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Northern California Art
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Running Fence at 50 Years,” commemorates the monumental 1976 intervention in the Sonoma and Marin County landscape. It documents a moment when individual artists began making their own cultural structures rather than waiting for established institutions to give them permission.
Fiber affords Terri Friedman a meditative medium for processing the too-muchness of contemporary life, and even a place of joy and healing in which carefully planned shapes, colors and textures coalesce into llyrical, brightly colored dreamscapes.
“Poetics of Memory” gradually reveals stories from Mildred Howard’s life as seen through her art, while leaving room for us to construct narratives of our own. The work has a specific personal and historical references.
Viewed through a rain-splattered windshield, the road ahead is swallowed by the dark woods that surround it. The trees’ twiggy crowns reach upward, precisely focused when they’re not visually smudged by the damp glass.
“The Wyeths: Three Generations” presents the work of five artists, all members of a single family. Examining the works reveals that one of the great family names in American art and illustration were wielded to support overly mawkish myth making.
There is a definite family resemblance shared by the porcelain with underglaze ceramic figures of Cynthia McIntosh’s “Turn the Party.” The title is a nod to Miss Amini’s booty-shaker, “Turn the Party Up,” indicative of the high-spirited humor in these caricaturized busts.
A portrait of Matisse’s devoted wife Amélie, a milliner who wears a hat of her own creation, “Femme au chapeau” violated the era’s ideas about the acceptable use of color and the staid conventions of portraiture. In truth, it was only nominally a portrait.
“The Etruscans” presents ample evidence of highly developed skills in gold, bronze and silversmithing. We also see just how enigmatic ancient Etruscan art is, partly because we still have so much to learn about it.
Foad Satterfield’s paintings investigate abstract concerns; Federico Uribe creates playful animal sculptures from recycled materials; and Kristine Taylor uses traditional bronze casting to interpret jungle animals and raptors.
Nicole White’s exhibition of photographs, “An Unending Path,” appropriately begins with “View,” a soft-filtered image of a window frame with a small, framed photograph, captured through a secondary gridded window, itself yellowed and scratched with time.
