Adaline Kent was born in Kentfield, California in 1900. She attended Vassar College and upon graduation she returned to the Bay Area, where she studied for a year (1923-24) with Ralph Stackpole at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Stackpole was a leading proponent of the “direct-cut” sculpting method. She then traveled to Paris in 1924 to study … Read more »
Arthur Monroe
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 … Read more »
Arthur Okamura
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 … Read more »
Bernice Bing
Bernice Bing, a native San Franciscan of Chinese heritage, received a National Scholastic Award to attend California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where she studied with Richard Diebenkorn, Saburo Hasegawa and Nathan Oliveira. She transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute to work with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degree with … Read more »
Carlos Loarca
Carlos Loarca, a Guatemalteco-born artist now living in San Francisco, is motivated by an instinctive drive to express powerful motives of pictorial nature, mainly of his native land. Since 1980, a reoccurent element of in Loarca’s work has been his depiction of “El Cadejo”, the mythical dog of his Gautelmateco past. … Read more »
Cornelia Schulz
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 … Read more »
Frank LaPena
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 … Read more »
Gary Woo
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 … Read more »
Gustavo Rivera
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 … Read more »
Jay DeFeo
When Jay DeFeo died in 1989, at age sixty, she was at the height of her creative powers. Alternately categorized as an abstract expressionist, a Beat painter, a Funk artist, an eccentric, and a romantic, DeFeo was a star of the small avant-garde art and poetry world of San Francisco during the fifties that included Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Conner, Michael McClure, and Wallace Berman.… Read more »
Jim Marshall
“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 … Read more »
Joan Brown
Flying
Oil on Canvas, 51″ x 57″, 1958
One of California’s pre-eminent figurative artists, Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco and died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India. Brown has long been recognized as one of the important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s. She created … Read more »
Joe Overstreet
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 … Read more »
José Ramón Lerma
José Ramón Lerma was born in 1930 in the Salinas Valley. Lerma came to San Francisco in 1950 and was one of the first Latino students to study at the California School of Fine Arts, now SFAI. Lerma was soon drafted into the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army at the start of the Korean War. He was stationed close to the front and … Read more »
Luis Cervantes
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 … Read more »
Mary Lovelace O’Neal
Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1942, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, a painter who also prints, is Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley and former Chair of the Department of Art Practice. She retired from the University in 2006. She has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, The San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA, Humboldt … Read more »
Nell Sinton
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 … Read more »
Patricio Moreno Toro
Patricio Moreno Toro was born in 1943 in Santiago, Chile. As a young teenager competing with artists twice his age, he received the first prize in painting from the Museo National de Bellas Artes (MNBS) in Santiago. He became the protégé of Nemesio Antunez, Director of MNBS, Antunez also founded in 1953 the internationally renown Taller 99 – printmaking workshop. Patricio Moreno Toro arrived … Read more »
Sonia Gechtoff
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 … Read more »
Susan Kelk Cervantes
Susan Kelk Cervantes, muralist and dedicated artist for 47 years, a pioneer of the SF community mural art movement, and the founder and director of the Precita Eyes Muralists in the Mission District of San Francisco. Established in 1977, Precita Eyes is one of only a handful of community mural arts centers in the United States.
Influenced by the Mujeres Muralistas, the first collaborative … Read more »
Win Ng
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 … Read more »
