(www.artzone461.com) is proud to present a survey of works (1947 to date) by Jose Ramon Lerma to celebrate his accomplishments during National Hispanic Heritage Month and announce a more complete retrospective in February of 2010.

Source: San Francisco Art Institute website, notable alumni biographies.

Nude 3 (1954)

Abstract (1959)

Mother Earth (1988)

Christ of Polish (1976)

José Ramón Lerma, 2007

Jose Ramon Lerma, by Ray Anderson, 1960

Jose Ramon Lerma, by Ray Anderson, 1960

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Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Win Ng established his reputation as a master ceramist, with an initial focus on abstract, non-utilitarian works in the tradition of Peter Voulkos. Raised in Chinatown, he attended Saint Mary’s Academy for six years where he studied Chinese language. Later, he attended City College of San Francisco, and San Francisco State. After discharge from the army, he resumed his studies in ceramics at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute), and received his BFA in 1959. In1960, he attended Mills College, but never completed his MFA.

In 1958 he had his first one man show at the Michow Gallery in New York, then, in 1961, was represented by Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco (now the Braunstein/Quay Gallery) who continues to represent his work posthumously. Many traditional critics feel that Ng’s important work dates from 1958 to 1965, the years before he shifted his creative output from gallery art to more functional work.

This “functional” work was a collaborative entrepreneurial endeavor with artist Spaulding Taylor. As co-founder of Environmental Ceramics (later to be named Taylor & Ng), Win Ng established himself as a consummate decorative designer and innovative entrepreneur. Taylor & Ng shifted the paradigm in retail merchandising by raising the awareness and perception of the mass market toward finely wrought hand-crafted artware, and in the process became the model for many culinary and speciality stores to follow. The Chinese Wok was just one of many objects Taylor & Ng help to popularize.

Following a twenty-year journey (from 1965 to 1985) Taylor & Ng grew from a small ceramics shop on Howard Street, to a mega, multi-level emporium at Embarcadero Center. There were also stores at the Stanford Shopping Center and other Bay Area locations as well a Taylor & Ng shop inside Macy’s in New York.

But Ng continued with his fine art even during this two-decade decorative period. He produced a veritable torrent of work—thrown ceramic bowls, pots, bottles, vases, dishes, slab constructions, sculptures in earthenware and metal, paintings, drawings, book illustrations, as well as hundreds of decorative designs for Taylor & Ng—in scales ranging from minute to monumental. And while this public departure from the purely fine art realm may have cost him an ongoing reputation in the gallery/museum world, it was his renewed focus on fine art in the final years of his life, as well as his innovations in decorative and ceramic arts that underscore his important contribution as a post-modern artist. In the last decade of his life (1981-1991) Win Ng would leave the retail world and re-visit in earnest his deep passion, “bringing together in one integrated work” his artful life.

- Allen R. Hicks

Untitled
Earthware sculpture, 1983

–Jandava Cattron

The surging crest of Robert Colescott’s work, its interconnectedness no less then its pulsating and continuous confrontational thrust, has catapulted viewers into self-questioning bordering on discomfort. This discomfort affects everyone. Over dressed-men and under dressed-woman are both black and white; so are misogynists, murderers, philanderers, and just plain lazy bums. Not only does he “mock our anxiety” about race but he “never doesn’t talk about race and he never talks about it only;” his joyous state, replete with “sonorous tumbling, shady joy, sex, love, money, music, art, memories, and comfort food” are present in all their glory, yet so are racism, sexism, poverty, murder, hate, avarice, envy and deceit. All, propelled by an overreaching consumerism, twirl through a spectacular frenzy of color and form to become paintings so masterful on so many levels that one’s breath is taken away.

Robert Colescott was born in Born in Oakland, California in 1925. He received his undergraduate degree in art at University of California, Berkeley in 1949 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952. During a sojourn to Paris (1949-50), Colescott studied with Fernand Leger.

Colescott is represented in numerous public collections listed including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, as well as many private collections. Colescott was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997. He was the first African-American artist to represent the U.S. in a single-artist exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

– Phyllis Kind Gallery

Eat Dem Taters
Acrylic on Canvas, 59″ x 79″, 1975

Manuel Neri has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture, Honorary Doctorate for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture by the San Francisco Art Institute, Awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the California College of Arts and Crafts, and an Honorary Doctorate by the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C.

Manuel Neri’s work has been acquired for many important collections including: Eli Broad Family Collection, Los Angeles; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Memphis Brooks Art Museum, Tennessee; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California; The Oakland Museum, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Diego Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum;and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In 1990 Neri retired from the University of California, Davis, where he had taught since 1965. Neri lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also has a studio in Carrara, Italy, where he spends several months each year creating sculptures in marble.

-Artists Forum

Untitled
Charcoal, pastel and gouache, 39″x27″, 1978

Untitled
Plaster, 1978
Manuel Neri CV

Luis Cervantes, 1923-2005 – artist, painter, sculptor, philosopher, and muralist who inspired generations of artists.

“He was passionate about creating a message about one’s roots. ” Luis Cervantes and his wife, Susan Kelk Cervantes, opened the New Mission Gallery in the 1960s, and in 1977, they started Precita Eyes Muralists, whose mission is to produce urban community art through collaborations. Mr. Cervantes directed many of the nonprofit’s projects, including “The Cross of Quetzalcoatl” at San Francisco State’s student union, “The Precita Valley Vision” at the Precita Valley Community Center and “Si Se Puede” at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in San Francisco.

Mr. Cervantes was born in Santa Barbara. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1942 and served in England, Belgium and France with the 358th Engineer General Service Regiment. Mr. Cervantes was among the invasion forces at Normandy on D-Day.

After World War II, Mr. Cervantes moved to San Francisco and found work as a custom mattress maker with the McRoskey Airflex Mattress Company, his employer until his retirement in 1992. He served as president of the San Francisco Furniture Workers Union for two years. Mr. Cervantes used his G.I. Bill scholarship to study sketching and sculpture at San Francisco State College and ceramic sculpture at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute.

His sculptures have been shown at the M.H. de Young Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Cervantes, who abandoned ceramic sculptures in the 1970s to concentrate on painting with acrylics, taught at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco State, the Galeria De La Raza and other venues. His work is in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum and many private collections.

In 1990, he and his wife participated in the Ecological Arts Collaboration, a cultural exchange between American and Russian artists. The couple visited Russia three times and produced two murals in St. Petersburg and one in Moscow. Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed April 6 “Luis and Susan Cervantes Day.”

I STILL LISTEN TO JAZZ. Though this musical form has been so driven to the edges of our culture that I sometimes feel like a fan of Gregorian Chants for doing so. I’m much too young to have known what it was like when jazz was being born and it felt like the heart of the future of America. But if there’s one message I get consistently from jazz it’s that anything is possible.

So I really envy Leo Valledor for growing up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1940’s and 50’s, where jazz was as alive and kicking as it ever would be – at least until urban “renewal” drove it out in the late 1950’s. Leo had a hard time as a kid, with parents who disappeared and God knows what kinds of racism to deal with. Jazz must have sounded like pure possibility to him. And abstract painting much the same.

We all know that at one time (especially in San Francisco) jazz, abstract expressionism and what’s known as “Beat” poetry were all part of one culture. It may be a cliché now but it was a powerful reality. One thing helped to explain the other: same thoughts, different languages. I can imagine how great Leo must have felt to show his art at the Six Gallery in 1955 (at the age of nineteen), the same year Ginsberg first read his culture-shaking poem, Howl.

Where Leo’s art gets hard for some is right where it ought to get easy. Abandoning the gestural language of abstract expressionism (which would linger on in the Bay Area for decades), he started to explore reduced palettes, geometric shapes, and the spatial dimension of color. This wasn’t the end of his dive into jazz-like spirit, it was the beginning. Geometry was his style and color was his tone.

When he moved to New York City in 1961, Leo found a new milieu, just as invigorating as the one he’d left in San Francisco: the Park Place Group. Named after a gallery that was to become the very first gallery in Soho, and which included like-minded artists Ed Ruda, Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor Anthony Magar, Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, and Dean Fleming, The Park Place Group was an idiosyncratic bunch whose work, though abstract and geometric, didn’t accord with the prevailing Minimalist ethos of pure form.

Robert Smithson, who showed with Leo at Park Place Gallery in 1966, wrote that same year, “How could artists translate this verbal entropy, that is ‘ha-ha,’ into ‘solid-models’? Some of the Park Place artists seem to be researching this ‘curious’ condition. The order and disorder of the fourth dimension could be set between laughter and crystal-structural, as a device for unlimited speculation.” Smithson believed that what the Park Place artists were depicting with their orderly, abstract forms was laughter.

A different take on Leo’s art, also written in 1966, comes from the great New York School poet, Ted Berrigan: “Leo Valledor magically invokes moods of nature with painting that consists simply of a number of bands of color juxtaposed in a manner that seems intuitively correct. His only ‘trick,’ to zigzag one of the bands, somehow is responsible for all kinds of miracles, conjuring up, in different paintings, sky, a summer afternoon, twilight, blue sea, mist, and everything pellucid.”

Laughter and lucidity. How much better can it get? For reasons of which I’m unaware, Leo left New York and returned to San Francisco in 1968. He continued to live and work here until his death in 1989. As I write this, I’m looking at a page of reproductions of Leo’s paintings from the mid-1980’s: In the AM, Okasian, Hotosho, Fastpassin’. Each one perfect proof that Leo was living in the laughing, pellucid jazz-spirit ‘till the very end.

Echo (1967)

Leo Valledor

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Read Leo Valledor’s son, Rio Valledor’s, ‘Zoot Zoot (A Song for my Father)’

Interview with Carlos Villa of San Francisco Art Institute about Leo Valledor

Montoya, who was an art professor at CSUS for 27 years, is an educator, painter, poet, musician and activist. He is co-founder of the nationally recognized CSUS Barrio Arts program and a co-founder of the Rebel Chic Art Front, also known as the Royal Chicano Air Force.

A multi-faceted artist, Montoya is the author of three collections of poetry, including the highly acclaimed In Formation: 20 Years of Joda. His paintings are exhibited around the world.

Montoya was born in New Mexico, but grew up in Central California. He entered San Diego City College as an art student shortly after the Korean War. He later transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. He graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. he began his career by teaching high school until he earned his M.A. degree in 1971 at California State University Sacramento. He then taught for over 27 years in the Department of Art Education at CSUS.

Montoya is a noted painter, musician and graphic artist. He has exhibited internationally Cuba. Mexico & Paris, as well as all over the United States. he has given poetry readings at top universities around the United Sates and abroad. His influence over several generations of Chicano poets cannot be overestimated. His use of Spanish, English and barrio slang poetry can be seen in the styles of countless Chicano writers who followed him.

Born in 1935 in Kalopa, Hawaii, George Miyasaki began drawing at an early age, copying cartoons out of magazines. Miyasaki’s family supported his interest in art, as did his high school art instructor, who encouraged Miyasaki to attend the California College of Art and Crafts. Miyasaki followed this advice, moving to Oakland and enrolling in CCAC in 1953, where he had the opportunity to study with Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. During this time, Miyasaki began to work in an abstract expressionist manner and by the late 1950’s his paintings and lithographs were beginning to find an audience and gain critical attention.

In spite of this early success, Miyasaki abandoned the expressionist approach during the mid-sixties in favor of more systematic investigations of color and form. The rigorous geometry characteristic of his works of this period subsequently softened and by 1978, Miyasaki was freely combining collage elements with hard-edge shapes and spontaneous, expressionistic paint application.

In these mature works, Miyasaki engages the viewer in almost meditative contemplation as he challenges the eye to survey the depths of his paintings’ highly nuanced surfaces and subtle printmaking. This involvement has brought him on numerous occasions to Magnolia, where he has produced several editions of delicate intaglio works and lithographs. Most recently, George Miyasaki was the recipient of the National Academy of Design’s prestigious purchase prize for print produced at Magnolia (from the Emotional Map portfolio). Miyasaki has also received, among other honors, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980, 1985), and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1963). His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Inner Eye
Acrylic on canvas

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Gary Woo was an acclaimed abstract painter who worked in San Francisco for five decades.

Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1925, Woo relocated to San Francisco in 1939. After serving in World War II, Woo studied briefly at the San Francisco Art League and the California School of Fine Arts. His abstract painting was related to the Chinese calligraphy he had learned from his father, and Woo’s interest in the glazed surfaces of Chinese ceramics. Woo’s work was recognized with awards, positive reviews and prestigious exhibition invitations during the 1950s and 1960s, and the North Beach studio which he shared with his wife, acclaimed art educator Yolanda Garfias, became an inspiring destination.

After their studio lease expired in 1972, the couple moved to a small house on the southern edge of San Francisco near Daly City. Although he continued to paint until his death in 2006, Woo exhibited less frequently in his later years.

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Gary Woo CV

Esteban Villa, born August 3, 1930, in Tulare, California, is a nationally recognized artist and muralist. A Professor Emeritus at California State University, his teaching career began in 1962 at the high school level and includes assignments at Washington State University, D.Q.U., Davis, and numerous lecture and slide presentations, art exhibits and mural projects at Universities mainly in California and surrounding states. He has served as an art consultant to schools and organizations including Centro de Artistas Chicanos, and has done art programs in the Prison System. He is a founding member of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a collective of artists, professors and students, which was formed amid the Chicano Movimiento’s push for social and political rights.

Log Cabin Window
Acrylic on Canvas, 3′ x 4′, 1989

www.chilipie.com

Esteban Villa CV