Stan Dann

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Stan F. Dann (born May 23, 1931 Burnaby, British Columbia, died May 8, 2013 in Lafayette, California) was a contemporary Northern California artist known for his puzzle-like bas-relief wall sculptures of polychrome wood. His earlier commercial career during the 1960s-1970s produced popular carved wooden signage, graphics and art objects.

Lafayette, California City in California, United States

Lafayette is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States. As of 2011, the city's population was estimated to be 24,285. It was named after the Marquis de La Fayette, a French military hero of the American Revolutionary War. Today Lafayette is known for its pastoral rolling hills, good schools, and wealthy inhabitants. In 2016, the median household income in Lafayette was over $140,000, more than twice the statewide average and about two and half times the national median.

Contemporary art art of the present time beginning with Pop Art and Conceptual Art

Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.

Northern California Place in California, United States

Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties its main population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Sacramento area, and the Metropolitan Fresno area. Northern California also contains redwood forests, along with the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta, and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions.

Contents

Early life

Dann grew up in Burnaby, British Columbia. He graduated in 1949 from Faulkner Smith Academy of Fine Art, Vancouver. Dann attended Art Center College of Design (then in Los Angeles) receiving a BS degree with honors in 1957. He moved to Lafayette, California after graduation and became a United States citizen. [1]

Vancouver City in British Columbia, Canada

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2016 census recorded 631,486 people in the city, up from 603,502 in 2011. The Greater Vancouver area had a population of 2,463,431 in 2016, making it the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. Vancouver has the highest population density in Canada with over 5,400 people per square kilometre, which makes it the fifth-most densely populated city with over 250,000 residents in North America behind New York City, Guadalajara, San Francisco, and Mexico City according to the 2011 census. Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada according to that census; 52% of its residents have a first language other than English. Roughly 30% of the city's inhabitants are of Chinese heritage. Vancouver is classed as a Beta global city.

After briefly working as an art director at McCann-Erickson advertising agency in San Francisco, Dann formed a boutique design group, 222, with several partners in the 1960s. To call attention to the new firm, he hand-carved a redwood sign. Architects and design firms in the surrounding North Beach area took immediate notice. As the demand for his skills grew, he quit the advertising business and opened the Stan Dann Studio in Oakland, California.

San Francisco Consolidated city-county in California, United States

San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 13th-most populous city in the United States, and the fourth-most populous in California, with 884,363 residents as of 2017. It covers an area of about 46.89 square miles (121.4 km2), mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second-most densely populated large US city, and the fifth-most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is also part of the fifth-most populous primary statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area.

Oakland, California City in California, United States

Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port city, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the San Francisco Bay Area, the eighth most populated city in California, and the 45th largest city in the United States. With a population of 425,195 as of 2017, it serves as a trade center for the San Francisco Bay Area; its Port of Oakland is the busiest port in the San Francisco Bay, the entirety of Northern California, and the fifth busiest in the United States of America. An act to incorporate the city was passed on May 4, 1852, and incorporation was later approved on March 25, 1854, which officially made Oakland a city. Oakland is a charter city.

Most work was one-of-a-kind wood signage, massive doors, and other architectural details commissioned by designers and architects such as Gensler and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for civic buildings, corporations, private homes, restaurants, vineyards and department stores. The company Forms & Surfaces provided carved reproductions of his work to the larger architectural community. Dann's early wood graphics and sculptural wood objects were important elements in the design style of the roadside attraction The Nut Tree in Vacaville, California, which also featured Charles Eames furniture and Wayne Thiebaud art. Dann carved the intricate oak doors leading to the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, Stanford University, built in 1978.

Gensler is a global design and architecture firm focused on strategic research and design shaping the future of cities. Organized into 16 diverse practice areas with expertise covering a broad spectrum of industry sectors, Gensler delivers a wide range of project types for clients around the world, with an innovative research program seeking insights to help solve the world's most pressing challenges. An employee-owned organization that puts its people first, Gensler was recognized again in 2019 as a Glassdoor Best Places to Work. In 2017, Gensler generated $1.197 billion in revenue, the most of any architecture firm in the United States. As of 2018, Gensler's global platform operated offices in 48 cities in 16 countries worldwide, working for clients in over 100 countries.

Wayne Thiebaud American artist

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter widely known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.

Stanford University private research university located in Stanford, California, United States

Leland Stanford Junior University is an American private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is known for its academic strength, wealth, proximity to Silicon Valley, and ranking as one of the world's top universities.

Artistry

In 1981 Dann turned his focus solely to fine art and the work for which he is most known. He abandoned hand carving and used a band saw and other power tools to sculpt free-form wooden shapes. The undulating pieces were applied to a wood background in a puzzle-like manner to create large bas-relief wall sculptures. The works were finished in such a manner that they were often mistaken for ceramic.

Dann's sculpture reflected two influences from his youth. First were the wood patterns made in his brother's pattern shop that would serve as patterns for industrial machinery parts. Secondly, he grew up fascinated by the multiple layers of interlocking symbology of the monumental carved totem poles and pillars of the Pacific Northwest's indigenous peoples.

Pattern (casting) form used in casting to replicate a shape

In casting, a pattern is a replica of the object to be cast, used to prepare the cavity into which molten material will be poured during the casting process.

Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast are composed of many nations and tribal affiliations, each with distinctive cultural and political identities, but they share certain beliefs, traditions and practices, such as the centrality of salmon as a resource and spiritual symbol, and many cultivation and subsistence practices. The term Northwest Coast or North West Coast is used in anthropology to refer to the groups of Indigenous people residing along the coast of British Columbia, Washington state, parts of Alaska, Oregon, and northern California. The term Pacific Northwest is largely used in the American context.

His subject matter ranged from everyday household objects and machinery to street scenes to abstract compositions. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote in 1989, "Objects in Dann's world hunker and lurch with a comic animal energy, as if conducting secret lives behind our backs." [2]

<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> newspaper serving the San Francisco Bay area

The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is currently owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.

Curator Carl Worth for the 1990 solo exhibition, Stan Dann: A Ten-Year Perspective, at the Walnut Creek Civic Arts Gallery, Walnut Creek, California, examined the artist's process. "… from schematic image through interlocked elements, (he) continues in his method of literally reconstructing reality." [3] While the medium and some themes persisted throughout his career, Dann continuously redefined his style as he explored the relationship between description and abstraction. "The result is a liberation from wood construction to expressionist painting" [4] concluded Carol Fowler, Contra Costa Times art reviewer.

In 2011 Dann's work was featured in the landmark exhibition Crafting Modernism: Mid-Century American Art and Design [5] at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City. He is represented in many private and institutional collections including Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, The Collection of Forrest L. Merrill, Berkeley, California, The Hechinger Collection, [6] Washington, D.C., McGraw-Hill, and McDonald Corporation. Commissions include his nine-panel sculpture for Simpson Manufacturing Company, Pleasanton, California, and bas-relief compositions for California Casualty headquarters in San Mateo, California.

During his lifetime, Dann was represented by the Allan Stone Gallery, New York City, where he had a solo exhibition, Shoes & Things, in 2000, and the Barclay Simpson Fine Arts Gallery, Lafayette, among others.

Dann was a member of The Breakfast Group founded by Elmer Bischoff and Sidney Gordin in the 1960s. [7] Made up of Berkeley-based artists who met weekly to talk art over breakfast, the group held several group exhibitions in which Dann participated. He was also a member of the Pacific Rim Sculptors Group in Berkeley. 

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References

  1. ↑ "Obituary of Stan Dann". San Francisco Chronicle. Legacy.com. May 19, 2013. Retrieved 17 November 2017.
  2. ↑ Installation Explores "Art/Not Art" Question, San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 1989)
  3. ↑ Carl Worth, Stan Dann: A Ten-Year Perspective, 1990, Exhibition catalog, Civic Arts Association, Civic Arts Gallery, Walnut Creek, California
  4. ↑ Carl Worth, Stan Dann: A Ten-Year Perspective, 1990, Exhibition catalog, Civic Arts Association, Civic Arts Gallery, Walnut Creek, California
  5. ↑ Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan, Crafting Modernism: Mid-Century Art and Design, pp. 129 and 277, 2011, Exhibition catalog, The Museum of Arts and Design, Abrams, ISBN   978-0810984806
  6. ↑ Pete Hamill, Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection (1995), Harry N. Abrams, ISBN   978-0-8109-3873-1
  7. ↑ Marech, Rona (February 4, 2000). "THE ART OF CONVERSATION / For decades, artists have met weekly in Berkeley to chew on topics trivial, profound". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 17 November 2017.
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