Renny Pritikin

Last updated

Renny Pritikin (born c. 1948) [1] is an American curator, museum professional, writer, poet, and educator. He was the chief curator of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum from 2014 to 2018. [2] He was Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis from 2004 to 2012.

Contents

Early life and education

Renny Pritikin was born in Brooklyn, New York to a nonreligious Jewish family. [1] Pritikin holds a BA degree from The New School for Social Research in New York. [1] He continued his studies and holds a master's degree in interdisciplinary art from San Francisco State University, where he studied under Jock Reynolds. [1]

Career

Pritikin has curated numerous exhibitions, and has authored catalogue essays and articles. Some of his projects include: Alan Rath: Robot Dance and Other Sculpture; Bay Area Now, a regional survey; Fred Tomaselli: The Urge to be Transported; Eight from South Africa; The Art of Star Wars ; Hall of Fame Hall of Fame; Don Ed Hardy at the Cuenca Bienal; and You See.

From 1979 to 1992 he served as executive director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco, [3] an alternative space internationally renowned for its presentations of new visual art, interdisciplinary performance, video, literature and music.

Pritikin worked at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1992 to 2004; [3] he served as the director of the visual arts program from 1992 to 1997, followed by chief curator for all artistic programs (film/video, visual art, performing arts, education) from 1997 to 2004.

Pritikin has been a frequent consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and was a founder of the National Association of Artists Organizations, and has also served on their board of directors. As a writer he received the 1989 McCarron Fellowship for art criticism, and has had four chapbooks of his poetry published, A Quiet in Front of the Best Western, (Museum Quality Press, 2014); How We Talk (Collective Foundation POD Press, 2007), All These Trees (e.g. Press, Oakland, 1985) and Fourth Gear City Limits (Two Windows Press, Berkeley, 1976). He was a contributing writer for Art Practical from 2009 until 2014.

He was the chief curator of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum from 2014 to 2018. [3] [2] [4]

In 1995, he received a United States Information Agency fellowship to tour and lecture in Japan and the Koret Israel Prize, a fellowship to visit Israel. In 1999 he travelled to Taiwan as a juror for the Ninth Annual International Print and Drawing Biennale at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In 2001 he was the curator chosen to represent the United States at the Cuenca (Ecuador) Bienal, and in 2003 he lectured in three cities in New Zealand as a Fulbright Fellow.

In addition to the California College of the Arts, he has taught art administration and artist professional skills training at San Francisco State University, and Golden Gate University.

Publications

Related Research Articles

Charles Desmarais is the Art Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

María de Mater O'Neill is a Puerto Rican artist, designer and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Hoffmann</span> Costa Rican writer and educator (born 1974)

Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contemporary Jewish Museum</span> Art Museum in California, United States

The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is a non-collecting museum at 736 Mission Street at Yerba Buena Lane in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The museum, which was founded in 1984, is located in the historic Jessie Street Substation, which was gutted and its interior redesigned by Daniel Libeskind, along with a new addition; the new museum opened in 2008. The museum's mission is to make the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a twenty-first century audience through exhibitions and educational programs.

New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 and located the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the United States, and New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art and involving artists in the decision-making process. Its first directors were Judy Moran and Renny Pritikin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph del Pesco</span>

Joseph Thomas Del Pesco is a contemporary art curator and arts writer. He is currently the International Director of Kadist.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marco Maggi</span>

Marco Maggi is a New York- and Uruguay-based artist whose work incorporates common materials such as office paper, aluminum foil, graphite, and apples to create micro drawings, sculptures, and macro installations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winston Branch</span> Saint Lucian artist (born 1947)

Winston Branch is a British artist originally from Saint Lucia, the sovereign island in the Caribbean Sea. He still has a home there, while maintaining a studio in California. Works by Branch are included in the collections of Tate Britain, the Legion of Honor De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, and the St Louis Museum of Art in Missouri. Branch was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, the British Prix de Rome, a DAAD Fellowship to Berlin, a sponsorship to Belize from the Organization of American States, and was Artist in Residence at Fisk University in Tennessee. He has been a professor of fine arts and has taught at several art institutions in London and in the US. He has also worked as a theatrical set designer with various theatre groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weston Teruya</span> Artist and arts administrator (b. 1977)

Weston Teruya is an Oakland-based visual artist and arts administrator. Teruya's paper sculptures, installations, and drawings reconfigure symbols forming unexpected meanings that tamper with social/political realities, speculating on issues of power, control, visibility, protection and, by contrast, privilege. With Michele Carlson and Nathan Watson, he is a member of the Related Tactics artists' collective and often exhibits under that name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natasha Boas</span> French-American writer and critic

Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Tse</span> Hong Kong-born American contemporary artist (born 1960)

Shirley Tse is an American contemporary artist born in Hong Kong. Tse's work is often installation based and incorporates sculpture, photography and video, and explores sculptural processes as models of multi-dimensional thinking and negotiation. She is faculty in the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, and was the Co-Director of the Program in Art from 2011-2014. She is co-organizer of the ReMODEL Sculpture Education Now symposia series and has been visiting faculty at Yale School of Art, Northwestern University, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Claremont Graduate University.

Betti-Sue Hertz is an American art curator and art historian and director of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.

Sidra Stich is an American art historian, museum curator, and travel writer based in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Couzens</span> American artist

Julia Couzens is a California-based, American artist known for a diverse body of work that embraces unconventional materials and methods and includes drawing, sculpture, installation art, and writing. Critic David Roth identifies as a connecting thread in her evolving work, her "decidedly surrealist-symbolist sensibility, in which eroticism, the grotesque and the gothic mix in equal parts." Her work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and California State University, Stanislaus (2009), in surveys at the University of California, Davis and Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (1999), and group shows at the Crocker Art Museum, P•P•O•W, Orange County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and BAMPFA, among others. Her art has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, and Art Practical, among other publications, and collected by institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California and Butler Institute of American Art, among many. In addition to working as an artist, Couzens has taught at several Southern California universities and writes about contemporary art for The Sacramento Bee and Squarecylinder. She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg and maintains a studio in downtown Los Angeles.

William "Bill" R. Olander was an American senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. He previously worked as curator and director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum. He was a co-founder of the arts organization Visual AIDS.

David Stuart Rubin is an American curator, art critic, and artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M. Louise Stanley</span> American figurative painter

M. Louise Stanley is an American painter known for irreverent figurative work that combines myth and allegory, satire, autobiography, and social commentary. Writers such as curator Renny Pritikin situate her early-1970s work at the forefront of the "small, but potent" Bad Painting movement, so named for its "disregard for the niceties of conventional figurative painting." Stanley's paintings frequently focus on romantic fantasies and conflicts, social manners and taboos, gender politics, and lampoons of classical myths, portrayed through stylized figures, expressive color, frenetic compositions and slapstick humor. Art historians such as Whitney Chadwick place Stanley within a Bay Area narrative tradition that blended eclectic sources and personal styles in revolt against mid-century modernism; her work includes a feminist critique of contemporary life and art springing from personal experience and her early membership in the Women's Movement. Stanley has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been shown at institutions including PS1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The New Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art, and belongs to public collections including SFMOMA, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, and de Saisset Museum. Stanley lives and works in Emeryville, California.

The Sanchez Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization located in Pacifica, California. It was formed in 1996 by local artists and community members.

Alison "Ali" Gass is an American curator and museum director. She is the founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. She has served as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, Smart Museum of Art, and chief curator of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Hamlin, Jesse (2014-08-13). "Contemporary Jewish Museum curator Renny Pritikin on a buzz mission". SFGATE. Retrieved 2022-07-10.
  2. 1 2 Desmarais, Charles (October 11, 2018). "Leadership changes announced at Contemporary Jewish Museum, Museum of the African Diaspora". Datebook, San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide. Retrieved 2022-07-10.
  3. 1 2 3 "Renny Pritikin Named Chief Curator of Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco". ArtAndEducation.net. April 11, 2014. Retrieved 2022-07-11.
  4. Pine, Dan (2015-01-16). "Chief curator adds personal touch to CJM". J. Retrieved 2022-07-10.