San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Artist captured faces of AIDS victims
“I am painting courage and strength. It is, above all, about life.” Jackie Kirk, artist
Once a week for 30 years, from 1977 to 2007, aspiring artists were invited to bring a sample of their work to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to be critiqued by staff curator Robert Flynn Johnson.
Only one of these aspirants got a solo museum exhibition out of it — a middleaged Fairfax woman named Jackie Kirk who brought three portraits of AIDS victims she’d painted in acrylic on stiff rag paper.
Those three portraits were the seeds of what became “The Face of AIDS,” a 1991 exhibition at the Legion of Honor that may have been the first to visually address the health crisis that San Francisco was then confronting.
It took some pleading by Johnson to make it happen, in part because Kirk was unknown and because AIDS was at that point virtually untouchable as a topic for fine art.
“San Francisco was having a nervous breakdown over the AIDS crisis, and nobody was artistically addressing it like Jackie was. She caught that crisis through her art,” said Johnson, now curator emeritus. “I’m as proud of the exhibition ‘The Face of AIDS’ as any exhibition I did in my 32 years at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.”
What made the series unique is that Kirk painted a selfportrait after each time she painted a dying AIDS victim. They hung side by side in the gallery to reflect what she felt while staring into the eyes of a dying man.
“Perhaps some people may approach this show with fear,” she wrote in her artist’s statement for the historic show. “They may think it is about death. It is not. I am painting courage and strength. It is, above all, about life.”
“The Face of AIDS” traveled to other museums and became both a book and a documentary film. Kirk kept painting into her 90s. She had painted on May 21, the day she suffered a stroke at her home in Fairfax, said her daughter Bobbi Wilson. She died one day later, at age 91.
“Jackie was a talented, determined, really almost saintly individual in her love of her fellow man,” Johnson said. “She was an expressionistic realist, and her style of painting conveyed emotional feeling through her vigorous brushwork and color.”
Jacqueline E. Karbach was born July 28, 1929, in Oakland.
When she was in 11, the family moved to Edina, Minn., and at 12, she won a contest to attend art classes at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
“I saw ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, and I didn’t feel so alone,” she later wrote. “Edvard Munch had a way of speaking his own personal truth that touched me and changed the way I felt forever.”
After graduating from Washburn High School in 1947, she entered the University of Minnesota to study fine art, but dropped out to launch an interior design firm with Robert Osterhaus, whom she married in 1954. Soon thereafter they closed the design firm and headed to California, where she took up painting again.
She and Osterhaus had two children before they divorced. She then married Neal Kirk. That marriage didn’t last, but the last name Kirk did. She was a single mom living on food stamps in San Rafael when she secured a tuition subsidy to Sonoma State University. She got her teaching credential in 1973 and got her first job teaching art at San Rafael High School, with her daughter in her class.
While there, she painted a portrait of one of her students who was dying of leukemia. It was the start of her career as a portrait artist, which she honed while teaching art therapy courses at nursing homes.
Her approach was influenced by German Expressionism, which encouraged the inner feelings of the artist to seep into the portrait.
“I was angry at society for letting old people suffer,” she later wrote. “I realized my art was close to politics.”
Kirk did not believe in working from photographs of her subjects, or from preliminary sketches. She carried her full easel and oversize watercolor paper wherever she went. It took a commitment from the subject.
“She was extremely personal while painting me over several days,” said Kay Carlson, a Sausalito landscape painter who was part of a potluck group of artists whom Kirk practiced on, “asking the hard questions, yet always ready with a quick wit and a wicked, naughty laugh.”
At one of their monthly potlucks, Kirk brought her signature bean salad along with a portrait she had made of an AIDS victim named Larry, a Petaluma quilt maker she’d met through her neighbor Roger Keyes, an esteemed art historian.
A few months later, she brought a second AIDS portrait along with a selfportrait that was even more compelling. “She had invented this new way of responding to her subject,” Carlson said.
It took her four or five years to build a portfolio of AIDS portraits. She met most of her subjects at the Peter Claver Community, an HIV residential program in San Francisco run by Catholic Charities. She also painted a priest, a woman and a child, all of whom had gotten HIV from blood transfusions.
When Kirk told the potluck-ers that she were being given a solo premiere at the Legion of Honor, “It was a total stunner,” Carlson said. “She’d had local shows but not major gallery representation.”
Kirk continued painting portraits on commission and also drew abstract landscapes of West Marin using colored pencil, graphite and pen and ink. She brought her work and her bean salad to the monthly potluck dinners for 37 years, until COVID19 shut it down. Kirk had painted portraits of all 10. Now death has whittled the members to three.
“Jackie was a humanitarian in the true sense,” Carlson said. “She understood people in their deep places and could be with them in these deep places.”
Kirk’s third husband, Philip Rosenfeld, also a Fairfax artist, died in 2012. Survivors include daughter Bobbi Wilson of Sebastapol; son Tom J. Kirk of San Anselmo; and granddaughters Amanda Lincoln and Sophia Kirk, both of Seattle, and Winona Wagner of Sonoma.
A memorial exhibition of her portraits and recent work will open with a celebration of life at 3 p.m. on Aug. 21 at San Geronimo Valley Community Center, 5800 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., San Geronimo.