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. Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life."
Jess Collins, simply known today as Jess, was an American visual artist.
John Currin is an American painter based in New York City. He is most recognised for his technically proficient satirical figurative paintings that explore controversial sexual and societal topics. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body, and has stressed that his characters are reflections of himself rather than inspired by real people.
Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.
Stefan Kürten is a contemporary German artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf. Known for his intricate paintings of domestic and urban landscapes, Kürten has exhibited extensively since 1984 and his work is held in a number of collections in Europe and the United States.
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.
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.
Julius Hatofsky was an American painter.
JB Blunk (1926–2002) was a sculptor who worked primarily in wood and clay. In addition to the pieces he produced in wood and ceramics, Blunk worked in other media, including jewelry, furniture, painting, bronze, and stone.
Brett Reichman is an American painter and educator. He was a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute where he taught both in the graduate and undergraduate programs. His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues. These exhibitions included Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles, Beyond Loss at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. However, after legislation passed in 1989 that restricted federal funding for art dealing with homosexuality and AIDS, artists like Reichman approached their themes subtly. His And the Spell Was Broken Somewhere Over the Rainbow is embellished with colors of the rainbow and presents three clocks. It references Oz while actually indirectly addressing the new reality that San Francisco could no longer be viewed as a land of enchantment due to the AIDS crisis. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984.
Ala Ebtekar is an American contemporary visual artist, of Iranian descent. He is known for his work in painting, drawing, illumination, and installation. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe, and time, gazing back at us.
Anglim Trimble Gallery, formerly Gallery Paule Anglim, and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, is a contemporary commercial art gallery which is located at Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, California The gallery was founded by Paule Anglim in the early 1970s.
Robert Kushner(; born 1949, Pasadena, CA) is an American contemporary painter who is known especially for his involvement in Pattern and Decoration. He has been called "a founder" of that artistic movement. In addition to painting, Kushner creates installations in a variety of mediums, from large-scale public mosaics to delicate paintings on antique book pages.
Judith Linhares is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings. She came of age and gained recognition in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s and 1970s and has been based in New York City since 1980. Curator Marcia Tucker featured her in the influential New Museum show, "'Bad' Painting" (1978), and in the 1984 Venice Biennale show, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade." Linhares synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor. Art historian Whitney Chadwick wrote, "Linhares is an artist for whom painting has always mattered as the surest path of synthesizing experience and interior life," her works "emerging as if by magic from an alchemical stew of vivid complementary hues and muted tonalities." Critic John Yau describes her paintings "funny, strange, and disconcerting," while writer Susan Morgan called them "unexpected and indelible" images exploring "an oddly sublime territory where exuberant bliss remains inseparable from ominous danger."
Travis Collinson is a visual artist whose paintings take elements from photographs and sketches and reinterpret them at larger scale.
Pamela Helena Wilson is an American artist. She is best known for watercolor drawings and paintings derived from photographs, largely of news events, architectural forms and landscapes. Her journalistic sources frequently portray scenes of natural and human-made calamity and the conflict, devastation and reactions that follow, often involving teeming crowds and demonstrations. Wilson's process and visual editing obscure these events, translating the images into suggestive, new visual experiences with greater urgency, universality and an open-endedness that plays against expectations. In 2013, critic Michelle Grabner wrote, "The luminosity of watercolor on white paper and the alluring atmospheric effects [Wilson] achieves in this medium creates images that are neither photographic or illustrational but seductively abstract and representational."
Don Dudley is an American artist who has worked on both the West Coast and East Coast of the United States. His early work is associated with the Finish Fetish school in California of the late 1960s as well as with New York Minimalism of the 1970s. Dudley studied painting at the Chouinard Institute with Abstract Expressionist painter Richards Ruben.
Léonie Guyer is a contemporary artist based in San Francisco. She makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, prints, and artist books. Her post-minimalist abstract work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces.
Katherine Sherwood is an American artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California who is known for paintings that explore disability, feminism, and healing, and for her teaching and disability rights activism at the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dean Byington, is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is known for large, hyper-detailed mixed-media paintings and paper collages of labyrinthine landscapes and invented universes that serve as settings for enigmatic allegories on nature, culture, time and humanity's effect on the planet. Seamless amalgams of images reworked from diverse sources, including his own stylized drawings, his art evokes fairy tales gone awry, the precision of centuries-old etchings and cartographic detail, and utopian and dystopian science-fiction. In 2017, critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote, "achieving a profound, operatic feat of scale, density, and clarity … Byington’s surrealism is that of dreams and memories, with an internal logic that unifies Eastern and Western antiquity, the consequences of climate change, the engineering of urban sprawl, and the limited role of culture in making sense of the soul- and soil-crushing weight of all that civilization."
