily closed until 28 February. Launching online from 6 February 2021. Launching online first, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Past Present Future,’ an exhibition of paintings, furniture, and ceramics, by preeminent American artist Mary Heilmann. Along with earlier work dating...
Visit: Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich
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A&E, EXXA, Santa Anita session, 2020
Paul McCarthy
To visit the exhibition, book a timed viewing appointment here. Beginning 23 February, Hauser & Wirth will present new drawings, paintings, sculpture and sound work by the celebrated American artist Paul McCarthy that confront the complex mechanisms of power, politics, desire, and history. Central to the exhibition is a series of large-scale...
Visit: Hauser & Wirth
542 West 22nd Street, New York 10011
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Afterimages
(Interference of Vision), 2021
Stephanie Syjuco
Syjuco’s highly anticipated presentation expands on research into the problematic construction of American history and histories of photography that foreground whiteness as a normative subject.
Visit: Catharine Clark Gallery
248 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Installation of
Gerhard Richter - Cage Paintings
Gerhard Richter’s Cage paintings ( 2006) will remain at Gagosian Beverly Hills until April 3 then travel to Gagosian New York in the spring of 2021. In conjunction with this key group of six paintings, a new group of drawings created by Richter on consecutive days during the summer of 2020 is being shown for the first time.
Gerhard Richter is not an alumni but worth seeing.
Visit: Gagosian Gallery - Los Angeles
456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
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Linda Lomahaftewa with her grandfather Viets Lomahaftewa for her graduation in 1970.
Photo courtesy Linda Lomahaftewa.
An Invisible Partnership: The San Francisco Art Institute, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the American Indian Identity in the 1960s.
Since its founding in 1871, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) has hosted many Native American and Indigenous students from all over the country. Recently, while researching Native American alumni, a connection became apparent between SFAI and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a large wave of students transferred from IAIA to SFAI. These students not only began an invisible partnership between Santa Fe’s illustrious IAIA and SFAI but also carved a space of belonging for Native and Indigenous students in the decades to come. To place this wave of Indigenous presence in a context of American systems converging from civil unrest, as well as a complex time for American Indian identity within the United States, we go back to the year 1965.
Read the updated version on Rye Purvis' Blog.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reads from A Coney Island of the Mind at SFAI’s 2012 Commencement
Ferlinghetti, attended SFAI’s Friday afternoon open studio drawing sessions beginning in 1956 and would hang out at the School’s cafe and outdoor courtyard adjacent to the Meadow. At the 2012 Commencement Ferlinghetti received the MacAgy Award, recognized as a Poet, Pacifist, Publisher, Painter, Political Activist and a Pretty Damn Good Role Model.
Go to the 21 minute mark on the video to hear Ferlinghetti’s advice to the SFAI graduating class of 2012 on Saturday, May 12, 2012.
Ferlinghetti passed away on February 22, 2020. Here is New York Times' last word: An Obituary Series With a Life of Its Own.
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Many thanks to Maria Theresa Barbist, Lior Bar, Shōkai Sinclair, Rye Purvis, Jeff Gunderson and his fabulous Archives, PhotoAlliance, Matrix/BAMPFA, The New Museum, Gagosian Gallery, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Catherine Clark Gallery, NYTimes, 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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