Gallery Opening Reception: "Girl Not Looking / Looking"

Danäe Anderson
November 7 – December 21, 2007
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Andrea Schwartz Gallery

They hung it this morning and I was able to grab a look on my lunch break! Her paintings are a mixture of Native American, Surrealist, Outsider, and Mexican art. She is able to produce this crackly surface that brings a fine layer of detail over a blanket of warm colors. The drifting movement created by thin lines over thick spaces of rich color has a yin and yang affect.

A graduate from CCA in 1978 and winner of several awards for her art. This is one of many shows she has had at Andrea Schwartz Gallery. If interested in meeting her, she will be around tomorrow evening for the opening reception.

Oakland Art Murmer

In Oakland: 1st Fridays

Satellite Gallery

Featuring: Annie Wong, Mary Anne Kluth, and Bryan Von Reuter.
Opening reception: Friday, Nov. 2nd 7-10 pm

You might have made it out last month for Nancy Chan's figurative lithographs. Do it again this Friday!

Black, Gold, White

Louise Nevelson
"Constructing A Legend"http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Oct. 27, 2007 - Jan. 13, 2007
de Young Museum

You should read biographical pieces on her. To some, she is considered the "grandmother of installation art." She was as iconic as Warhol who was creating pop art around the same time. A Jew the Ukraine who came to America when her father's job moved, her work associates strongly with the painful history of Nazi's occupation of Germany. Other influences in her work came from collaborating with Diego Riviera and the elements found in the Cubist movement. In a video interview, she says that everything in her work begins with the cube. You will see this in her wall pieces as they can be broken down to their beginnings as boxes in a grid structure. Each box (cube) contains its unique varying shapes and arrangements of found objects. The cube is important here as it keeps everything in order among all the different shapes.



Her works from 1955 struck me as the most impressive in this exhibit. It seems that around '55 she was beginning something that later exploded into the installation pieces. But I like the simple beginning of more compact, larger shaped sculptures. From this period, the "Chief" was among my favorites.

When you explore this exhibit you will be reminded of palaces. The change from back to white to gold seems as though you are traveling through castles in different villages. So go explore!

First Fridays

The Lab
Jesse Houlding
"Telluric Currents"
Opening: Friday November 2nd, 6-9pm

This gallery always has great opening receptions. Don't miss it this week!

First Thursdays!

Date Farmers
"The Ballad of Richie Valenz and Other True Stories"
Upper Playground/Fifty24SF


Opening: Nov. 1st, 7-9:30pm

"Presence of the Missing"

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98

Wrappings: remind me of elegance and death
it is like beauty comes full circle with its life span

Christo and Jean Claude are fascinating installation artists whose sketches can often be equally incredible. After viewing Christina Pettersson's pieces at MM Galleries and really processing them, I was brought back to Christo and Jean Claude. The bricks Pettersson draws and the flow of her bodies remind me of the couple's building wrapping sketches. The translucence of each is what attracts me. While one is a sketch for a future installation and the other a finished piece they both lead the viewer through new places of the past.


"The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality." cited


Christina Pettersson
MM Galleries
Mirabile Visu
A graduate of RISD, recently moved back to southern Florida, where she grew up.


I get suspicious when viewing works done with only graphite or black ink. I question the integrity of the artist, wondering what they are saying or what the work says about their energy involved in the piece. After standing in front of Pettersson's graphite drawings, I found a depth convincing me that these images take one places. The visual subjects, bricks and people, each contain rich textures, finite detail, and a surrealist nature. The emptiness, created through the floating images and the simple medium, contributes to the depth.

Electric Innovations

N. Sean Glover
M1 Gallery
Long Time Collective Plus One Exhibit
Oct.26- Nov. 9 2007

Playful drawings that make creatures out of boom boxes. His positive/negative images, created with simple black and white ink, make the drawings more about the balance of space and abstract shapes. He stands out in this exhibit, due to the use of 2D and sculptural mediums. A pile of boom boxes with cords collected in a trail, just as in the drawings, reminds me of balloons with their strings all gathered together, keeping them in a group and safe from floating off.
Glovers sculpture also incorporates light by reproducing formations created by stars in the night sky. The materials he uses are old kitchen pots and pans with holes punctured through where the projected light comes out. This is among his latest work for 2006-2007.

You can check out a YouTube video of his work for more visual understanding. If you are in Ireland you can check out the group show he is part of titled, "City of Ideas" in Galway this November.

The incorporation of technology as art is something his wife, Elizabeth, also in the LTC show, does. You can view her work here!

You Belive Their Definition Because...

Above: Lucretia

Serena Cole
Group Show: Mirabile Visu, at MM Galleries through November 26, 2007



The exhibit is based in memories from youth, carried as dreams, and causing distorted expectations for life. Cole's paintings of women, inspired from fashion magazines and pop culture, questions the Western standards of beauty. Her women are eerily attractive, in a familiar-to-your-association-with clothing and make-up advertisements. Throughout, Cole displays her ability to manipulate watercolor, pen, and at times gold leaf for an ephemeral experience with beauty.Having just finished her BFA in painting at CCA, she is pursuing future exhibits in San Francisco and beyond.



The overall gallery space is surprisingly peaceful and airy. All white interior, second floor location, tall ceilings, friendly gallery staff, and plenty of viewing space to accommodate many visitors.

Other notable artist in show: Michele Muennig

To Calm Yourself

Hiroshi Sugimoto

When his seascapes were on exhibit at the de Young I only got to visit them twice...I wanted so much more. Now he is at the Asian Art Museum and it will only wet your tongue in reaching your Sugimoto satisfaction.

This show is of small detailed items. They provide windows towards understanding and insight to other works he has done. Two such items are: "Time's Arrow," a small gilt bronze reliquary frame containing one of his seascapes and "Treasure Pagoda With Seaview Crystal Ball," a sculpture through which you can see a seascape upside down.

I was unable to find strong images of either of these but recommend his portfolio for other works.


Among his many exhibitions, I pulled out a few titles, as they most resemble what the viewer experiences.


1985
The Art of Memory/The Loss of History, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

1990
Reorienting: Looking East, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow/Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London

1994
Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan/ Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

2003
Liquid Sea, Museum of Contemporary of Art, Sydney