The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection, the inaugural exhibition at the museum’s new location, di Rosa San Francisco.
Innovation outside of the mainstream
Far Out features artists working from the 1960s through today, including Sandow Birk, Joan Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Mildred Howard, Packard Jennings, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Peter Saul, among others. The exhibition explores the myriad ways that artists working on the periphery of the mainstream art world have long been progressive forces for material experimentation, creative dissent against authority, and innovation beyond art historical traditions.
The exhibition offers three thematic approaches to illustrate how California artists have always used their position outside of the mainstream to push and challenge art historical assumptions.
‘Material Worlds’
In this section of the exhibition, figurative painters and sculptors from the postwar era such as David Ireland, Jay DeFeo, and Carlos Villa expand what raw materiality can say to us in the realm of fine art. Unconventional materials are used to create spaces and tell stories. In Third Coat from 1983, Carlos Villa created a feathered coat, with bone dolls (micro-puppets articulated out of animal remains) sewn into the fabric, meant to be displayed but never worn. These objects were used to tell a story about his own Filipino heritage and global indigenous cultures.
‘Tricksters, Scavengers, Scamps’
Artists who are also pranksters take the models of human society and distort their meanings, often in a way that is humorous and thought provoking. Taking on new identities helped artists like William T. Wiley and Roy De Forest don alternative identities to subvert and distort the pressures of the art market. Artists like Bruce Conner and Michele Pred find inspiration for their drawings in landfills, dumpsters, and other unexpected source materials. Their work examines the unseen and unexpected while critiquing commercial and political systems.
‘Piracy and Protest’
Many of the images, logos, and icons we see every day are poised to capture our attention in an attempt to convince us to buy something. In the final section, artists hijack these familiar corporate images to subvert their intended purpose and rewrite meaning. Enrique Chagoya’s When Paradise Arrived draws on familiar imagery of the Walt Disney Company to investigate his experience living on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. At the same time, Ester Hernandez’s Sun Mad references the Sun Maid raisin box to bring attention to the oppression of Latinx populations. Other works by Wally Hedrick and Kara Maria draw on common commercial/corporate references to discuss sociopolitical injustice.
“Northern California artists have always operated on their own terms, and have long been considered anarchic, anticapitalist, and anti-hierarchical,” Said Twyla Ruby, associate curator at di Rosa. “Rather than limiting these artists, geographic separation has been a creative boon, encouraging them to push their art forms further, and to ask what’s possible — of their materials, their practice, and themselves. Our collection celebrates that creative spirit, and this exhibition sheds a light on the way contemporary artists in the greater Bay Area are continuing to carry that spirit forward.”
Di Rosa San Francisco presents the next chapter for this foremost collection of Northern California Art. The Minnesota Street Project space will be a platform for exhibitions and educational programs that put works by contemporary artists into dialogue with artists in the collection. The space pays homage to di Rosa’s intention behind collecting and experiencing art, which is to encourage visitors to enjoy the work on its own terms, the spirit of the collection’s outsider vision and to embrace of radical thinking and self-expression outside of existing hierarchies.
