Every Exit Is An Entry: The Life and Work of Liam O’Gallagher shares the art, writing, and story of a highly original individual. A creative catalyst in 20th century art and literature, O’Gallagher spent a lifetime avoiding the spotlight. With his life-partner Robert Rheem and a close circle of friends, he inhabited the world of free-thinkers, painters, beat poets and sages, quietly impacting the lives of others. With unprecedented access to the artist’s archives and journals, author Kevin Wallace explores O’Gallagher’s life and work, joined by guest authors William Gray Harris, Whit Hibbard, Jan Herman, Cynthia Newby Luce, Michael McClure, India Supera, and Lewis Warsh, and insights from friends and associates, including Charles Amirkharian, Michael Bernsohn, Henry Dakin, Hammond Guthrie, Roshi Joan Halifax, Judith McBean, Paul Sand, & Gerd Stern.
softcover ISBN – 10: 069200145X / 13: 9780692001455
hardcover ISBN – 10: 061527014X / 13: 9780615270142
published by Fine Arts Press
written by Kevin Wallace
format: softcover and clothbound with dustjacket
dimensions: 9.5” x 9.5”
136 page plus cover / 136 color plates
publication year: 2009
softbound: $35
hardbound: $50
order number: softcover: FAP-101-S / hardcover: FAP-101-H
Forever fascinated by the color and culture of Mexico, Charles Barth: A Kaleidoscope of Culture captures the excitement of the country through depictions of its people and traditions in vibrant, richly detailed intaglio prints. Employing a variety of Mexican themes, Barth incorporates items and photographs collected over twenty-five years of traveling with his wife in Mexico. From collections of masks and costumes, he clothes his figures in an imagination that reflects the essence of Mexico. Many prints depict glimpses of Mexican daily life and festivals such as the Day of the Dead or the Guelaguetza in Oaxaca, Mexico. Other prints depict popular culture such as lucha libre or salsa dancing. Whatever the subject matter presented, color and detail combine to give the prints a life of their own. Places like Oaxaca, Mexico, can be magical and that magic is present in Barth’s work. Like most artists of Oaxaca, he is very much concerned with fantasy and storytelling. Above all, color is the key to Barth’s work. The colors, rich or gaudy, brilliant or garish, pulsating or flamboyant, contribute to the character of Mexico’s people, buildings and traditions. Vivacious colors activate Barth’s work with a seemingly glowing quality and provide the background for the exuberant way of life in Mexico.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Bay Area artist Robert Brady established himself among the nation’s most original ceramic sculptors. His work was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and many important private collections. This publication which accompanied the exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2006 is a long overdue survey of Brady’s sculpture in wood. Brady’s inventive wooden sculpture projects a powerful inner presence, like ritual objects in tribal art, Robert Brady is a master of figural abstraction whose work has evolved poetically from the flux of his own life, work with ceramics, and deep reveraence for materials.
The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf was published to coincide with the artist’s exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2008. The exhibition and publication illustrates the artist’s interest in architecture, comics, and the narrative voice. Also examined are the social, moral, and political issues that Metcalf has raised in his essays. In his work, issues are acted out by his vulnerable protagonists on the stage of miniature worlds. Cast in silver, or carved in wood, Metcalf’s characters with their emotionally-distorted bodies manifest inflicted pain from human nature’s “dark side.” With their atrophied limbs, they are powerless in confronting Sisyphean ordeals in their worlds. Metcalf purposely leavens these conditions with wit. Physically big-headed, all Metcalf’s figures are born from cartoon traditions. These characters with big brains are strangely credible, as they ponder Metcalf’s overarching themes—the human condition, nurturing the juncture of nature and culture, and issues of dissent. As morally charged inventions, The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf reside in the same realms of imagination as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Lewis Carroll’s fabulous Through The Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There).
Nathan Oliveira : The Painter’s Bronzes is the first comprehensive publication to survey the sculptures, 1960—2008 of this internationally-celebrated artist. He first received national acclaim in 1959 as the youngest painter to be featured in the New Images of Man exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. While his paintings have been heralded as part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, they are, in fact, rooted in European Expressionism. Identified further as a pivotal figure in the revival of lithography and monotype, Nathan Oliveira was a Professor of Studio Art at Stanford University from 1964—1996. This publication was published to coincide with the first major exhibition of Oliveira’s sculpture at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2008.
William Hunter is a major figure in the field of contemporary craft and a leading figure in contemporary wood art. Transforming Vision: The Sculpture of William Hunter, 1970—2005 is the first major publication on the artist and features work that encompasses over three decades of artistic exploration. In his insightful essay, curator Kevin Wallace traces Hunter’s work back to childhood interests in baseball, fishing and hand crafts, and coming of age during the turbulent and inspiring era of 1960s America. Inspired by the back-to-the-earth movement and philosophies of self-reliance and reinvention, William Hunter entered the field of contemporary wood turning during its formative stages and pioneered a new language in wood, evolving from a foundation in utilitarian forms to a vehicle for sculptural exploration. Investigating the medium’s rich expressive potential, Hunter advanced a new direction for contemporary wood art, and assisted in its emergence as a legitimate and highly regarded form of artistic expression.
The Art of Vivika & Otto Heino documents the lives of two leading figures in 20th century ceramics. As teachers, they exerted a major influence on the work of generations of makers. As artists, their work has been prominently featured in hundreds of exhibitions, honored with innumerable awards, and now forms an essential part of the craft collections in dozens of museums. But, as Eudorah Moore, Founder and Director of the California Design Exhibitions, has pointed out, “Over and beyond the work, their great distinction was the early visibility they gave to the crafts, revealing the crafts as a way of life.”
Jack Stuppin creates landscapes that celebrate nature, but he is certainly not a traditional plein-air artist. As Susan Krane of the San Jose Museum of Art explains, “Stuppin’s landscapes are amplified, as if quick glimpses that he has forever exalted and memorialized. The scenes he offers the viewer are held taut, orderly patterned and captured in brilliant Technicolor. They may remind us of the modernist masters of metaphorical landscapes (from Grant Wood to Marsden Hartley to Arthur Dove), and of images that are part and parcel of Americana.”
River of Destiny: The Life and Work of Binh Pho presents the art and story of an important Vietnamese-American artist. A leading figure in the new international movement in contemporary wood sculpture, Binh Pho utilizes modernist approaches to painting and sculpture to create bold new work that bridges the decorative arts with concerns for narrative and concept traditionally associated with contemporary art.
Celebrating Nature presents the state of the art of craft. These artists work in materials the earth offers—wood, clay, metal, stones and natural fibers—to create work that presents the wonder and beauty of the natural world.
This award-winning catalogue presents, for the first time, the maquettes of Robert Arneson (1930 —1992), one of America’s most original, witty and iconoclastic artists, known for his pivotal role in establishing ceramics as a vital medium for contemporary figurative sculpture.
Animal Myth and Magic explores the central place and significance of animals in the Andean cosmovision through the prism of South American archaeology, anthropology, natural history and mythology. Illustrated with 155 marvelous images from pre-Columbian textiles, this unique anthology discusses over forty-five species, from the hummingbird and butterfly to the llama and jaguar. The depictions—from surreal to naturalistic, awe-provoking to whimsical, abstract to totemic—span a diversity of habitats and 2000 years of culture (Chavín to Inka).