Last Week to See Jennybird Alcantara's "Creatures of Saintly Disguise"

Jennybird's amazing solo show Creatures of Saintly Disguise will be coming to a close on Saturday, July 28. If you haven't made it in yet, swing by during our normal business hours, Tues-Sat 11am - 6pm. In the meantime, here's a beautiful view put together by Kerri:

For those without Adobe Flash capability, head over to the exhibit page HERE

Chuck Sperry Interview for "Occupy Bay Area" at YBCA

SF Bay Guardian Interview: 

To be a poster artist during Occupy: Chuck Sperry on psychedelic art, social change, and port shutdowns

July 20, 2012
Caitlin Donohue

"No one directed us to make these posters. No one asked. We just did it. And passed them out."

With Occupy's first anniversary sneaking up on us, has enough time past since its inception to reflect on its urban encampments and frightening conflicts with law enforcement in a rational, reasonable manner? Maybe rational is the wrong word -- I'm sure many would agree that the movement's major contributiont to date was a general firing up of the 99 percent, even of those 99 percenters who would sooner have ridden a bike to work than sit in on GA meeting in Oscar Grant Plaza. Through leaving its agenda undefined, Occupy allowed us all to paint our own hopes and dreams for the world onto it like a piece of drawing paper. 

For some more literally than others. This month, an exhibit opened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that accumulates the work of 25 Bay Area artists who spun their Occupy dreams into poster form. Chuck Sperry is perhaps one of the most well-known name of the bunch. Sperry's lived in the Bay since 1989, and recently came home early from a camping trip to answer our questions about his relationship with Occupy, the way he distributed his "This Is Our City And We Can Shut It Down" prints on the day of the Oakland port shutdown, and general "what does art mean" token asks. 

SFBG: At what moment did you realize that Occupy was an important event? How did you first hear about it? 

CS: Through the beginning of 2011, I was creating an installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curated by Renee de Cossio, with artists Chris Shaw and Ron Donovan. Each artist would install work in one of three artists' gallery windows on the side of the SFMOMA on Minna Street. The proposal for the installation was to bring the aesthetic of San Francisco's poster traditions to painting, and to realize these in monumental form. I wanted this piece to reflect San Francisco's poster history beginning in the freedom of speech movement through the 1960's, and to also reflect the psychedelic tradition that gave birth to the rock poster.

While I was working on an 11-foot by nine-foot acrylic painting, I was following the progress of the Arab Spring movements, Tahrir Square, and the gathering Occupy Wall Street movement that was spreading across America. I decided to use my reaction to these events as inspiration for an iconographic painting titled, "Saint Everyone." I wanted to express the opening mind, and spreading enlightened humanism, the decentralization of power -- or awakening sense of people power -- to the piece. I used vibrating, reactive colors to paint a figure holding an opening lotus (symbol of enlightenment), against a background of op-art circles, which communicate decentralization -- that the background has many centers -- like the movement which has no leaders.

"Saint Everyone" was installed at the SFMOMA in June 2011. So I was getting with it by then.

As Occupy Oakland was forming by the fall of 2011, my artist friend Jon-Paul Bail of Political Gridlock was printing his iconographic "Hella Occupy Oakland" posters on Frank Ogawa Plaza (re-named Oscar Grant Plaza) from the point when people were first gathering there. When I say printing, Jon-Paul Bail was printing live, right there, with a table set up in the open, printing and handing people freshly-made posters. In a few short weeks he had printed hundreds, if not, thousands of posters which were being handed out to people there. He was joined there on Oscar Grant Plaza by Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde, who created more iconographic posters for the Occupy movement.

SFBG: What led to your decision to make art inspired by Occupy? Was it a different process than your other creative projects?

CS: In September I was in an art show, LA VS. WAR, with Bail, Barraza, and Cervantes, (among others) and we discussed making posters for the November 2 Occupy action to close the Port of Oakland. Fellow artist Chris Shaw -- who was involved in the SFMOMA Window Gallery Installation -- offered to pay for the production of any Occupy posters through the printing account of rock band Moonalice who was in solidarity with Occupy. 

I created "This Is Our City, And We Can Shut It Down." I usually work with images and take a lot of time to work my art into a design. In this case, the message was so overriding and important that I felt it was my job as an artist to stay out of the way, and let the words and message do their job. So in this way it was different. I used color theories learned in studying the long San Francisco tradition of psychedelic poster art, the use of hot colors against cold colors to make the words read from a half mile away -- haha! I wanted a strong, radical message, used with bold nurturing colors that convey a positive emotion. It would not be a typical political poster.  

SFBG: How do you want your Occupy poster to be used?

CS: Chris Shaw and I discussed printing our posters on heavy paper stock, and printing on both sides to double the exposure we could give people to our message. You could use this poster as a placard, hold it up over your head. It would make quite an impression and be useful to the action. I stood at Oscar Grant Plaza next to the street and passed out nearly 1000 posters in 45 minutes to the front of the march, so when television camares picked up the action at the Port of Oakland, the front of the march was a sea of my poster with the message, "This Is Our City, And We Can Shut It Down." No one directed us to make these posters. No one asked. We just did it. And passed them out.

SFBG: What's been some of your favorite protest art throughout history?

CS: I am very inspired by Emory Douglas' art in the Black Panther Party newspaper. I've had the honor to work with Mr. Douglas to reprint some of his iconic images. I also am very fond of the French Situationist posters of May 1968, and had the good fortune to print a poster, while I was visiting Paris to make a poster show about five years ago, on the very same press that produced these memorable images. When my artist friend told me that Guy Debord had worked with artists on this very same press, I laughed and dropped to my knees and just could not believe it.

Sperry at Occupy

I invited Jon-Paul Bail to collaborate in teaching a class at the Free University of San Francisco, as I'm organizing the art department of that cooperatively-organized free school. We told the story of making posters for the Occupy movement and created a poster for the Occupy Education action last spring. I think the ideas coming together from the Occupy protests will move through society in a very healthy and transformative way. There's no way to stop people once they have been awakened to their potential. 

SFBG: What is the role of art in social protest?

CS: Art can reach many people in many walks of life. I was invited by San Francisco's Varnish fine art gallery to exhibit at SCOPE / Miami in conjunction with Art Basel Miami art fair. Even in the context of the fine art world I felt it was important to express the social revolution that was taking place through the Occupy movement, and created a piece titled, "Mind Spring," which expressed some of the same ideas I put in my SFMOMA painting and my Occupy poster. In "Mind Spring", I created an icon of the worldwide Occupy movement and it’s antecedent in the Arab Spring. The figure wreathed in blooming spring flowers is a representation of the surprising enlightened humanism, the opening mind, the broadened socio-political possibilities which has swept the world in 2011.

I've had many discussions about the role of political art over the years. Two solutions to this problem constantly come to mind, first, "content over style" -- that content is more important than style. Your message is the most important element in creating art of social protest. Second, that "the personal is political", your own experience is so very often shared by others all over the world. When you make a piece of art in social protest, and just tell your story from your own perspective, and you do not hold back, you will be describing a situation that is shared by others half a world away. It's uncanny, but our local problems are very similar to everyone else's globally. So get in there and try to change what you can from where you are. Many hands make light work.  

"Occupy Bay Area"

Through Oct. 14

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

Saint Everyone, 2011
Chuck Sperry

Mind Spring, 2011
Chuck Sperry

UPDATED from SFBG.com

Beyond the Veil: An interview with Jennybird Alcantara

Painter Jennybird Alcantara  is best known for minutely detailed oil paintings filled with a symbolism that draw the viewer deeply into a world both strange and beautiful.  At its core her work has a dreamlike narrative that emanates from a central figure, encouraging us to contemplate the complex interconnectedness of opposites as seen through the prism of myth, fable and fantasy. 

She took some time from working on her upcoming solo show at Varnish Fine Art, Creatures of Saintly Disguise (June 9-July 28, 2012) to answer a slew of questions about the ever unfolding universe of characters and symbols emerging from her brush. 

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

I did art as a kid, like everybody does art as a kid. Officially I’d say, when I made this kind of announcement in my head that I didn’t want to be a veterinarian anymore, was probably around 11 or 12 years old. I didn't really know what being an “artist” meant, but I knew it was something I really enjoyed, that I was good at it and that I got praise for it from my parents.

My mom and her best friend were crafters. They would make cradles and sell them at these craft fairs and I’d paint the little teddy bear scenes on the front of the cradle. My friend Sheri and I started making little clay teddy bear dolls and little sculpted teddy bears in chairs and things and they let us have a little section of the booth. So from the time I was a kid I was always doing arts and crafts kind of stuff. It would be fun to find one of those cradles, "The first Jennybird sale!"

Struggle in the Garden of the Porcelain Queen 2009
 Oil on Wood
40 x 60" (diptych)

Rapping with Isabel Samaras

We enticed Isabel Samaras with chocolate away from her painting to answer some burning questions about her work, process, influences and how the past, present and alternate dimensions come together to create new narratives for old characters.  Isabel, represented by Varnish Fine Art, is best known for lush and meticulously painted riffs on Old Masters that send up pop culture and classic fables. Her subjects are tender, witty, and mysterious painted narratives that are classical in technique and pop in content. Her ribald images are interwoven with references to classic horror movies, ancient mythology, hip-hop music, and childhood fairy tales. Magical realism and the forbidden fantasies of fabled characters present a world where elusive desires become reality and ill-fated journeys turn into enchanted honeymoons.  

From Beginning to End: Ron Garrigues

Farewell to the Gorgons

Mind Spring featuring Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw and Ron Donovan ends Saturday, so come by the gallery for a last look at the Gorgons, hand-pulled screenprints, and luminescent originals.  

You'll find Sperry in the Mission Sunday teaching an art class, and you'll never get better silkscreen instruction:

Occupy Art with Jon-Paul Bail & Chuck Sperry

Jon-Paul Bail & Chuck Sperry present
OCCUPY Art!
an Art Course at the Free University

Sunday February 19th, 2012

The Free Uni­ver­sity of San Fran­cisco Art Class is every Sun­day from 2:30pm to 5:00pm (Feb­ru­ary 5th to March 4th) at Vira­cocha - 998 Valen­cia Street (at 21st Street), San Fran­cisco, CA.

The Free Uni­ver­sity of San Fran­cisco aims to make the high­est level of edu­ca­tion avail­able, com­pletely free, to any indi­vid­ual who wants it, regard­less of color, creed, age, gen­der, nation­al­ity, reli­gion or immi­gra­tion sta­tus — a uni­ver­sity free of money, taught for free. The only require­ment for mem­ber­ship is a desire to teach and/or a desire to learn.

Course Descrip­tion:

The Free Uni­ver­sity Art School is very proud to present Jon-Paul Bail (of Polit­i­cal Grid­lock) pro­lific Bay Area artist who uses the streets of the world as his can­vas. Since last year’s bril­liant pre­sen­ta­tion of street art com­plete with a wheat paste demon­stra­tion (video taken by yours truly) at the Free Uni­ver­sity, Jon-Paul Bail has been extremely active mak­ing a series of Hella Occupy posters for the Occupy move­ment across California.

The Relaunch(es) make way for Mind Spring

With the Relaunch Part II (all sculpture show) ending tomorrow, Varnish Fine Art is pleased to present the upcoming show: 

Mind Spring: New paintings, installations, and limited silkscreen editions by Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, and Ron Donovan.  Lending rock and alternative music a form of visual expression in sync with their urban environments, Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, and Ron Donovan embrace, alter, re-assign meaning and re-contextualize images until they become the medium-the subject emerging, used purposely--irreverently or reverently--to transform ephemeral events and experiences into a lexicon of shared cultural visual memory.

Please join us for the Mind Spring opening reception on Saturday, January 14th, 4pm to 7pm.  On exhibit through February 18.

In the title piece Mind Spring (shown above), Chuck Sperry creates an icon of the Worldwide Occupy Movement and it's antecedent in the Arab Spring. The figure wreathed in blooming spring flowers is a representation of the surprising enlightened humanism, the opening mind, the broadened socio-political possibilities which has swept the world in 2011.

Chuck Sperry has honed the craft of designing and hand screen printing for over 15 years to become recognized throughout the world as one of the foremost rock poster artists. Elevating the craft to fine art, Sperry creates socio-political artwork beyond rock. He adheres to the ideal that beauty strengthens his message. Sperry works in San Francisco, but exhibits internationally from Bristol to Belgrade. He has been featured in documentaries for film and television in the US, Europe and Australia.

Chris Shaw's work (shown above) is collected by both rock poster fans as well as art collectors. Shaw’s posters and paintings have been featured in several books, notably, The Art Of Modern Rock. Shaw’s artwork has also been published in a myriad of newspapers and magazines both domestically and abroad. German Rolling Stone magazine named Chris Shaw “Artist of the Year” in 2001. Shaw’s posters were featured in the 2009 documentary film “American Artifact”. In 2011, Shaw, Sperry and Donovan collaborated on a 6 month installation exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.


For the last 2 decades Ron Donovan has created hundreds of cutting-edge rock posters (pictured at left), all the while spilling spurious political propaganda. Prolific rock art poster artist Ron Donovan opened The Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company together with Chuck Sperry in the late '90's. Donovan became well known for his rene­gade, abun­dant cre­ative energy and can­did expres­sion. His Pacific Island back­ground and influ­ence invig­o­rated his focus on Amer­i­can polit­i­cal satire and rela­tions, and multi-cultural stud­ies. It was also in col­lege where he met Chris Shaw, fel­low col­lab­o­ra­tor.


Give us a shout at the gallery or visit our website for more information about this exhibit.