Summer’s last breezes
Time running out for final glance at season’s invigorating exhibitions
As the summer winds down, those sprawling, loose-themed group exhibitions that grace most art gallery walls in August will give way to more rigorous fare. Beginning Sept. 6 and opening throughout the fall, the Bay Area has a lot of serious art to look forward to. Before we say goodbye to the lighter fare, however, we might want to pay visits to a couple of invigorating exhibitions. One, “Division of Labor,” a pop-up exhibition at Minnesota Street Project, closes Saturday, Aug. 25, so time is very short. The other, at Guerrero Gallery through Sept. 15, is actually three small shows in one. They are grouped under the unwieldy moniker “Binder of Women: Heat Wave/
Reaching Point Break and A Group Show Curated by Laura Rokas and Maryam Yousif.”
“Division of Labor” was organized by Chris Grunder, who with Clea Massiani runs a small but energetic gallery called Bass & Reiner. Though it emulates commercial galleries in some respects, Bass & Reiner’s website calls it “a curatorial project with the goal of introducing local artists to a broader audience and bringing artwork from elsewhere to the Bay Area.” That altruistic underpinning shores up the current exhibition, staged in two substantial but temporary spaces, downstairs from the gallery’s permanent quarters.
The show comprises the work of 44 individuals better known for their day jobs in Bay Area visual arts organizations and businesses than for their activity as artists. Some, such as California College of the Arts President Stephen Beal, who exhibits and sells his compulsively precise abstract paintings, engage in dual careers. Others — among them curators, administrators, critics, framers and lots of museum preparators — make art with little expectation of attention outside their personal circles.
There is no price list, no sales strategy — though Grunder will gladly put a potential buyer and artist into direct contact. It’s an exhibition assembled for the pure joy of sharing among people whose professions promote the art of other people.
Given that democratic selection standard, the general level of the work is surprisingly high — though the participants’ regular exposure to the work of other top artists probably keeps them sharp. Plus, Grunder has a great eye. Forced to pick favorites, I would single out art administrator Michelle Mansour’s meditative “Getting Back to Center” (2017) and elementary school teacher Courtney Johnson’s loopy “Ibis” (2018), a painting of rancid green hands against orange bunting.
But in John DeMerritt’s odd dioramas (“Three Rooms,” 2017), assembled from binder’s board and handmade paper, and Conrad Meyers’ ethereal “Non-Object #1 (Follicle),” formed of laminated acrylic sheets, we see loose ends of the exhibition come together. DeMerritt is a bookbinder, Meyers a fabricator for artists and designers. The Binder of Women: Forming a collective of female artists is hardly a new idea. The Dinner Party creator Judy Chicago’s sometimes controversial efforts to bring female artists together, beginning with the quasiacademic Feminist Art Program founded at Fresno State College in 1970, may be the best known. San Francisco Women Artists, in the city’s Inner Sunset District, claims a heritage that goes back to 1887.
Not all such groups can lay current claim to the vitality demonstrated by a Los Angeles collective founded last year, though. The Binder of Women, which has about a dozen members, sent exuberant paintings and collages to its first San Francisco joint exhibition, titled “Heat Wave.” The group also chose to introduce a small number of nonmembers in a pendant show called “Reaching Point Break.”
In contrast to the noncommercial approach of “Division of Labor,” Binder of Women pledges, in part, to “take action to grow the number of works by female identifying artists in contemporary art collections.” Accordingly, all the works in the Guerrero Gallery show are for sale, many for less than $1,000. Highlighting that point breaks a personal rule to stay away from art market discussions, but it makes clear that getting work on collectors’ walls is a priority at least equal to making money.
Some works seem on the edge of science and spiritualism. Kysa Johnson’s “Blow Up 325 ...” (2017) is a radiant complexity of finely drawn colored lines, somewhat in the manner of Julie Mehretu, that look like time-lapse representations of the night sky. Others are sweetly pathetic, like Sarah Thibault’s “Fold” (2018) — a personified flower, bowing in obeisance or exhaustion.
Ginger Wolfe-Suarez presents a landscape-like reverie, less than a foot square but slight only in a material sense. That it is made with handmade dye from ocean plants, shells and salt water on silk adds an alchemical element. Erin Morrison cast, carved and painted gypsum concrete to create panels that have the feel of Eastern religious objects of veneration.
Whether it tells us anything about art by women, or Los Angeles women or even the shared concerns of these particular women, I can’t say. But it is a gentle show and a joyful one, and a welcome break in the emotional heat wave to which all California has lately been subjected.