West of the West

Untitled, 2018, SFMOMA The multi-lingual and multi-cultural visual artist , poet, and essayist Etel Adnan was at home in many places—but she became a painter in California. Born in Beirut, Lebanon and trained as a philosopher in Paris, Adnan came to Dominican College in San Rafael in 1958 to teach aesthetics. Here, at age 34, she began painting, in dialogue with poets, musicians, and playwrights in Ann O’Hanlon’s Perception Workshops in Mill Valley in the 1960s. Working with

Velasquez Family, 1961, Crocker Museum Among the crowd of out-there painters , poets, scene makers and scene stealers of San Francisco’s 1950s Beat era, Bernice Bing stood out for her obvious cool. She reputedly couldn’t walk down the street without being greeted. With a studio above the Old Spaghetti Factory, Bing was “a fiery presence,” according to Jay DeFeo. But unlike DeFeo and Joan Brown, Bing faded from the annals of California art. But she has come back in a blaze of

Untitled (Ocean), 1975, MOCA Los Angeles Vija Celmins says that her task as an artist is “to document another surface and sort of translate it” in an act of both invention and fidelity. Coming of age artistically in 1960s Los Angeles, she had a Pop interest in the mundane; she painted studio objects, such as a desk lamp, a fan, and a heater, not in the splashy colors of Pop, but in monochromatic gray tones. In Venice, California, she resisted the siren song of color and ligh

Barns on Cass Street, 1925, Monterey Museum of Art File this story under the archaeology of art history—the rediscovery of an artist celebrated in her day who faded from view as tastes changed. This lovely work, Barns on Cass St , was painted by Margaret Bruton, a woman at the center of the NorCal interwar art world. She knew Frida and Diego, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and met Henri Matisse when he visited San Francisco in 1930. And she had two equally talented siblings—the

Wrong , 1967, LACMA John Baldessari’s wide-ranging art practice includes printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography—everything but painting. He once painted as a young artist and art teacher, of course. But by 1970 he had grown so disillusioned with the very idea of painting that he took all his canvases to a San Diego funeral home and cremated them. In 1949, David Park took his abstract works to the Berkeley Dump and began the adventure that was the B

Angel-Go-Round , 1996, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art David Ireland was a latecomer to art. According to local legend, when an art student borrowed a taxidermied elephant’s foot from his African imports store for an installation, Ireland was so inspired that he enrolled at SFAI and threw himself into The City’s conceptual art scene. Perhaps this wasn’t such a radical gesture for a man who had already been an architectural draftsman, a carpenter, and an African safari gu

Waterfall , 1922, Dallas Museum of Art Los Angeles modernist Henrietta Shore refused to confine herself to a style or movement. In her lifetime, Shore’s powerful, honest interpretations of nature were well appreciated, and like her SoCal contemporary Agnes Pelton, Shore was regarded as an important American modernist. For both women, however, social and personal attitudes conspired against lasting success, and Shore died destitute and virtually unknown. But in 2020, the Whit

First War Winter, 1939-40, SFMOMA Brown-shingle Berkeley has been home to many artists, and at the dawn of the 20 th century, a whole family of them lived on Ridge Road. Imagine the dinner conversation when the Howard clan gathered—father John Galen Howard, architect of UC Berkeley; his wife Mary, a noted watercolorist; and sons Henry, John Langley, and Robert—all artists married to artists. Perhaps hoping to distinguish himself, son Charles opted for journalism. But in Ca

Hatton Ranch , 1920, Monterey Museum of Art Although the turn of the 20 th  century was an era of expanding opportunities for women, Euphemia (she preferred Effie) Charlton Fortune was neither the first nor the last woman artist to disguise her gender.  Her style, which moved from Impressionist softness to a harder-edged, geometric style highlighting the bright colors of California, was naturally praised as “masculine;” early reviewers of her work may not have been aware tha

Continuum Basket: Pivat (Tobacco), 2018, Palm Springs Art Museum Gerald Clarke is a cowboy , UC Riverside Ethnic Studies professor, tribal leader, artist, and (his preferred identity) Indian. He works a cattle ranch in the Anza Valley, as his father, grandfather, and other Cahuilla tribal members have done since the Spanish Colonial period. Though Clarke is inspired by the history and beauty of the Cahuilla coiled basketry tradition, his eclectic art takes that heritage in ma

From The Great Wall of Los Angeles , 1976-84 It’s over 90 on a summer day in LA. Below street level, in a concrete flood control channel in the Valley, eighty at-risk kids of different ethnicities struggle with the unfamiliar tools of the mural trade—lots of paint gets splashed around—but under the direction of Judy Baca and a team of artists, in that summer of 1976 they completed 1,000 feet of the most remarkable mural in a city famous for them: The Great Wall of Los Angele

American Dream Machine , 2005, Autry Museum of the American West With his trademark blend of traditional imagery, contemporary experience, and vibrant color and form, Harry Fonseca created a body of work as varied as it is powerful. His works stretch our understanding of indigenous art and show us—if we need reminding—that the news from native California is good. Fonseca, who is of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese heritage, began his art career in the 1960s at Cal St

Coast Highway Culvert , 1960, Laguna Beach Art Museum Stripped of oleanders and other abuse-tolerant plants, the freeways, in their geometry and sleekness, have inspired many visual artists, especially in the Midcentury years. One of my favorites is Roger Kuntz. Kuntz’ eerie, human-less, and in fact car-less images from the early 1960s read as both figuration and abstraction, moving between these two opposite artistic stances just as the then-new freeways allowed a transition

Sentinels , 1917, SFMOMA Imagine the thrill of being called “the most advanced artist in San Francisco,” “a crusader for the modern movement,” and a “masterly” and “virile” painter—all while being a woman! That’s Anne Bremer—socialist, feminist, friend of Jack London, and one of NorCal’s foremost painters at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her travels to New York and Europe inspired her to lead San Francisco out of its Tonalist reverie and into a modern style of landscape

Suburban Nightmare , 1982 , UCI Langson/Orange County Museum of Art For a candy-colored view of the streets of Los Angeles, look no further than Carlos Almaraz. Born in Mexico, Almaraz arrived at age 9 in LA, a place, he said, that seemed like a dream. The feeling stayed with him. Almaraz went to UCLA and earned an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1974 and was one of the founding members of the influential Chicano art collective Los Four. He spent several years