William T. Wiley
"XCHANGE"
1994
watercolor and graphite on paper
30 x 22 in.
This unique project brought together new, visionary work of 6 artists from Brazil and 6 artists from the San Francisco Bay Area for the enjoyment of more than 15,000 people from throughout the world, visiting San Francisco during the World Cup Soccer summer of 1994.
Later, the same exhibitions traveled to Brazil (home of the World Cup winners) for an exhibition at Rio's major museum, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, during November and December of 1994.
Jointly sponsored by SAPA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the exhibitions were curated by Anne Trueblood Brodzky, founder of SAPA, and Marcus de Lontra Costa, director of Museu de Arte Moderna.
The summer visitors saw the "Exchange Show" of San Francisco/Rio paintings at Yerba Buena Ceter for the Arts and the concurrent "Drawing Exchange" of related drawings by the same artists at Meridian Gallery. Combined exhibitions of the paintings/drawings (and the artists) then traveled to Rio for a very warm reception.
"Tree Murmur"
1994
oil on wood
96 x 39 in., 240 x 97.5 cm.
Kim Anno is currently a visiting professor of art at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition, Anno teaches art to prison inmates as one expression of her dedication to expanding the function of art in society. In 1993 Anno completed a public arts project, "Richmond Conversations," in collaboration with photographer Ruth Morgan and local residents of Richmond, California. "Richmond Conversations" was commissioned by the city of Richmond and displayed as billboards in several locations in the Bay Area. Anno's abstract paintings and drawings reflect her ideas about ritual an cultural identity.
Content was always really important to me in my work as an abstractionist, and I made a conscious decision to pursue a reductive, spiritually based aesthetic.
I think of my paintings as objects, as shapes. I construct them of wood, and I like the tension between their actual nature as paintings and their resemblence to sculpture. They are really enigmatic, ritual objects.
I want my work to have the kind of potency that religious work has but without the specific ideology. My art making is my practice.
(Image currently unavailable)
"At the Hotel"
1993
acrylic on canvas
39.5 x 39.5 in., 100 x 100 cm.
Victor Arruda was trained in museology and, while exhibiting extensively throughout Brazil, has devoted himself to education for the underprivelaged by founding th Free Art Studio for needy children at the Fundacao Nacional do Bem Estar do Menor in 1977 and teaching at the Instituto Penal Lemos de Brito in 1982. In 1989 Oscar Niemeyer invited him to paint the foyer panel in the Memorial Theater of Latin America, measuring approximately 65'7"x65'7", and in 1992 a panel for the Latin American Parliament, measuring 29'6"x29"6."
I think a tragic sentiment, the idea of death, has often prevented me from being merely maudlin, as my sense of humor, at other times, has protected me from being merely grotesque. As time goes on, thiss interests me less and less. Perhaps what I like best in my paintings today is this grotesque, maudlin aspect. After all, why not be grotesque or maudlin?
"Night"
1994
oil and synthitic enamel on canvas
35.5 x 39.5 in., 90 x 100 cm.
Cristina Canale studied economics as an undergraduate. She was awarded the drawing prize at the Salao Carioca de Arte in 1986 and the prize "Governador do Estado" int the XXI Sao Paulo Bienal. She has shown extensively in Brazil and also in Europe and America during the past decade, most notably in Wiepersdorf, Germany and Washington, D.C., in 1993 and in Stockholm's Culture Hall in 1991. In 1993 she received a stipend to live and work in Brandenburg County's House of the Arts in Wiepersdorf Castle.
My work has evolved within the language of paint both as a means and an end. I always search for a project within specific themes, such as landscapes and flowers, and from there I look for new pictorial solutions for these elements which already exist within the tradition of painting.
Untitiled
1994
oil and encaustic on canvas
51 x 73 in., 130 x 185 cm.
Chico Cunha studied architecture as an undergraduate and painting at the Escola de Arte Visuais Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. He was awarded a prize at the Salao Nacional de Artes Plasticas in 1987 and 1989 and won the Premio Brasilia de Artes Plasticas in 1990. Recipient of the Ciudad de Mexico scholarship in 1991. His most important exhibitions include: "Brazilian Contemporary Art in Tokyo" at the Fujita Vente Museum and "Anos 80 na Colecao Gilberto Chateaubriand" at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., both in 1993.
Cunha paints the process and the crisis of painting in order
to reflect on the possibilities of its recuperation (or resurrection?).
Through pre-modern structures and landscapes, he considers the
possibility of the figurative against a history which aspires
to integrity. Cunha investigates landscape so as to maintain his
connection with the real, the object. Using reminiscence, he simultaneously
unfolds a net of poetic meanings in which fantasy and myth assume
their role.
-Marcus de Lontra Costa, 1993
"Make Hay and Lay Waste While the Sun Shine, Touchdown
for the Purpose of Correction
1991
mixed media on cotton
84 x 65 in., 213 x 165 cm.
Violet Fields won a 4-year tuition-waiver scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970 and subsequently launched her professional career as an artist in the early '80s. Fields participated in the biennial exhibition, "Emerging Artists, New Expressions," at the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles in 1990, bringing her work to a wider audience.
In addition to solo exhibitions of drawing and painting, Fields has created performance pieces, such as "Show and Tell" with 5 poets at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991, and "Shake 'em Jake My Fingers Ache, and They Think They Bad," a forthcoming collaborative installation piece. A crusader/advocate for inclusion in the arts, Fields teaches art in inner city public schools and serves on the Public Arts Advisory Committee of the City of Oakland and the Board of the Berkeley Arts Center.
I always loved abstraction, landscape. Somehow all the drawing from life that I did not like doing in school comes out in the paintings. Among persistent imagery of stones, funnels, birds, masks, people are always seeing breasts, penises. Maybe being a figure myself it is my own foot, thigh, hands that I show. I do know how to keep myself raw enough to free-fall and let the art come through me and not stop it too much in my head to discover, oh my God, the paint that's on my hands matches what's on the wall.
"Iguacu Night"
1994
acrylic on canvas
76 x 61.5 in., 193 x 156 cm.
Leigh Hyams has been exhibiting since 1970 in the United States, as well as in the British Isles, Germany, Russia, and Japan. Hyams has received 10 painting fellowships, including a Fulbright Western European Regional Research Grant in 1984. Hyams solo exhibit in 1992 at the Meridian Gallery, "Brazilian Paintings: Waterfalls and Skies," was reviewed in Art in America. Hyams has been active a a teacher of drawing and painting in such Bay Area institutions as San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, and University of California Extension. In addition, Hyams has led cultural tours on 5 trips to Brazil.
I paint the feeling of space, moving, and breathing in the night, in oceans and mountains, wind and stars. A viewer can enter it and vanish.
On Bonnard:
I continue to learn from him, the way he paints that in-between
thing, that sense of living right there at his table.
Untitled
1993
oil on canvas
108 x 108 in., 274 x 274 cm.
Oliver Jackson has exhibited widely for the past 30 years throughout California and the United States in gallery and museum shows surveying contemporary art, and in solo exhibits such as the Seattle Art Museum's major survey exhibition, "Oliver Jackson," in 1982. Jackson participated in the 1983 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Jackson receivedd a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Painting for 1980-81 and a Fleishacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship Award in 1993.
Currently, Jackson teaches at California State University, Sacramento. In 1994 Jackson completed a large-scale outdoor marble sculpture, commissioned by the federal government for the Federal Building in Oakland, California.
The mind is not a hand, a set of eyes
On Making:
I need to do it and I can do it. There is a mystery and it
is an honest mystery.
On Theater:
A cousin put us in plays as children, plays whose scenarios
we liked. I have often done sets since the fifties. Bad live theatre
is often better than movies.
On Space:
Space has great strength and potency according to your state
of being -- grief, comfort, antipathy.
On Late Picasso:
He can make his transitions easier. He can get to his poetry
poetry quicker.
"Wund (Wound)"
1993
earth, pigment, and acrylic on canvas
86.5 x 85 in., 220 x 215 cm.
Karin Lambrecht has been featured in the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1985, 1987, and 1994. Internationally, Lambrecht has shown widely in Germany in addition to Stockholm's Culture Hall, New York's Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, Washington, D.C.'s Art Museum of the Americas, and Caracas' Museum of Fine Arts Foundation. In 1986 Lambrecht was the recipient of a Millany Colony for the Arts scholarship to the colony in Austerlitz, New York and in 1988 a recipient of the Ivan Serpa Prize in Rio de Janeiro.
Visibility
(Plane): Surface, texture, tree, light, skin, eyes, nose, metal,
earth, car, image, wall... Visibility
(Other Plane): Interiors, bone, motor, sap, blood, brain, stomach,
underwear, filling... Invisibility
(Other Plane): Magnetic Field, radio waves, displacement of air,
thought, energy, transparence..
Invisibility
(Other Plane): Dream, desire, consciousness, angel, reflex...
Untitled
1993
acrylic on canvas
71 x 71 in., 180 x 180 cm.
Beatriz Milhazes studied social communication before painting. Since first exhibiting in 1983, her work has been well represented in Brazil's most important collections and in group exhibitions. Her work has won many prizes and she enjoys an extensive bibliography in several languages. She has exhibited in Caracas, Mexico City, and Guadalajara. In 1993 Milhazes was part of "UltraModern: The Art of Contemporary Brazil," at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and of "Eco-Art" at the Casa de las Americas, Madrid.
By accentuating the fine membrane of paint over canvas, skin over skin, dermis over dermis, the debate of circular forms with geometric principles creates a painting of heightened sensitivity, born of the mad struggle between Baroque figuration and rigorous constructionn. This is not a struggle between one element and another, one current and another, but rather their mutual exaltation: a Baroque sensuality clothed in Matissian colors, liberating the embryonic Constructive emotion of the work.
"Black Island Series #1
1994
oil on canvas
48 x 64 in., 122 x 163 cm.
Larry Thomas has had numerous exhibitions and widespread recognition since his 1984 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thomas received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for 1980-81 and 1987-88. In 1993 Thomas collaborated with Charles Hobson, artist's bookmaker, on a large-scale limited edition of Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, bound with original lithographs and accompanied by a suite of original etchings. Unknown Masterpiece has been acquired by major museums and libraries around the United States. In 1994 Thomas helped to set up a program for teaching printmaking at the University of Jordan and gave lectures on issues in contemporary American art at the University of Damascus.
This new series of Black Island paintings and drawings comes out of my long interest in remnants of habitation, remains of human activity. Darkness, moodiness, heaviness; notions of distance, isolation and loneliness are pervasive. I am thinking of ancient sites on the North Coast of California or Oregon where dances to "fix the earth" have traditionally been held. These sites compel my imagination. They are usually isolated, separate from daily activity, places where dance, song, prayer and meditation are enacted to allow closer communication with forces.
"Eve & Adam"
1994
acylic, graphite, and charcoal on canvas
72 x 104 in., 183 x 264 cm.
William T. Wiley has gained widespread recognition in drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking over the past 30 years, participating in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. Of note, Wiley has exhibited at: Documenta V, Kassel, West Germany in 1972; the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1972 and 1980; the Whitney Biennial 1983; and a solo travelling exhibition, "William T. Wiley: Struck! Sure? Sound/Unsound," in 1991, originating at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C..
Wiley was a faculty member in the art department at University of California, Davis, 1962-73. From 1985-1991 Wiley created and fabricated with Lippencott, Inc., a 75-foot sculpture, The Tower, which displays imagery of the Middle Ages that has characterized much of his work in recent years.
The ampersand sign [&] figures in the drawing that came before the new painting, Eve & Adam, 1994. It reminds me of a kind of Koan that keeps coming around again or of the Sufi statement: "You think you must understand one because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and."
On Dumb Bells on The Ocean, 1993:
Salmon fishing in the last two year has found me falling in
love with the ocean ever deeper, ever more impressed with it and
amazed and stunned by it. And by the cavalier things we are doing
to it.
Untitled
1992
acrylic on canvas
138 x 71 in., 345 x 178 cm.
In 1987 Luiz Zerbini was featured in the 1987 Sao Paulo Bienal. Since then he has had multiple exhibitions in Mexico, South America, the United States, and in Spain, Sweden, and Japan. Among his exhibitions in Mexico was "Myth and Magic in the Eighties" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City. In 1993 Zerbini was part of an important exhibition that traveled to Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice. In the United States Zerbini's most notable recent exhibit was "Brazil -- Images of the 80's and 90's" at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C..
Luiz Zerbini is neither a landscape painter nor a painter of
still lifes. He is an artist of the memory of sensation. He uses
memory as the minimum unit from which he artificially reconstructs
the universe of his emotions. It is as if memory were an atomic
particle within each one of us, containing the whole of sensation.
However, it is no longer possible to access this emotion directly.
Instead, one can only disorient, using false clues to fool the
senses into activating a memory and preserving an emotion.
-Marcio Doctors, 1993