Continuing through June 27, 2026
Ward Schumaker is a second lifer. That is, before beginning to show paintings in local galleries at the age of fifty-eight he had a successful career as an illustrator and designer. The 54 works that comprise “Ward Schumaker: Paintings 2007-2026” survey his second life as an artist. Schumaker applies acrylic, sometimes mixed with bookmaker’s glue for a rougher texture, to various support media: canvas, cardboard, board, and on the pages and covers of artist-made books. Everything on view has to do with his reinvention of books, literature, language and the notion of the page, manifested through color choices that lean heavily on brick reds, yellowy oranges and type-like blacks.
When balancing image and text Schumaker sets things up so that visual and linguistic components carry equal weight. Otherwise, the image feels off kilter. He mostly succeeds in striking such a precarious balance, giving the show the addictive page-turner quality of a good novel. Though only occasionally telling a linear narrative, his quotations (from Walt Whitman or German philosopher G.W. Leibniz, for example) and snippets of language are plucked from his reading or the aural environment. These words send us off on journeys at acute angles away from the regimented dimensions of the picture plane and into an internal psychic space far from the raucous streetscape beyond the gallery.
“Drawing Dirty” (2020) tells a charming and nostalgic childhood anecdote about pre-pubescent hijinks, with a subtext about how a young artist’s role in the community can be awkward and painful. It offers both the most conventional narrative in the show and the least painterly, with color relegated to edging and stains. It could pass for a reproduction of someone’s long-lost diary found in an attic. About half the works in the exhibition have stenciled words, letters and numbers, while the other half range from complete abstraction to arrangements of gridded marks that resemble pages of print. The latter are the most affecting, as they allude to the power of literature while simultaneously exploiting the emotional impact of color.
Among these are “Padlock” and “Heaven’s Gate” (both 2025). The former offers a series of untranslated black dots and dashes in a grid against a field of golden yellow, combining references to Morse code with suggestions of redacted information from a government document or a Hitchcockian McGuffin. “Heaven’s Gate” features three-inch red rectangular brushstrokes placed both horizontally and vertically, with other red, Clyfford-Still-like flames set against a black background. Recalling the colors of anarchist banners from the 1930s, it produces a similarly stirring bravado. “100 People” (2017) combines a short text about the ever-evolving multiplicity of an individual’s identity with a field of inverted T-shapes that are laid out like a page in a yearbook, each glyph standing in for a head shot of a student.
The closer Schumaker gets to simplicity and graphic elegance the more impactful his paintings become. A standout example, “Heaven” (2017) is composed of a narrowing tower of black and white boxes set against a grey ground that culminates at the top with the title’s word. In “Venus” (2017) a small, medium, and large set of brick-red globes that reference the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf are placed against an off-white ground that is subtly streaked with the faintest of horizontal text-like lines.
Schumaker uses language not so much for its denotations as for its visual and associative potential. In that way the artist rubs shoulders with the many local poets, such as Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Alan Bernheimer and Kit Robinson, for whom words are selected not so much to stir readers’ emotions but more as tools to investigate how the mind works. The first generation of UC Davis professors migrated this literary aesthetic to visual art, most notably William T. Wiley, whose paintings frequently deployed puns and other wordplay to disguise or soften his acerbic political observations; and Robert Arneson, whose ceramic sculpture is rife with deadpan verbal jokes. Rupert Garcia’s political posters combined his striking imagery with hard-hitting agitprop texts. A generation later, Margaret Kilgallen used her knowledge of typography to incorporate slang from surfing, music, graffiti and feminist history into her paintings and wall installations. This show convincingly associates Schumaker with those folks and other local artists.
Another section of the exhibition includes smaller works, often the size of a sheet of typing paper. Collectively they reveal an informal charm. Some are gnomic texts that pay homage to Ed Ruscha’s sensibility, although Schumaker’s are more colorful, as in “Pretty Honest Mistake 03” and “True (Descending)” (both 2018). There are also artist-made books and pages from books that are mostly abstract and don’t carry the same sense of assuredness as do his best pieces. On the other hand, “Spyder 02” and “Spyder 05” (both 2017) feature pages of web-like lines that have the eerie immediacy of text messages from the mind of an arachnid.
