THE COLLAGE PARTY 3

August 20 - 23, 10am - 4pm
EXHIBITION OPENING: Friday, August 24 from 5-8pm
with Taco Pop-Up by Tacos Oscar
and Music by DJ Lloyd Cargo

Join us as we take over the Creative Growth Gallery with collage! Organized by Winnipeg artist and curator Paul Butler, The Collage Party is a participatory studio where everyone is invited to cut, paste, and create alongside Creative Growth artists and guest artists. The week of collage making culminates in a celebration and exhibition of the week’s creations from 5-8pm on Friday, August 24. We are thrilled to bring this popular and historic event back to our space for the third time.

The Collage Party is free and open to everyone to participate. Stop by the Creative Growth Gallery anytime Monday, August 20 through Thursday, August 23 from 10am-4pm to join in the collage making. Live music, DJ sets, and a spin-your-own record table will be on throughout the week to inspire music-themed collage on album covers. When the week of collective art making comes to a close, Paul Butler will install a one-night-only exhibition of selected work made during the week. All proceeds from the evening will go to support Creative Growth and the 160+ artist who call the studio home.

The Collage Party is a nomadic, participatory studio produced by Paul Butler since 1997. Paul Butler’s multi-disciplinary practice is rooted community, collaboration and artist-run activity. In addition to his longstanding studio practice, Butler has also produced projects that include: The Other Gallery (2001-2011) – a nomadic commercial gallery with a focus on overlooked artists; and Reverse Pedagogy (est. 2008)– a touring, collectively directed residency. Butler has served as the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the director of 2/edition in Toronto. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Center; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and La Maison Rouge, Paris. He has contributed his writing to the books The Life and Times of Bill Callahan, and Decentre: Concerning Artist-run Culture as well as publications including Border Crossings and Canadian Art. Butler's work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, and TD Canada Trust.

Materials, refreshments, and food for The Collage Party generously donated by Contact Records, the Creative Growth community, Temescal Brewing, and Dough & Co.

CHROMA KEY

June 28 - August 15, 2018
Exhibition Opening: Thursday, June 28, 5-8pm

Creative Growth is pleased to present Chroma Key, an exhibition featuring digital and video work. In the Creative Growth Digital Media Lab, artists explore the potentials of new media using programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro to create and edit original video and digital pieces. Rarely exhibited, the work in Chroma Key represents the last few years of new media art produced by Terri Bowden, Janis Danker, Heather Edgar, Carlos Fernandez, Rosena Finister, Susan Janow, Paulino Martin, Nick Pagan, Jordan King, Kim Clark, Stephanie Hill, and Gregory Stoper.

A long-time producer, writer, and collaborator in the Digital Media Lab, Susan Janow’s most recent short film, Questions, is a departure from her characteristically narrative-driven videos of the past. In Questions, Janow silently sits, facing the camera as we hear an audio track of Janow asking a series of questions. The questions shift seamlessly between standard interview-like queries to more personal inquiries about one's preferences and experiences. Neither confrontational nor entirely comfortable, the viewer is left to reflect not only on one’s own responses, but also the motivations and responses of the enquirer herself.

Gregory Stoper’s second episode of “History in a Minute with Gregory Stoper” will also be on view. For this series, Stoper researches and then writes, directs, narrates, and performs in biopics focused on singular historical figures; in this case Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Blending found video with performed scenes, the sepia-toned film becomes a meditation on the key moments of Gandhi’s life and the way in which history is told. Watch the first episode of "History in a Minute with Gregory Stoper" and other past work from the Creative Growth Digital Media Lab here.

Chroma Key will also include a site-specific installation by Terri Bowden, who will be presenting digitally manipulated portraits alongside her current fascination - the Union Jack flag. Visitors will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in Bowden’s world, while listening to her ambient musical compositions.

Visitors will also have the opportunity to have a multi-sensory experience of a new extra large work by Barry Regan. Inspired by synesthesia and courtesy of Ryan Wolff, visitors will strap on sub-woofer backpacks and headphones to see, feel, and hear Regan’s artwork.

Judith Scott featured | Outliers and American Vanguard Art

January 28 - March 18, 2018

Work by Judith Scott is included in the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art curated by Lynne Cooke. The exhibition originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and is currently on view at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA until September 30. It will travel to Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 18, 2018, through March 18, 2019.

From the National Gallery of art: Their classification may have varied—from folk and primitive to naïve and visionary—but intermittently throughout the history of modern art, gates have opened, boundaries have dissolved, and those creating art on the periphery have entered the art world. Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the first major exhibition to explore those key moments in American art history when avant-garde artists and outsiders intersected, and how their interchanges ushered in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. On view in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from January 28 through May 13, 2018, the exhibition brings together some 250 works in a range of media by more than 80 schooled and unschooled artists, such as Henry Darger, William Edmondson, Lonnie Holley, Greer Lankton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Matt Mullican, Horace Pippin, Martín Ramírez, Betye Saar, Judith Scott, Charles Sheeler, Cindy Sherman, and Bill Traylor.

Spanning more than a century, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, books, and mixed-media assemblagesare organized into three sections, each of which focuses on a distinct period when artists, art institutions, and audiences engaged intensively with the work of self-taught artists, or autodidacts: c. 1924–1943; c. 1968–1992; and c. 1998–2013. These pivotal periods of social, political, and cultural upheaval stimulated artistic interchanges that challenged or erased traditional hierarchies. While the show's first two sections historicize the evolving identities and roles of the distinctly American versions of modernism's "other," the last section proposes models for exhibiting art created on the periphery with that of the mainstream in ways that differ from today's prevalent approaches. Beyond bringing to light little-known or overlooked artists, Outliers and American Vanguard Art probes prevailing assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.

"This groundbreaking exhibition considers how, and in what terms, self-taught art has been represented in the past, and how institutions like the Gallery might present it today," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. "As the nation's collection of fine art, we are proud to initiate this discussion of what has been left out of American modernism's dominant narrative, and why it should be included."

The exhibition was on view at the National Gallery of Art from January 28 through May 13, 2018; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from June 24 through September 30, 2018; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 18, 2018, through March 18, 2019.

Creative Growth at the 2018 SF Art Book Fair

The 2018 SF Art Book Fair

1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Booth #C1

Preview - Friday, July 20th - 6pm – 10pm
Saturday, July 21st - 11am – 6pm
Sunday, July 22nd - 11am – 5pm

The 2018 SF Art Book Fair is an annual multi-day festival of artists' publications. This event is FREE and OPEN to the public and will feature artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera, and artists' multiples. These works will be presented by over 100 independent publishers, antiquarian dealers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts. Over the course of the weekend, the fair will be complemented by a diverse range of talks, discussions, book launches, on and off-site special projects, exhibitions and signings.

The mission of the fair is to foster the unique art publishing community of the Bay Area while providing a platform for national and international publishers to exhibit their work to a new audience.

Last year we welcomed 110 exhibitors and over 10,000 visitors. We aim to reach an even larger audience this year and create an event that continues to showcase some of the most interesting publishers and booksellers in the world.

The SF Art Book Fair will be held at Minnesota Street Project. The project’s landmark location, 1275 Minnesota Street, houses 10 galleries, a not-for-profit, temporary exhibitions spaces, media room, and a recently opened restaurant.

Click here for more information.

Carl Hendrickson featured | SOMArts | San Francisco

Work Creative Growth alumni artist Carl Hendrickson is featured in Something (you can't see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow at SOMAarts, curated by Juana Berrío.

From SOMArts:

SOMArts is proud to present Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow, a multi-disciplinary exhibition curated by Juana Berrío exploring the politics of space in the urban landscape. The exhibition includes a selection of sculptures, videos, photographs, graphic scores, and paintings by a multi-generational group of artists from around the world.

“By shifting the focus away from real estate or city development and towards the human body, this exhibition emphasizes individuals who claim and appropriate public space in ways other than property ownership. The show includes a range of works where bodies, particularly those who have been historically less privileged and more vulnerable, challenge the forces that threaten to make them invisible, especially when urban planning, economic growth, public policy, and underlying societal stigmas seem to overshadow and disempower them,” curator Juana Berrío remarked on her curatorial debut at SOMArts.

SOMArts, located just a few steps from the new Airbnb headquarters and several other young startups and businesses, is also located in a neighborhood that has one of the largest homeless populations in the Bay Area. Situated in this paradox at the intersection of 9th and Brannan, SOMArts is one of few spaces remaining in San Francisco dedicated to preserving the fierce creative experimentation that makes the Bay Area so unique. Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow invites viewers to engage this paradox in their own lives — to situate our bodies in the complexities of urban space in order to challenge the dynamics of gentrification and displacement.

The exhibition opens with David Wojnarowicz’s What is this little guy’s job in the world (1990), a photograph of a hand holding a small frog accompanied by a series of powerful questions: “What is this little guy’s job in the world? If this little guy dies does the world know? Does the world feel this? Does something get displaced? If this little guy dies does the world get a little lighter? Does the planet rotate a little faster?” This focus on the relevance of an individual’s journey and his or her presence in the world also appears in stanley brouwn’s rarely-shown note cards and drawings of how he navigates the streets and in Yuji Agematsu’s sculptures of small bits of trash contained within the clear cellophane wrapper from cigarette packs.

Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. Reverie-0 (2015) is made with worn women’s pantyhose that have been pulled, stretched, knotted, and filled with sand. In the words of the artist, nylon mesh “relates to the elasticity of the human body… From tender, tight beginnings to sagging… The body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape.” On the other hand, Delcy Morelos covers a large fiber mesh in many layers of earth-colored paint and then folds it, solidifying and compressing its presence.

AK Burns’s sculpture creates a threshold and an obstacle that divides the physical space with a metal gate. The gate’s bars spell out the word “known” twice, once from either side, playing with the readable as well as the unreadable nature of what we think we already know.

Phillip Greenlief, an experimental saxophonist and composer, presents a selection from his MAP SCORES series, collages and drawings of cities and different geographies that constitute a musical score. Greenlief will perform a newly commissioned map score, inspired by San Francisco’s public spaces at the opening reception on Saturday, July 14, 6:00–9:00 pm.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a writing exercise that poet Ed Roberson gave to his students while he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2014. The assignment appears in Dodie Bellamy’s essay “In the Shadow of the Twitter Towers,” published in her collection When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015), which forms the basis for a reading room that is also part of the exhibition.

Something (you can’t see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadowExhibiting Artists Yuji Agematsu stanley brouwn A.K. Burns Abraham Cruzvillegas Shannon Ebner Phillip Greenlief David Hammons Carl Hendrickson Zoe Leonard Delcy Morelos Senga Nengudi Catherine Opie Gordon Parks Davina Semo Stuart Sherman David Wilson David Wojnarowicz

RELATED EVENTS

Opening Reception Saturday, July 14, 6–9pm The opening night celebration features the performance of a newly commissioned map score by experimental composer Phillip Greenlief.

Artist Panel DiscussionThursday, July 26, 6–8pm Panel discussion in response to the themes of the exhibition with writers Dodie Bellamy, Daphne Gottlieb, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.

HOME SHOW

May 3 - June 22, 2018
Exhibition Opening on Thursday, May 3 from 5-8pm
Live Music: FRUIT HOSPITAL, Creative Growth family band
Members' Preview: 11am-2pm

Creative Growth’s annual Home show features a large selection of artwork and homewares, including pillows, woven blankets, ceramic planters, wood sculptures, and for one-night-only, an installation of artist-created table settings complete with dishes, linens, and artwork.

This year, Creative Growth’s Home show focuses on Togetherness and the complexities of gatherings and personal connection. Do we gather to celebrate and share in one another’s life or do we come together due to proximity or familial obligations? Do we blend together or remain distinct? What happens when the longed for connection is not reciprocated? Gatherings can feel harmonious, like the throng of whales in Larry Randolph’s ceramic pod, or ambivalent, like the two figures sharing a tension filled space in Ying Ge Zhou’s watercolor work. Interpersonal relationships can be full of complication and full of love; Rosena Finister explores this strife of through her painting of anthropomorphized talking birds and Zina Hall immortalizes familial dynamics in her hand-embroidered “Good Times” handkerchief.

With work by over 50 Creative Growth artists, Togetherness explores the myriad ways we come together and for the exhibition’s opening, there will be a one-night-only opportunity to gather together, as communities often do, around the dinner table. This year’s Home show includes a presentation of complete table settings of one-of-a-kind ceramics, tablecloths, and artwork; each setting of tableware is the creation of a single artist. Join us on the evening of May 3 when the artist tableware will be on display and for sale throughout the gallery and studio.