Laurie Halsey Brown is an American artist and curator based in San Francisco. [1] Best known for her collaborative projects incorporating urban landscapes, Brown founded, in 2008, the artistic laboratory senseofplace LAB. [2] [3]
Brown earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, [4] studied psychology in New York, and worked in Rotterdam for five years. She taught a course of her own design, “Interdisciplinary Media and Contemporary Society”, at The New School from 2000 to 2012. She has lived in San Francisco since 2007. [3]
Brown was one of 15 artists that were part of a residency program, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, located in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center when the September 11 attacks destroyed both the working space and the council's Tower 5 office. The group exhibited nonetheless, showing at the nearby New Museum of Contemporary Art. Brown re-used material from her original project and, wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter, produced "something very different in tone and meaning. Using bits from a film about the ubiquitous security surveillance at the trade center, she has simulated the panoramic view she saw daily from her Tower 1 studio windows: New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty to the south, Tower 2 to the southeast." [5] The work incorporated footage she had taken the day before the attacks. [6]
While living in Rotterdam, Brown created a webcast and poster addressing controversies over squatting in the Netherlands. Brown's series, Honoring Japan's 'sense of place', includes a triptych that combines a textile with photograph of a crowded intersection that echos the cloth's colors and grid. Another work, also employing juxtaposition of two mediums, combines a photo of people sitting over a canal two abstract watercolors. "When I'm in a place", she was quoted in SFWeekly, "it's not just seeing one thing—it's a layering of different things, with lots of different elements." [6]
In October 2013, Brown invited four artists, Jeff Hantman, Alicia Escott, Brian King and Githinji Mbire, to create works using debris dumped illegally on the streets of Oakland. The resulting works employed, among other found objects, a truck tire, leather couch, and jawbone from an unidentified rodent. [7] [8]
Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.
Coit Tower is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California, overlooking the city and San Francisco Bay. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built between 1932 and 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.
Julia Morgan was an American architect and engineer. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.
Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California is part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in 1871 and became the second women's college west of the Rockies. In 2022, it merged with Northeastern University.
Jay DeFeo was an American visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
Hung Liu (劉虹) was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.
Karen Finley is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. The case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, was decided against Finley and the other artists. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work. She is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
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.
Salma Arastu is an internationally exhibited woman artist known for her unique global perspective, reflecting her diverse cultural background and experiences. Born in Rajasthan, India, Aratsu pursued her formal education in Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India. She was raised in the Sindhi and Hindu traditions and later embraced Islam and moved to the USA in 1986, currently residing in California. As a woman, artist, and mother, Arastu's creative endeavors aim to foster harmony and express the universality of humanity through various art forms, including paintings, sculpture, and poetry. She has also worked extensively with calligraphy and produces greeting cards for the American Muslim community.
Laurie Simmons is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Recology, formerly known as Norcal Waste Systems, is a waste management company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company collects and processes municipal solid waste, reclaiming reusable materials. The company also operates transfer stations, materials recovery facilities (MRFs), a number of landfills, and continues to spearhead renewable energy projects. Recology is the largest organics compost facility operator by volume in the United States.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Lutz Bacher was an artist closely associated with Berkeley, California since the 1970s, and who lived and worked in New York City from 2013 until her death. The name Lutz Bacher was a pseudonym, and the artist did not publicly reveal a former name. She was once considered a figure with "cult" status—known for being "legendary but elusive" in the California art scene. Since the early 2000s, her work increasingly gained mainstream recognition.
Deborah Remington was an American abstract painter. Her most notable work is characterized as Hard-edge painting abstraction.
Anne Walsh is an American visual artist who works with video, performance, audio, photography, and text.
Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is based in Oakland, California.
Benny Alba is an artist who lives in Oakland, California.
Lauren Halsey is a contemporary American artist. Halsey uses architecture and installation art to demonstrate the realities of urban neighborhoods like South Central, Los Angeles.
Olive Madora Ayhens, is an American visual artist. She first gained recognition in California in the 1970s for stylized figurative work, but is most known for the fantastical, dizzying cityscapes, landscapes and interiors, often depicting New York City, that she has painted since the mid-1990s. These works intermingle the urban and pastoral, and inside and outside, employing absurd juxtapositions, improbabilities of scale and vibrant colors, in pointed but playful explorations of the clash between civilization and nature. New York Sun critic David Cohen has described her images as "poised between the lyrical and the apocalyptic. They capture both the poetry and the politics of the densely populated, literally and metaphorically stratified, used and abused city." She is based in Brooklyn, New York.