Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric,lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings,these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.
Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster,bronze,and marble. In Neri's work with the figure,he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia,California;in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara,Italy,for working in marble. Over four decades,beginning in the early 1970s,Neri worked primarily with the same model,Mary Julia Klimenko,creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at University of California,Davis for nearly three decades.
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture,gallerist,and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art,mechanical kinetic sculpture,junk/assemblage sculpture,Pop Art,and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life,he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings,Conceptual Art,Bad Painting,Neo-Expressionism,and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading,and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist”long before the label “conceptual art”entered the art world,and experimented with innovative use of language in art,at times resorting to puns.
David Gilhooly,was an American ceramicist,sculptor,painter,printmaker,and professor. He is best known for pioneering the Funk art movement. He made a series of ceramic frogs called FrogWorld,as well as ceramic food,planets,and other creatures.
Funk art is an American art movement that was a reaction against the nonobjectivity of abstract expressionism. An anti-establishment movement,Funk art brought figuration back as subject matter in painting again rather than limiting itself to the non-figurative,abstract forms that abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were depicting. The movement's name was derived from the jazz musical term "funky",describing the passionate,sensuous,and quirky. During the 1920s,jazz was thought of as very basic,unsophisticated music,and many people believed Funk was an unrefined style of art as well. The term funk also had negative connotations because the word had an association with a foul odor. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s,Funk was a popular art form,mainly in California's Bay Area in the United States. Although discussed as a cohesive movement,Funk artists did not feel as if they belonged to a collective art style or group. This is because while its artists shared the same attitudes and created similar works,they were not necessarily working together.
William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing,painting,sculpture,film,performance,and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.
Fletcher C. Benton was an American sculptor and painter from San Francisco,California. Benton was widely known for his kinetic art as well as his large-scale steel abstract geometric sculptures.
Arthur Putnam was an American sculptor and animalier who was recognized for his bronze sculptures of wild animals. Some of his artworks are public monuments. He was a well-known figure,both statewide and nationally,during the time he lived in California. Putnam was regarded as an artistic genius in San Francisco and his life was chronicled in the San Francisco and East Bay newspapers. He won a gold medal at the 1915 San Francisco world's fair,officially known as the Panama–Pacific International Exposition,and was responsible for large sculptural works that stand in San Francisco and San Diego. Putnam exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913,and his works were also exhibited in New York,Philadelphia,Chicago,Paris,and Rome.
Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver,best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.
Mary Snowden is an American painter and educator. She is known for works that use humor to explore issues of feminist identity and consumerism.
Cheryl Marie Bowers,known as Ciel Bergman,was an American painter of Swedish origin. Her work,considered post-modern,has a focus on the environment as well as feminine consciousness.
Peter Howard Selz was a German-born American art historian and museum director and curator who specialized in German Expressionism.
James Darrell Northrup Weeks was an American artist and an early member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Unlike many artists in the movement,Weeks was never known for painting in a non-representational style,instead using abstraction in the "ideas of painting." He further diverged from his colleagues in the rigidity of his figures,a characteristic that Anita Ventura described as "[painting] not for expression so much as comprehension."
Jacques Schnier (1898–1988) was a Romanian-born American artist,sculptor,author,educator,and engineer. He was a sculpture professor at the University of California,Berkeley from 1936 to 1966.
Robert Brokl is an American visual artist and activist based in the Bay Area,known for expressive woodblock printmaking and painting that has focused on the figure,landscape and travel for subject matter. His visual language combines the influences of German Expressionism,Japanese woodblock printing and the Bay Area Figurative Movement with a loosely autobiographical,Romantic interest in representing authentic personal experience,inner states and nature. Critics and curators characterize his style by its graphic line,expressive gestural brushwork,tactile surfaces and sensitivity to color,mood and light.
Brian Wall is a British-born American sculptor now living in California. His work consists mainly of abstract welded steel constructions,and his career stretches over six decades. He has had numerous solo shows,and his sculptures reside in many private and museum collections. He was a faculty member at the Central School of Art in London,and a professor of art at the University of California,Berkeley.
Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian,author,and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades,both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art,overlooked artists of the past,women artists,and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention;among the best known are:"The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism","Visual Politics:The Art of Engagement",and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff,Roy De Forest,and Franklin Williams. Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics,National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation,among others. Critics,including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight,praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism,De Forest,Richard Diebenkorn,and Bernice Bing,among others,as pioneering. In 2021,Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art." Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19,2020.
