On April 11th, the art department at Sacramento State held it's eleventh annual Art History Symposium. This year's symposium, titled
Here as Everywhere: Art of the Sixties and Seventies in Northern California, dealt with re-looking at regional art in Northern California in the post World War II decades and the relation of Northern Californian artists to the entire world of art. The symposium consisted of five speakers, including a keynote by Michael Schwager.
The keynote speaker, Michael Schwager of Sonoma State University, spoke on the fifties and early sixties in a lecture titled
Don't Hide the Madness: Bay Area Art in the 1950's and 60's, named after the Allen Ginsberg poem,
On Burrough's Work. For much of his talk, Schwager concentrated on the California School of Fine Arts, now San Francisco Art Institute, and specific artists who he thought were paramount to understand art in the bay area at this time.
After talking about some of the stereotypes of the 1950's, Schwager started off by speaking about the widespread peace movement in art at the time and how San Francisco artist, Wally Hedrick, painted
Peace Flag in 1953, a year before Japer Johns' famous
Flag. Hedrick took the fatalities of the Korean War personally, according to Schwager, and was vehemently anti-war.
Wally Hedrick, Peace Flag, 1953.
The California School of Fine Arts, Schwager explained, was the center of abstract expressionism in the bay area. It was also home to some prominent female artists, notably Deborah Remington, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown and Sonia Gretchoff, and African American artists, like Hayward King, making it seem more accepting of diversity in the fifties, unlike its New York counterparts.
Schwager emphasized artists like Peter Voulkos, the revolutionary ceramic sculptor, Bruce Connor, Richard Diebenkorn, Manual Neri, and Joan Brown. These artists were of the Beat generation and often dealt with isolation, depression, and fears of nuclear destruction.
Dr. Makeda Best, an associate professor at California College of the Arts, gave a talk on political posters during the sixties and seventies, titled
Radicalizing the Artistic: Production Models, Techniques, and Forms of the Political Poster in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Best spoke about the history of using posters to show concern, for college students to protest, and for civil rights activists to promote their message. She concentrated on the posters by Garcia and Montoya, two artists of the Chicano Movement. Best is interested in how these artists work in with print work on a national scale, opposed to a regional one.
Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Cornucopia, 1974.
Next on the roster was Bridget Gilman who spoke about responses to gentrification through art in the late seventies in San Francisco in a lecture titled
Urban Transformation and Aesthetic Experimentation: Responses to Gentrification in 1970s San Francisco. Gilman concentrated primarily on billboards that represented the shifting landscape of San Francisco. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan experimented with billboards as shown in their
Cornucopia from 1974 and their
Oranges on Fire billboard that resulted after their billboard was covered by a Sunkist advertisement in 1975. Their
Ties billboard, 1978, moved to the financial district after being in a more industrial area representing the shift in San Francisco. Gilman also focused on artist, Janet Delaney, who worked against the ideas of gentrification. Gilman sees landscapes as a complex, critical tool.
Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Oranges on Fire, 1975.
Matthew Weseley spoke on Robert Colescott's Search for Identity. After a trip to Egypt, Colescott fully realized his non-European identity and began to paint satirical, comic inspired paintings on the theme of racist stereotypes. Paintings like The Green Glove Rapist and Aunt Jemima's Pancakes featured minstrel figures and dealt with sexual harassment, racism, and commercialism.
The final speaker of the event was Nicolas Rosenthal, who spoke on Native American art in a talk titled, Painting a Cultural Resurgence: California Indian Artists in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Rosenthal, New Mexico and Oklahoma are most well known for being the narrative of Native American art, but there was a vibrant scene in Northern California in the sixties and seventies as well. California art was less hindered by the idea that Native American art had to be what was considered traditional Indian art. Rosenthal discussed artists like Frank Day, Frank LaPena, Jean LaMarr, Brian Tripp, and Harry Fonseca to show California's colorful, rich history of Native American art. In Frank LaPena's Bear Dancer, Native American oral history and research was interpreted. In Harry Fonseca's Coyote works, the artist commented on modern culture and Native Americans. According to Frank LaPena, who was in the audience, the message of Indian art is universal to all indigenous peoples on a global scale.
Frank LaPena, Bear Dancer, 1983.
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