Gustavo Ramos Rivera is an abstract painter working in San Francisco whose work is celebrated nationally for its intense emotional content and its unique, personal symbology.

Rivera’s paintings combine the palette and iconography of the indigenous cultural heritage of his native Mexico with classic techniques of Post war American abstraction. In his paintings Rivera constructs layers of intense translucent color fields upon which he lays simple hieroglyphic markings of rich impasto which seem at once archaic and contemporary. They articulate a poetic narrative but also express the artist’s pure delight in working the medium of oil paint.

In addition to his painting Rivera is also a master printmaker who works in monotypes, intaglio and lithography. He has also produced unique and limited edition artist books illustrated with original art.

Born in Ciudad Acuna Mexico in 1940 Rivera has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1976.He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships and in 2006 the San Jose Museum of Art presented a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to additional venues in Mexico and California.

- Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery

Ocara, 2009, Oil on canvas, 84 x 84 Inches

Landscape # 1, 1956, Oil on Canvas, 58 x 58 in.

Although she lived and worked in San Francisco for less than a decade, Sonia Gechtoff took a highly active role in Bay Area art while she was there. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Gechtoff received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Philadelphia Museum of Art School in 1950, and then came to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts in 1951 and ’52, eventually teaching there for several years before relocating to New York in 1958. In the Bay Area, Gechtoff was most frequently associated with the action painters, including her husband James Kelly, Madeleine Diamond, Julius Wasserstein, Deborah Remington and Jay DeFeo.

Gechtoff’s paintings of the ‘50s and early ‘60s were not only abstractions; they were also symbolic markings. Poetry was an important inspiration for Gechtoff. Her exhibition at the San Francisco De Young Museum in 1957 was accompanied by pages of Michael McClure’s poems which, like her painting, often focused on natural themes. Her painting, “Anna Karenina”, is a great example of her work. Through this work she delves into figurative abstractions and, in so doing, reveals her poetic inspiration.

- John Natsoulas Center For The Arts

Purple Flight, 1971 acrylic on canvas. 82 X 102 inches.

Between his birth in Conehatta, Mississippi in 1933 and 1946, Joe Overstreet’s family moved five times before finally settling in Berkeley, California. In 1951 he graduated from Oakland Technical High School, joined the Merchant Marines, and working part time from 1951 through 1958, traveled to the Far East, Europe, and South America. He briefly worked as an animator at the Walt Disney Studios during the mid 1950’s.

Overstreet began his art studies in 1951 at Contra Costa College and in 1953 and 1954 studied at the California School of Fine Arts. During the early 1950’s he established a base on Grant Avenue in San Francisco, near the studio of Sargent Johnson who became very influential in his thinking. He participated in the North Beach Beat scene, and during this time Overstreet had solo exhibitions at Cousin Jimbo’s Bop City, the Bagel Shop, Vesuvio’s and Connie Smith’s Tea Room. But Overstreet was developing an interest in West Coast abstraction, and he also saw the excitement of New York painting.

So in 1958 along with his friend, poet Bob Kaufman, he moved to New York to set up his studio in the City. Overstreet credits his “real art education and development” from his talks with many artists in the Cedar Street Bar. He became friendly with DeKooning and established relationships with Romare Bearden, and Hale Woodruff. In 1962 Overstreet moved to a studio on Jefferson Street in a loft upstairs over the great jazz musician, Eric Dolphy. Then Overstreet moved to the artists’ community along the Bowery, where he spent the following fifteen years.

In his Bowery studio, he began to reconsider African art and its place in the history of art.  He was already grounded in the tradition. Sargent Johnson was an important mentor for Overstreet inspiring his work ethic, intellectual tenacity and Africanist centered position.  Hale Woodruff encouraged his use of African elements, and Woodruff was also able to move between figuration and abstraction. These alliances aided Overstreet in reconciling his own interests in cultural information as indicated in his early shaped canvases such as The Boat of Ra and North Star.

The Basket Makers, 2003, Oil, stainless steel wire cloth, 92″ x 97″

During the mid 1960’s, Overstreet became involved in Civil Rights activities. He organized exhibitions and projects that created opportunities for Black artists. Overstreet worked with Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School as Art Director. Larry Rivers saw Overstreet’s 1963 painting The New Jemima; a Menil Foundation commission enabled him to produce a large scale version that Rivers included in the exhibit Some American History. During this period of civil rights activism, Overstreet participated in many solo and group exhibitions in New York and California.  His work developed from the shaped canvases to canvas works without a stretcher that were suspended in space by ropes.  These works were influenced by the tents and portable housing methods used by nomadic people.

From 1970 through 1973 Overstreet returned to California and taught studio courses at University of California at Hayward. On his return to New York in 1974, Overstreet, Corrine Jennings and writer, Samuel C. Floyd established Kenkeleba House in the East Village. Overstreet’s art production continues unabated and his work travels to Boston, to Taiwan, to Amherst and Cleveland. He created the Storyville paintings that exemplify his use of narrative and his connection to music and Jazz in particular.  These paintings have been shown in New York, New Jersey; St. Louis and Atlanta. Between 1982 and 1987, he returned to the Bay Area when he received a commission to produce a seventy-five-panel work of neon and Cor-ten steel at San Francisco International Airport.

Overstreet’s studio work was often based on travels, to Martha’s Vineyard during 1984 to visit the Wampanoags, to the Alhambra, Spain to visit Moorish sites on the Iberian Peninsula., and on walks around his Lower Eastside neighborhood. Overstreet visited Tuskegee Institute, where he renewed his connection to George Washington Carver as scientist, teacher, and painter and maker of pigments. He commemorates Carver with new structures in his paintings. During a trip to Senegal for the Dakar Biennale of 1992, Overstreet visited the Slave Castle at Gorée Island. When he returned to New York he immediately embarked on a Door of No Return series of large stretched canvas paintings. These works produced over nearly two years allowed Overstreet to make full use of his interest in paint texture, and the tenets of sacred geometry.

Of his paintings he says, “My paintings don’t let the onlooker glance over them, but rather take them deeply into them and let them out – many times by different routes. These trips are taken sometimes subtly and sometimes suddenly. I want my paintings to have an eye-catching ‘melody’ to them – where the viewer can see patterns with changes in color, design and space. When the viewer is away from the paintings, they will get flashes of the paintings that linger in the mind like that of a tune or melody of a song that catches up on people’s ear and mind.”



The 1999 solo exhibition at Dartmouth College revealed paintings rich with surface texture.  These works led to the Silver Screens exhibited in 2001 and Meridian Fields in 2003 that illustrate Overstreet’s interest in transparency has led him to paint on steel wire cloth. Since 2003 Overstreet’s work has been included in many important survey and traveling group exhibitions.  In his career he has exhibited in more than 25 solo shows.

For 35 years Overstreet has organized exhibitions for mid-career and emerging artists, and retrospectives for those left out of mainstream history. His dedication to art, artists and the community at large is manifest through his contributions of his own work, and the opportunities Kenkeleba House and the Wilmer Jennings Gallery provide artists.

In 2009, a two-part interview and several images were published in the Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. Joe Overstreet was recently interviewed for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Joe Overstreet Resume

Dream Songs #1, 2007, 19″ x 20″, Mixed media

Born in San Francisco, California in 1937, Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Wintu) attended federal Indian boarding school in Stewart, Nevada. Interest in the arts began in high school and continued through college. His paintings and sculpture reflect a deep interest and appreciation of his native heritage, and he shares this with his students as professor of art and director of Native American studies at California State University, Sacramento.

LaPena, an internationally exhibited painter and published poet, was born in 1937 in San FrancProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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co. As a young man he became interested in the song, dance, and ceremonial traditions of his tribe. He has worked with the elders of the Nomtipom Wintu, the Nomlaki Wintun of northern California, and elders of neighboring tribes, and is a founding member of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists, dedicated to the revival and preservation of these Native arts.

LaPena lectured widely on Native American traditional and cultural issues, emphasizing California traditions, and he is a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. His art has been exhibited since 1960 in twenty-two one-man exhibits and numerous group shows across the United States, Europe, Central and South America, Cuba, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been a consultant to museums across the country including the de Young, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He lives in Sacramento and is still active in ceremonial life as a singer and dance leader.

Since 1960 he has exhibited in twenty-two one-man shows and numerous group shows across the United States, Europe, Central and South America, Cuba, Australia and New Zealand. He is a consultant to museums including the De Young, the Oakland Museum, the California Indian Museum and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. LaPena has also published several volumes of poetry and writes a report on contemporary California art activities for News from Native California.

Gift of Life, 2007, 31″ x 31″, Acrylic on canvas

Arthur Okamura was born in Long Beach, California, February 24, 1932. He was interned at the Santa Anita Race Track “Assembly Center” soon after Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, on December 1, 1941. After 6 months, he and his family were transferred to Amache Relocation Center in Colorado, where they lived for three years.

After the war ended in 1945, Arthur and his family relocated to Chicago, Illinois. There he attended grammar school, high school and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that he got married and started off in his formative years as an artist. Arthur had always planned to be an artist and began working after school at a silkscreen poster studio when he was fifteen years old. He worked there for twelve years and became the main layout artist and stencil cutter.

Upon graduating from the Art Insititute in 1945, he received the Edward L. Ryerson Foreign Travel Fellowship and went, with his wife, to Mallorca in the Balearic Islands to paint. It was in Mallorca that he first met Robert Creeley. Creeley became a close friend who offered him inspiration and influenced his work. Back again in Chicago in 1956, Arthur, his wife and his first child packed up their car and moved to San Francisco, at the suggestion of Arthur’s Chicago art dealer, Charles Feingarten, who was opening a gallery in San Francisco. Subsequently, Feingarten opened other galleries in Carmel, Los Angeles and New York.

In 1997 Arthur retired from teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, where he taught for 31 years, and in 2009 passed away at the age of 77.

- http://www.bigbridge.org/Issue3/creeley/biooka.htm

Unlevied Rocks, 2008 Acrylic on canvas; 22 x 28 inches

Arthur Okamura CV

More Allan Gordon coming soon…

Untitled, 1961

Vanitas Pastry Box, 2010

Allan Gordon CV

2 Carrots in Search of the Earth, 1976 29” x 23”, Enamel on graph paper

The bold perimeters of Schulz’s paintings matched with the intricate and refined surfaces, result in an engaging dialogue between grand modernist ideals and reflective, personal reverie. Schulz sophisticatedly manipulates the oil paint, alkyd resin and acrylics that spread throughout and emerge from her assembled shaped canvases. Having been educated in painting around the same time as iconic 1960′s painters such as Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, similarities in sensibilities and experimentation with shaped canvases are certainly evident in Schulz’s work. Continuing also in the footsteps of artists such as Barnett Newman and Frank Stella, she sought to redefine the rectilinear orientation of the art object. Cornelia Schulz exhibits with Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco. Since 1962, she has exhibited at such prestigious institutes as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, along with many other commercial galleries around the country. In 1973, Schulz began teaching at the University of California, Davis, where twice she chaired the Art Department. In 2002, Schulz retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.

Untitled, 1975 29” x 23”, Enamel on graph paper

Cornelia Schulz CV

Another Room, 1970, 59" x 47", Acrylic on canvas

Nell Sinton began painting in the 1920s. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (then called the California School of Fine Arts).

Sinton was acknowledged as one of the Ten Most Distinguished Bay Area Women and was an active member of the Bay Area art community and also served on the San Francisco City and County Art Commission, 1959-1963 and the Board of Trustees of the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966-1972.

Nell Sinton, died in San Francisco of natural causes in 1997 at the age of 87.

Nell Sinton has had ample success as recorded in exhibitions, awards, recognition by art critics and mention and illustration in recognized Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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t periodicals, national and international. Among artists of her own locality she is well known and she has a sure place nationally. This is largely irrelevant in the presence of her work. Her works speak directly to the sensitive viewer on their own terms. They are in acrylic – a medium Nell Sinton adopted in 1964, in preference to the traditional pigments.

Nell Sinton has often incorporated collage of some type with acrylic painting She is deeply responsive to the possibilities of her medium, for her art, whatever its style, has been marked by a sensitivity in which external stimulus for the work and the means of its execution have both played their part, along with her intimate feelings.

She has been an innovator in her own development as an artist, very aware of thee evolution of today’s art as represented in the work of her contemporaries. She has valued her own development, and is sympathetic to the movements of her time. It is the breadth of her personal curiosity and excitement that one feels strongly in reviewing Nell Sinton’s work through the years.

-Grace Morley, April 1970 for the San Francisco Museum of Art

Nell Sinton in her home, 1970, San Francisco Museum of Art

Nell Sinton CV

Bob Dylan Kicking Tire, 1963, source: www.marshallphoto.com

“THE GREAT FRENCH photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson famously used the phrase “the decisive moment” to describe the intuitive fraction of a second that separates a timeless photograph from the dozens of less inspired frames surrounding it. This instinct cannot be taught. It isn’t a skill photographer’s acquire as part of their craft. It’s a creative force that defines an individual style. And because Cartier-Bresson had the instinct to trigger his Leica’s rangefinder lens at so many memorable moments, he remains the 20th Century’s most remarkable photojournalist.
It takes no leap of the imagination to think of another Leica user, Jim Marshall, as the Cartier-Bresson of music photography—or more accurately, musician photography.
For nearly half-a-century Jim Marshall has captured his own rather remarkable share of “decisive moments.” Whether it was an informal portrait of John Coltrane, a boyish Bob Dylan kicking a tire down a New York street, Hendrix immolating his Strat at Monterey Pop, The Who greeting the sunrise at Woodstock, or Johnny Cash flipping a big F-you at San Quentin, Jim Marshall was there. And during the most extraordinary times yet for popular music, he somehow seemed to be everywhere—that mattered.
But no matter how iconic these and countless other of Jim’s images undoubtedly are, his photographs are always about his subjects, not about making a “Jim Marshall photograph.” Because Jim lived the life alongside his subjects, and never betrayed their trust, he was granted second-to-none access to scores of great musicians. Indeed, it is arguable that the only guy who could have possibly captured certain moments of unguarded intimacy, such as Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix strolling the Monterey fairgrounds, or Janis Joplin lounging backstage with a bottle of Southern Comfort, is Jim Marshall.
As Jim has said, “…I do see the music. This ‘career’ has never been just a job—it’s been my life.”

Jim Marshall holding his famous portrait of Johnny Cash, by Tim Mantoani

Born in Chicago in 1936, Jim Marshall grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore district. As a boy, he started taking pictures on a Baby Brownie. But after winning a school track meet, and seeing the razor-sharp image of himself crossing the finish line that a spectator had taken with a Leica camera, Marshall’s destiny seemed all but sealed. He acquired his first Leica, an M2, in 1959, for the then-princely sum of $50 down followed by twelve monthly payments of $24 each.
Naturally drawn to San Francisco’s North Beach coffeehouses, Marshall began shooting the beat-poets, artists, and jazz musicians he encountered every day. While in the Air Force, he shot photos of fellow servicemen. After his military stint, trying to launch a career, he photographed dragsters and sports cars. But it was a return to his North Beach roots that brought his first big break, one that would define his path.
It was 1960. While hanging backstage at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, Marshall encountered John Coltrane. Then on the verge of his astonishing late-period visionary quest, Coltrane wondered how he might get across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, where he was to meet with Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason. Seizing the moment, Marshall offered Coltrane a ride to Gleason’s house, where he would fire off nine rolls of film, capturing several classic shots of the soon-to-be tenor legend.
The early ’60s found Jim Marshall in New York, where assignments from record labels such as Atlantic, Columbia, and ABC Paramount, and the magazines Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post added to his ever increasing reputation, and offered unusual access to folk and jazz musicians. Lesser-known aspects of Marshall’s early work include photojournalism assignments documenting life in Appalachia, and Civil Rights activities in Mississippi.
In 1964, Marshall drove back to San Francisco and moved into a small North Beach apartment. His timing could not have been more perfect.
Rock ’n’ roll was blossoming, and so were Marshall’s talents. As the beat-era’s coffee, booze, and cigarette culture kaleidoscoped into the pot-smoking, acid-dropping hippy movement, San Francisco was becoming the epicenter of America’s counterculture, with a music scene that would soon rival those of London and New York.
As a fixture on the scene, Jim Marshall was there to immortalize local bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, and Santana long before they were household names. In 1966, Marshall was the only photographer allowed backstage access to what proved to be The Beatles’ final concert at Candlestick Park. A year later, Jim’s photos from the Monterey Pop Festival would become as woven into the lore of that gig as would the breakout performances of Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding. Marshall was the first photographer to shoot The Who and Cream in the U.S; he was selected as one of the official photographers of the Woodstock Festival, covered the Rolling Stones ’72 tour for Life magazine, and is the only photographer able to squeeze the friendly rivalry between Janis Joplin and Grace Slick into a single frame.

But as extraordinary as Jim’s lifetime body of work is, for him it all comes back to the music. As he wrote in the introduction to Not Fade Away: “Too much bullshit is written about photographs and music. Let the music move you, whether to a frenzy or a peaceful place. Let it be what you want to hear—not what others say is popular. Let the photograph be one you remember—not for its technique but for its soul. Let it become a part of your life—a part of your past to help shape your future. But most of all, let the music and the photograph be something you love and will always enjoy.””

Source: www.marshallphoto.com

Johnny Cash Flipping Bird, 1969, source: www.marshallphoto.com

Jimi Hendrix, 1967, source: www.marshallphoto.com

Jim Marshall Timeline

Read Rolling Stone Tribute to Jim Marshall

Brooklyn-born Arthur Monroe spent his formative years in New York City. It was during those years that he became a close friend of Charlie Parker, who advised him “to know his axe;” that is, to know his craft, advice that he has adhered to ever since.

Abstract Expressionism was the prevailing American art style in the 1950s and was generally recognized as being the most important modernist art to have occurred after World War II. As a young artist, Arthur Monroe immersed himself in the exciting milieu of the East Village. He had a studio facing that of Willem De Kooning’s, and he hung around the Cedar Street Bar, where he knew some of the most acclaimed Abstract Expressionists, including Franz Klein.

The young Arthur Monroe felt a need to examine non-European sources of visual art and left New York to travel in search of them in Mexico, particularly the sources inherent in the cultures of the Mayans, Zapotecans, Michteans, and Olmecans. He wished to become involved intimately with cultures that offered spiritual, philosophic and aesthetic viewpoints different from his background in the mainstream art world of New York.

Monroe returned to America, first to Big Sur and then to San Francisco during the legendary Beat Era of North Beach in the late 1950s, becoming Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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important participant in an art scene that included a host of other artists.

However, Arthur Monroe remained committed to his Abstract Expressionist roots. They have continually provided him with an approach to express himself in his search for new visual truths. He may spend as much as three years on a painting, engaging with it in an interior dialogue and anguishing over each stage of its development. He is unable to paint anything that isn’t an expression of a laboriously-evolved visual turth. Unlike many artists since the 1960s, Monroe eschews drawings as an executional expedient, feeling that this will only reflect what comes off the top of the mind superficially. Initial ideas become extensively transformed as inner truths struggle to be realized.

Nothing is clear ahead of time; Arthur Monroe works more as a scientist asking a myriad of questions before he finds his hypothesis. Many painters bypass this process because they don’t even know that it exists. An artist learns from mistakes, as if the stone knows more about the sculpture than the sculptor himself. Arthur Monroe faces his materials as a challenge; the more he handles them, the more he appreciates what they might do.
Visual innovations are a by-product of the same laborious process of Monroe’s involvement with the medium. A finished painting is unique unto itself and never serves as a prototype for linearly-serialized visual statements. As in the purest era of Abstract Expressionism, extraneous concerns such as ideological stances never dictate the outcome of a painting.

Arthur Monroe remains enchanted by the Abstract Expressionist penchant for large-scale work. He observes that while European Modernist art before World War II was monumental in concept, it wasn’t always large in scale. He was initially attracted to American Abstact Exprssionistic paintings that had the potential to make their impact much greater on the viewer by altering the scale of the work. Monroe continues to find that the space between the painting and the viewer becomes more charged because of the enlarged forms, colors, and brushwork.

Since Arthur Monroe left New York, he has immersed himself in an investigation of non-European cultures extending from Nigeria to the Amazon. He has taken his cue as an artist from T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes, who said you really can’t write poems until you learn to think in another language. Monroe remains the prototypical underground artist who believes, as Hughes did, that you really don’t understand yourself, your culture, or your art until you understand what is in the person who has the least. Monroe also believes that this applies to the art scene, with each art movement being an important link and none being more important than another.

Ultimately, all artists are part of the chain; these are some of the ideas that Monroe’s art is noursished by, as well as Charlie Parker’s teaching about living and life: “know your axe: know your instrument before you talk with it.”

- Terry St. John

Self Portrait