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

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

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.”

“To me, the Mandala symbolizes the pose of the human mind. And, from the Mandala, I seek and find ‘absolute peace.’ To me, the world of beauty exists in the heart with pure peace, and in such a heart, artistic works that are honest are created. To me, Mandala does not necessarily denote the Buddhist Mandala. It is a state of mind.”
– Chun Sung Woo

Known for his Mandala works, Sung-woo Chun started his career by exhibiting 18 pieces of Mandala works in Seoul in April 1965 upon returning from a 12-year stay in the States. Since then, he has consistently exhibited many more Mandala works up until the creation of the Chungwha Mandalas in the 1990’s. Besides the title of Mandala Artist, Chun has been recognized by critics for “the natural description of the Oriental way of thinking by adopting abstract expressionism.”

In the 1950’s, the Pacific coast area of San Francisco Bay was one of the two central areas of the American contemporary art, developing the original school called the Bay Area Figurative School, distinguished from the New York Abstract Expressionism. It was in the San Francisco area that Chun studied as a student at the California School of Fine Arts (presently San Francisco Art Institute). CFSA played a central role in the flourishing of contemporary art in the Western area of the USA and majorly impacted Chun by impressing the fundamentals of abstract art that would later determine his artistic style.

Excerpted from writings of Chul-hyo Kim, Art Historian, General Manager of Archives & Library at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

Like other Koreans studying abroad, Chun took a deeper interest in his native country and the East when he was in the States than when he was living in his homeland of Korea. As a consequence, his abstract paintings were elevated to works more Oriental in themes and form. It is a well-known fact that abstract expressionism was more inspired by the thoughts and art of the East Asian region. Therefore, the prevalent view is to understand the worlds of Asian artists with Oriental lyricism, though different in technique, as a branch that absorbed the influence of abstract expressionism.

Excerpted from writings of Young Mok Jung, Art Historian, Seoul National University

50 Year of Refined Art:
Yung-nam Park on Chun Sung Woo

“I have a photograph that I cherish. It is a commemorative picture of the freshman at the Department of Arts, Seoul National University, at Yeon-geon-dong in 1969. In the first row, there is Mr. Jong-yeong Kim, Then the dean of the Department of Arts, full-time instructors at his sides, and the 70 students standing in the back rows. At the fifth seat from the right of the first row, there is Mr. Sung-woo Chun, or Woosong by pen name and at the back row. I was there, myself standing. The steep stairs were ideal for picture taking. The stairs were also meaningful because the students walked up to the art studio through those stairs for their classes at the Department of Painting. Walking down the stairs, we used to enjoy the entire view of the campus below – the stairs were indeed memorable to students majoring in painting.

It was in the art studio that I met Woosong. It was a landscape painting class. Pointing to one of the student’s landscape paintings, he used to start by asking “shall we try turning this picture upside down?” followed by the next question, “shall we try turning this picture upside down?” followed by the next question, “How do you feel looking at the same inverted picture?” When there was no particular answer, he then continued, “If you don’t feel uncomfortable in looking at the inverted picture, you can be reassured that harmony exists among the colored spaces. This is the harmony that makes our visual perception comfortable.” His lecture went on to explain that the forms in colors are necessarily correlated with the spaces of their background. He added that, if we are to paint apples, the background of the apples is as important as the apples themselves. In other words, he suggested that good management of the background automatically lead to the natural form of apples.

His remark in point is still vivid in my memory. Even though I had been trying to paint for a long time before coming to the College of Art, I had no idea until that moment that the form of the object is determined by the space of the background. I instantly fell into an abyss rather than joy by the new finding. I felt that I was being emptied in to a void. When I had finally emptied myself, I got to be accustomed to being refilled little by little, and it was quite joyful, It reminds me of the concept of Positive Space and Negative Space. To create a space of depth, there should be some power for the space of colors to push and pull each other. It was a first-time experience for me, who had thought that colors were always subordinate means of expressions, to realize that colors can be independent subjects that take dynamic forms. This is how I first met Mr. Chun and 40 years have passed ever since.”

Mandala Box: Golden Phoenix #1
Mixed Media, 10 x 7 x 3.5 inches, 1998

Mandala Box: Yacha
Mixed Media, 10 x 7 x 3.5 inches, 1998

Chungwa Mandala: Cloud Sea #72
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 41 inches, 2004

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The greater body of Villa’s art has been an exploration of cultural identity. He freely appropriated and assimilated imagery, traditional materials, and ideas from his own Filipino heritage as he reinvented a cultural vocabulary for Filipino Americans one step removed from the source of such a rich culture. It is the same impetus that moved him to pioneer the study of Filipino and Filipino American art history. Works such as Coat (1979), drew inferences between ceremonial attire, cultural artistry, and the role of a twentieth-century artist-as-shaman in re-presenting an old culture to new generations. Villa furthered this transcultural connection between tradition and artistic reinvention in a series of performance art pieces, such as Ritual (1980), in which the artist absorbed and enacted the essence of cultural shamanism, translating it in to an act of aesthetic experience.

Concurrent with these widely celebrated explorations of heritage and art, Villa was also creating a body of work less culturally identifiable, but no less pertinent to the individual. This work was much more minimal in nature: not minimalist as an adherent of a particular school of art, but minimal as a means of seeking the essence of humanity beneath the over-layering of cultural identity. The aesthetic results are both more challenging to read, and more relevant to the universal experience of being human.

Villa’s installation of works at the Triton Museum of Art consists of a series of finely crafted cabinets, each containing a grid of assembled panels. Their presentation is clean, precise, and, as in all of Villa’s work, laden with conceptions of history, time, relations, and the meaning of cultural identity and human experience. Each cabinet is made of wood and hinged so that its contents can be hidden from view, or open to examination. In this they are akin to a medieval altarpiece or a Joseph Cornell assemblage box. The interior panels, assembled and unified, though still separate, are the treasures contained inside their wooden reliquaries, awaiting the understanding of the viewer, should she or he be desirous of receiving its mysteries.

The panel blocks arranged inside the open book-like cases form a community of interdependent units. In each community there are interplays of lines made from the actual separation and joining of the panels, and lines artificially etched on to their surfaces. As the artist suggests, these lines may represent the delineation of time between events, space between dates, or geographic and cultural separation between people. Yet across these lines flows the inherent grain of the various woods, forming complex patterns of natural similarities that transcend the artificial boundaries of separation. We are left to ponder what kind of wood is used, its color, the presence or absence of applied patina like the external layering of separate cultural identities, and the complexity of grain densities suggesting the deeper core of shared human nature. Human identity, be it individual or as a member of a community, is to the artists, the essence of what matters most. It is this essence that is given visual voice and treasured in its own altarpiece cabinet(s). If Villa’s cultural explorations are a guide for those outside of that particular heritage to understand ‘the Other,’ then this body of work represents the artist’s attempt to help us understand ourselves on a universal level. The assembled panels are a visual metaphor, and Villa is the poet of that vision.

Accompanying this latest work are three series of photographs documenting some of the artist’s earlier universal explorations of humanity through his own minimalist vocabulary. Together with the newer cabinet pieces, they provide a more complete view of Villa’s attempts to portray what he sees as the essence of the human experience.

In addition to an extensive exhibition career, Carlos Villa is a noted historian, activist, and lecturer. He currently teaches art at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of San Francisco.

- Preston Fletcher (view article)

Beseeching 3

www.Carlos-Villa.com
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Kent returned to San Francisco in 1929 and set up a studio in North Beach. She soon established a reputation as an innovative and original sculptor of great originality, developing an abstract style rooted in surrealism and becoming a prominent member of the San Francisco Art Association. Kent exhibited or juried in the prestigious Annual show nearly every year from 1930 until her death in 1957. She served on the Board of Directors from 1947-57, and taught at the California School of Fine Arts in 1955.

She had her first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949. Kent subsequently showed her work several times in New York, including the 1950 Whitney Annual, an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a second solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. Following a trip in 1953 with her husband, sculptor Robert Howard to Egypt and Greece, her work evolved toward simplified columnar forms.

In 1957 Adaline Kent died in an automobile accident on the Pacific Coast Highway south of Stinson Beach. Her will bequeathed $10,000 to establish an annual award to a promising California artist.

'Presence', Magnesite, Collection of SFMOMA

Adaline Kent was very much of her time in every way in none more than the advantage she took of the twentieth century artist’s freedom to find the substance and the reason for creative expression everywhere.

Art of the other times, places and people, curiously formed or colored objects from nature, the inherent qualities and accidental appearances of things and materials, the forms she discovered and those she created, the varied aspects of the world about her, all served her art, and were transmuted, according to her lively fancy and creative need, into a personal statement. She gathered around here, and lived and worked among objects from many parts of the world and things of everyday life and of nature in which her sensitive eye and inventive mind recognized an art quality.

Travel in the mountains of the West and over the stark earth-toned landscape of Greece alike could nourish her imagination and contribute to her creation of new forms. Her work comprehends and expresses all these sources of creative invention, and at the same time remains her alone, completely original and personal.

-Grace L. McCann Morley
Director, san Francisco Museum of Art

From the notebook’s of Adeline Kent

“Sculpture, as any other creative effort, is a document on the thinking of the creator- a piece of autobiography.”

“A piece of sculpture should be a personal experience if not a whole voyage of discovery- discovery of new facets of one’s self.”

“Modern art is the expression of OUR time. It differs from earlier art because of new knowledge. It brings out new horizons. Artists themselves, from the beginning carry a constant, – the need to create a personal truth. As a person lives in his time he must share the ideas that make up that time.”

“The beginning of being an artist is to make yourself worth expressing. Nothing is wasted. You sharpen your personality with every good book you read, every stunning symphony you hear, the rhythms you discover while dancing, every danger you get through, every person you really love, – there’s no end to it. All the time you must be working at the EXPRESSION end of it. You should take notes from nature. You can’t lose anything by knowing how to draw a hand, – one that is alive, not cast, – how to catch and set down, the meaning of a blade of grass or a mountain.”

“An individual artist goes through the transitions of the history of art – classicism to romanticism etc. – swinging toward another as the mood fulfills itself in action – each at his own tempo.”

“I want the power of Stonehenge and the magic of the South Pacific in language of the Wide Present.
To fuse the spiritual with the animal instinct
in forms coherent with nature.
The mystery comes from the strength of
Form-and-Space, not from amorphousness.”

Trapped Rainbow
Mixed Media, 12 x 8 inches, 1969

Gaius Plinius
Mixed Media, 9 x 15 inches, 1993

Duchamp & Schwitters
30 x 16 inches, 1984

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