As an environment and living artwork, David Ireland’s home at 500 Capp Street became not just a dwelling but also an idiosyncratic assemblage of his creative vision. Ireland became a full-time artist at 40. After spending time in New York, he returned to San Francisco and became a part of the Bay Area Conceptual movement, which included artists like Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, and Jim Melchert. The group helped establish San Francisco as a key location in conceptual art through video, performance, and installation art.
Ireland’s experiences informed his site-specific installation pieces of everyday objects that explore ideas of place and transformation, utilizing everything from phone books to cement to discarded furniture. When he bought the Victorian house in 1975, he applied his sense of minimalism and absurdity to transform the space. By exploring the beauty of everyday things, Ireland became an accessible conceptual artist for audiences that wouldn’t normally have the patience for the medium.
Twentieth century art has a rich history of artists wanting to become a part of their own work. Artists like Joseph Beuys whose conceptual installation, I like America and America Likes Me (1974) consisted of the artist living in a performance space for three days with a coyote. Marcel Duchamp, whose art and wry humor influenced Ireland’s methodologies, also believed in merging art with life and said, “Anything is art if the artist says it is.”
Mildred Howard: ‘Collaborating With The Muses Part One’
Over the last 50 years, Mildred Howard has been a key figure in the Bay Area art scene. In September 2024, she is launching Collaborating With The Muses Part One, a series of overlapping exhibitions at multiple venues. The exhibitions will highlight the variation and scope of Howard’s multidisciplinary practice, to which large-scale sculptural installations, public artworks, and assemblages are central and include a wide range of mediums including print and film. The dialogue and interplay among different artistic disciplines is one of Howard’s major themes — particularly the role of music — in a behind-the-scenes capacity informing the artist while the creation is being executed, or as a part of the final work’s presentation.
Anything is art if the artist says it is.
— Marcel Duchamp
Collaborating With The Muses begins on Sept. 7 and runs through Oct. 26 at the Anglim/Trimble Gallery, which has represented Howard for more than three decades, with an exhibition featuring her large-scale photo prints. At Oakland’s Part 2 Gallery, Howard will debut a new installation (Sept. 14 through Oct. 26) inspired by Peace Piece, a favorite composition by eminent jazz pianist Bill Evans. Hand-selected internationally known Bay Area musicians will take part in this work.
At 500 Capp Street, Howard will screen her 2021 film The Time and Space of Now (Sept. 21), which she created after finding an 8-millimeter film reel in her mother’s purse where it had been for decades. The short film is composed of the footage that Howard took as a 14-year-old, which includes shots on the beach in Alameda, metaphysical fictional dialogue between artists Dewey Crumpler and Oliver Lee Jackson, and themes of borders, migration, and the interconnectedness of time and space. The exhibition will be paired with excerpts of the large-scale installation work that accompanied the film’s premiere at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.
Collaborating With The Muses Part One: Excerpts from The Time and Space of Now will be on display from Sept. 21 through Oct. 26.
Annie Albagli: ‘Milk Teeth’
The dining room of the David Ireland House will transform into a meditation on “where we come from” with the help of artist Annie Albagli and her dreamlike artworks that consider the origins of life. A limestone sculpture covering the dining room table reaches back in time and into the fossil record to trace the web of life between sea, land, and cosmos. A montage of digital art decorates the ceiling with celestial images of motherhood and mythology. An additional video work will weave in Albagli’s personal origin story, and visitors, in the spirit of collaboration and transformation, will be able to add their own stories to the installation, sending them via fax to a machine stationed in the kitchen.
As part of the exhibition, Albagli is organizing several public events and exhibition activations. On Sept. 26 there will be a premiere of a collective performance score by artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. On Sunday, Oct. 19, Albagli and fellow artists from UNIDEE Art Academy’s Neither on Land nor at Sea residency program will join together for an online and in-person interactive event in which both artists and audience are invited to share speculative stories about objects, materials, and place.
Milk Teeth will be on display from Sept. 12 through Nov. 2.
The David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street offers guided tours (including special exhibitions) with reservations on Thursdays (3 p.m. and 4 p.m.) and self-guided drop-in tours on Saturdays 1–4 p.m..
