(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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Influenced by the Mujeres Muralistas, the first collaborative group of women muralists, Cervantes has applied the same process of accessible, community art to any size mural or age group through community mural workshops.

Cervantes is responsible for more than 400 murals (including the murals on the Women’s Building) considered some of the finest in the country. She is dedicated to enhancing the environment through the creation of murals while involving and educating the community about the process and history of public community mural art. Her deep commitment to collaboration guarantees that the creative work produced is accessible, both physically and conceptually, to the people whose lives it impacts.

“The mural movement itself is ethnically based. When you get ready to create a mural somewhere you’re sensitive to that place and its history. We’re constantly finding new ways to express the history that we all share and make it more visible. Murals beautify and enhance a drab environment, just the colors alone. They are uplifting, life affirming.”

“Murals are a real peoples art. People feel it is for them and about them. It concerns their hopes and dreams for a better future for everyone.”

“Balmy Alley is a mural destination for visitors. As the coordinator of the mural restoration project, I feel that it is most important to start there, and then work outward.”

“A mural is a bridge to the community. The artists communicate with the people; meetings are held to discuss the issues. The result is a reflection, a mirror of that community.”

“I don’t think of any one culture while I am painting. I try to bring out what’s common in people. Hopefully they’ll see themselves in my work.”

“I don’t think that there should be any restrictions or censorship placed by governments on artists. I certainly feel visual information has a lot of power, but people should not fear it.”

“My social responsibility as a public artist is to reflect the diversity of a community.”

“People in the community have concerns, and it is important that they have a voice. Public art gives people that voice. It gives them the visibility of the hopes and dreams of their community.”

“We believe hat through the various processes of creating public art, youth develop as artists and gain confidence in their ability to have a voice in the cultural life and the positive transformation of their city.”

“Their vision is ours. This is our home, where we live and raise our families. We are proud of it.”

“Every single kid has a design in this mural. No one was excluded from that opportunity, so they all feel that they’re a part of it, and not separate from it… so it’s really truly their mural.”

“It is great being outside and painting really large, but more important was I saw how muralists worked with each other in a collaborative way, and respected each other’s efforts, and trying to paint what was important. And then the passersby would offer comments and I realized how important it was for artists to be visible to the community, and how good it was to have art become part of everyday life.”

“Everyday you should be able to walk outside and see something being created. ”

“Art is not part of what we see, and not part of what our children see. It’s so sad. I see cultural genocide occurring. There’s a whole generation of kids without exposure to art. They haven’t learned about what’s inside them.”

“When we express our feelings through art, it’s a release. It makes you begin to care and have compassion for things around you, if you see yourself in something you’ve made.”

“There is an artist within everyone and if everyone were creating something at the same moment there would be peace felt all over the world. ”

-Susan Cervantes

Please visit Susan Cervantes’ website: www.susankcervantes.com

Susan Cervantes at work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Spiral of Life, 1968

Transparent Ecstacy, 1969

Family Life Mural, 1977

Celestial Cycles, 1982

Our Children Are Our Reincarnation, 1982

Susan Kelk Cervantes_CV

When Ruth was 16, she and her family were interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast of the United States. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreparable harm. For Ruth, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life. In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she reflected on the experience: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”

Zig Zag
oil on paper, 6.75″ x 3″, 1946

–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

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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