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Commonweal Gallery Exhibitions
Stephen Parker, PhD:
Images from the Cave of the Heart
Commonweal Gallery
February 19 - March 23
Reception Sunday, February 19, 3 - 5pm (following a New School talk from 2 - 3pm)
Steve Parker is an artist and Jungian psychologist, who’s been living in the interior of Alaska for almost forty years.
This installation, framed in copper, is a story in images and words about a journey of healing after a severe heart attack. The story begins with Chiron, the mythical centaur who had a permanent wound in his knee; chronic illness can feel like a similar, never-ending wound. The forty images and narrative convey a surprising story of alchemical transformation.
Dreams, stones, pelicans, and eggs were all participants in this journey. In this long process of dealing with mortality, Steve has constructed an underground stone cave, a labyrinth, and a stone retreat space in the birch forest where he lives.
A book on his experience, Heart Attack and Soul in the Labyrinth of Healing, was published in January 2011. Robert Bosnak, author of Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreams, writes about this book:
When the heart stops, a world comes to an end. The work of Steve Parker shows us that there is life after the end, after the heart has been attacked by death, and survived. In his remarkable reports and stunning paintings, we are moved to witness the transition from his life before to his life after as it forges its way to renewal.
A reception for the artist will be held in the gallery immediately following the New School event with Stephen Parker and Michael Lerner – Jung, Art and Healing.
Jacqueline Mallegni, Curator
jacquie@commonweal.org
505/685.4732
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 11 am – 4pm
The gallery is located on the second floor and is not wheelchair accessible.
Jessica Dunne: Momentum
Commonweal Gallery
November 20, 2011 - February 10, 2012
Reception Sunday, November 20, 2011, 3 - 5pm
Jessica Dunne is a San Francisco painter and printmaker and longtime friend of Commonweal, and she participated in The Commonweal Cancer Help Program in 2010.
She has won grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Kala Art Institute, the Dodge Foundation, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She has work in many collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, the Oakland Museum, and Stanford Special Collections.
We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much….
- Robert Walser
Dunne's eye for the overlooked, for the unseen or too familiarly seen, is particularly evident in her San Francisco landscapes. San Francisco is a city which is all too often glimpsed through a haze of habit (That bridge! That fog! Those trolleys!), but she turns it into something entirely unexpected, the last stop on an eerie American road trip. I lived in San Francisco for four years and it often seemed to me a lovely but trifling place, full of people who falsely mythologized themselves as great rebels and romantics, but Dunne's painting make me see this for the glib characterization it is. In her haunting prints and paintings, there is a dark and true romance to the city, a sense that one is at the very edge (and end) of things. In these peopleless cityscapes, we are forced to see what a bleak and beautiful place man has made, one where the flickering lights of the highway are as seductive as stars.
In the end though, Dunne is not an apocalyptic painter. Her eye is too generous for that, I think. When I look at these Wyoming and San Francisco pictures, I return again and again to that feeling of tenderness, to her striking ability to find a place in her work for things both great and small. But the true brilliance of her art lies in the fact that this tenderness exists alongside something much darker, a vision of this world as it wavers before our eyes. Look, she says, truly look. While there is still a world to see.
- Jenny Offil, author of Last Things
Jacqueline Mallegni, Curator
jacquie@commonweal.org
505/685-4777
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 11 am – 4pm
The gallery is located on the second floor and is not wheelchair accessible.
Toni Littlejohn: After Death Experiences
Commonweal Gallery
August 7 - September 30, 2011
Reception Sunday August 7, 3 - 5 pm
The Gallery at Commonweal is delighted to exhibit the artwork of long time West Marin artist Toni Littlejohn, entitled After Death Experiences. After Death Experiences reflects Toni Littlejohn’s journey with the death of her father last September at the age of 96.
Coinciding with the New School’s ongoing “End of Life Conversations” series, Littlejohn’s large dramatic and sensuous paintings will add visual potentency to a topic that is one of the most understated and avoided aspects of human existence. Littlejohn’s journey with her father – sensing into what she imagined he was experiencing both before and after his passing is the focus in this series of paintings. The paintings are a back and forth geologic process – a building up of texture, color, and form; the destruction through scraping, eroding, burning, and dissolving; followed by the cycle of rebuilding and erasing. Her work indends to touch the mystery, the vastness, and light.
The Gallery at Commonweal is located on the second floor and is not wheelchair accessible.
Arthur Okamura:
A Bolinas Life
Commonweal Gallery
April 17 - July 29, 2011
Reception Sunday, April 17 3 - 5 pm
Arthur Okamura lived in Bolinas for nearly 50 years. He took great pleasure in his long-time relationship with Commonweal as friend, associate, and board member for more than 10 years. During his many years as friend to Commonweal, he conducted a weekly art class that still gathers at Commonweal carrying on his teaching and practice of seeing with a creative eye.
An art professor for 31 years at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Arthur often traveled to exotic countries such as Bali, Indonesia, Japan, and Mexico where he was inspired by art and culture and his spiritual practice. Arthur was a master of many artistic mediums including etching; monotypes; paper and bronze sculpture; drawing; and painting with oil, watercolor, and acrylics.
The exhibition of works displayed at the Gallery at Commonweal focuses on Arthur’s large- scale contemplative work as well as silkscreen prints produced at the same time as block prints for the book Ox-Herding with Joel Weishaus in 1972.
The Commonweal exibiton coinsides with an exhibition of the same title at the Bolinas Museum from April 23 – June 5, 2011. To learn more about the Bolinas Museum, visit: www.bolinasmuseum.org.
The Gallery at Commonweal is located on the second floor and is not wheelchair accessible.
Site Specific:
Retrospective by Corrie McCluskey
Commonweal Gallery
February 5 - April 15, 2011
Reception Saturday, February 5, 3 - 5 pm
Corrie McCluskey is a Bay Area black and white medium format photographer who shoots fine art and social documentary projects, ruins, urban landscapes, and occasional portraiture. Her images have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Camerawork, Photovision, Shots, Foto Pozytyw (Poland) and Focus (Netherlands) and exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States, Germany (Mannheim), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Naarden, Enschede, Groningen).
Trained in anthropology, McCluskey’s photographs have become her field notes; she explores themes of “place” as repository of memory and as cultural artifact, the passage of time, looking at the forbidden and forgotten with their unwanted histories. Her method is site specific, focusing on buildings and warehouses, prisons, train stations, cityscapes, graffiti, and architectural details using ambient light and manually operated cameras (Hasselblad and Holga). She is interested in how objects and environments can resonate with traces of people who have touched them, leaving a subtle feeling of life—or perhaps the residue of past life—left behind like an empty skin.
The retrospective will include work from five portfolios:
- Within a Ten-Mile Radius: McCluskey looks at “home” with new eyes and records what is discovered, all within 10 miles of her front door. While navigating her barrio, she witnessed her neighbors’ struggles with immigration policies.
- Many Mexicos: Dichotomy of ancient Maya ruins in Yucatán and Chiapas and modern day Mexico.
- Expatriate: Images from two places—Northern California and Europe—taken during a time when she wanted to emmigrate to the Netherlands.
- Living in the Shadows of the Past: In collaboration with a Czech Holocaust survivor, McCluskey documented holocaust-era internment camps and former Jewish communities throughout the Czech Republic and Poland. Together they visited Terezín, Auschwitz/Birkenau, Krakow’s Podgórze Ghetto, and small towns in Bohemia and Moravia where Jewish communities once thrived.
- Alcatraz Seen & Unseen: Exploration of the ordinarily off-limits and empty corridors of the famous “supermax” federal penitentiary in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, with portraits of former prisoners and guards.
Visit her Web site for more of her work.
Ken Botto: Last Work 2008 - White Hat and Mothership
Commonweal Gallery
October 10 - November 12, 2010
Reception Sunday, October 10, 3 - 5 pm
Bolinas Museum (48 Wharf Road, Bolinas)
October 2 - November 12, 2010
Reception Saturday, October 2, 3-5 PM
415.868.0330
Ken Botto created and photographed miniature tableaux using his toy collection, unique props, and found objects. Armed with his "funky 1973 Nikkormat" he relied on natural light in his Bolinas, California, backyard and used reflected mirrors to produce illuminated and atmospheric effects. All images were created in the camera with neither digital nor darkroom manipulations. Botto created over 35 series, each containing anywhere from 9 to 153 images. Much of the work comments on cultural contradictions and absurdities of everyday life.
I’m dealing with artificial, fake objects. They are fabrications. I’m trying to get beyond the objects of course. I want to stretch the believability. We know these are miniatures, but at the same time the scene looks bigger than it is. It’s bigger than life. I’m trying to say something about how we see ourselves through these objects.
- Ken Botto interviewed by Paul Karabinis
White Hat: 2008
Botto was easily identifiable by his ever-present white hat. He incorporates his trademark in the series White Hat, the second-to-last series that he completed in the last year of his life. No matter the set- up, by including this iconic and personal possession, Botto interjects himself in his examination of mortality and identity.
The majority of the props that he selected have the themes of death and dying in common. Included in this series is one of the three identified self-portraits that he completed in his lifetime.
Mothership: 2008
Photographed in the last year of Botto’s life, Mothership, explores questions of ascension, human existence and space exploration. The placement of whale vertebrae and jaw bones in the sky, often hovering or ascending over constructed landscapes, suggest Botto’s belief in the continuation of life after death through the spirit.
Throughout his life, Botto was fascinated with transcendental thought, supernatural phenomena and extraterrestrial intelligence. These photographs with dramatic spotlights, glowing orbs and orchids provide compelling variety, yet stay within the existential framework that focuses the series.
Learn more about the Kenneth J. Botto Photography Trust
Photo: White Hat: Enlighten, 2008
Tending the Wild
April 11 -June 24, 2010
Commonweal Gallery
Tending the Wild, an exhibition of mixed media art by the participants in Wild Carrots, an arts workshop facilitated by Toni Littlejohn.
Exhibiting artists include:
Marcia Branca, Susan Brayton,
Pam Fabry, Rachel Gertrude, Jerie Gilbert, Shuli Goodman, Mary Isham, Arina Isaacson, Barbara Jay, Barbara Khurana, Erika Kunkel, Jean Langmuir, Toni Littlejohn, Cariadne Mackenzie, Barbara McDaniel, Suzanne Parker, Patrice Pilipovich, Susan Sasso,
Gwen Serriere, Wen-Hui Shen, Kay Taylor, Amy Weber, Ayumi Kie Weissbuch.
In Wild Carrots, artists and new artists can discover and affirm the belief that powerful art is created through a connection with the truth and wisdom of personal experience. Founded in 1992 by artist Toni Littlejohn, the workshops, held in her Point Reyes studio, cultivate faith, spontaneity and depth in each person's inner creative journey. No matter the level of technical expertise, a vast array of traditional art media as well as eclectic materials are used to spark the imagination. Many participants come without any art making experience. Others have been creative over the course of their lives, yet appreciate the support of a nurturing and inspired studio setting.
She Lives
A Collaborative Installation with
Lissa Rankin and Nancy Bellen
January 24 - March 6, 2010
Commonweal Gallery
SHE LIVES: Stories of Love, Loss, Recovery & Hope
She lives through the words “You have cancer.” She lives without knowing what tomorrow will hold. Shefollows a path towards recovery, and rallies the troops to help her overcome. She is not defined by her illness. She transforms. She surrenders to the Universe. She loves fearlessly. She takes off the mask. She speaks her truth. She lives on the open road, giggling at gas stations. She plants a garden and watches it grow. She dances with her arms held high and her head thrown back. Sometimes, she succumbs to the disease, but she lives on still, ever present. She cannot be broken because SHE LIVES.
Artists Nancy Bellen, a film-maker, photographer, and breast cancer survivor, and Lissa Rankin, an OB/GYN physician, artist and writer, join forces to explore the living essence that radiates from women who have experienced breast cancer. Witnessing the stories with seemingly opposing but surprisingly overlapping lenses, Bellen and Rankin document how women live, in spite of breast cancer.
For their two-person show at Commonweal titled SHE LIVES, Rankin showcases The Woman Inside Project, while Bellen features large photographic prints from her series, inescapable belonging. To create The Woman Inside Project, Rankin cast the torsos of women with breast cancer, while listening to their stories. She then painted the casts with encaustic (molten pigmented beeswax) and transcribed their stories into first person narratives, reflecting back her view of the beauty within each woman. Bellen, with collaborator and model for the series, Rebecca Wilson, worked together over five years using medium format photography. Bellen never uses Photoshop in her work, leaving nature to reveal the exquisite beauty and truth of life.
To create the draped fabric piece of installation art that frames the show, Bellen and Rankin collaborated, combining Bellen’s collection of photographs with the stories Rankin wrote. Fluid layers of silk evoke memory, dreams, and lives lived fully.
About their show, Bellen and Rankin say, “This show is not about breast cancer. It’s about living. We aim to shine a light on the fact that we all experience and recover from loss over and over again in our lives. Whether we lose a job, a loved one, a marriage, a dream, or a breast, we live still. Not to diminish what anyone experiences, but we get to choose how we live in the face of loss. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Joy is a choice. This show is about how people live in the face of adversity. It’s about the resiliency of the human condition.”
September 12 -November 14, 2009
One Breath Exhibition
by Kazuaki Tanahashi
One Breath Exhibition
by Kazuaki Tanahashi
Kazuaki Tanahashi, born and trained in Japan and
active in the United States since 1977, has had solo exhibitions of his calligraphic paintings internationally. He has taught East Asian calligraphy at eight international conferences of calligraphy and lettering arts. Also a peace and environmental worker for decades, he is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
July 12 - August 14, 2009
Art Within The Weal
Commonweal Community Exhibition
Commonweal Gallery
Art Within The Weal
Commonweal Community Exhibition
Commonweal Gallery
The Commonweal Gallery will exhibit an eclectic installation of artworks from the diverse members of Commonweal community including photography by Philip Buchanan, Corrie McCluskey and Christina Tucker, ceramics by Diane Blacker, mixed media by Dianne Duchesne, Patricia Marina and Katrina Mayo-Smith, jewelry by Rachel Naomi Remen, sculpture by Arlene Allsman, Burr Heneman and Jacqueline Mallegni, paintings by Michael Rafferty and Marianne Patton (Sharyle Patton’s mother), a collaborative installation by Waz Thomas and Victor Marchase and beautiful flowers arrangements by Susan Braun.
"Fun/No Mind Drawing"
March 8 - April 10, 2009
Arthur Okamura's Drawing Class at The New School. Featured artists include: Carol Collier, Eileen Danse, Dianne Fingland, Dolores Gates, Hermione Healy, Cindra Joy, Vera Louie, Anna Mohn and Carl Nagin
Richard Duning -- Stations of the Cross and Other Stories
Commonweal Gallery through October 3rd, 2008.
This installation of Richard Duning's stations of the cross and other stories is comprised of 14 paintings as well as an altar of fetishes and symbolic items. The garden of eden, the resurrection and the rough beast are several of the stories. Duning says "The journey of my painting consisted of looking at these stories as living myths that I approached both as an individual but also from an archetypal point of view. Certainly I referenced the Biblical stories for a starting point, but then I approached them more from the direction of what does it have to do with life as I know it? What does it have to teach me? It has been rewarding to share the work with different audiences and to realize that other people are also experiencing these works from a similar but very individualized point of view."
Burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria: An Original Theater Piece with an Interpretive and Visual Art Exhibition, with the Artship Ensemble, directed by Slobodan Dan Paich. This performance was held in the Commonweal Gallery on Saturday, October 4th.
The Burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria is an original theatre performance and exhibition that celebrates the central role of wisdom collections - oral or written - in every culture at all times in history.
Director, Slobodan Dan Paich, who created and developed the project, says: "The performance will addresses - directly or indirectly - the idea of alignment and misalignment of place, issues of freedom of speech and expression, and the rise and fall of empires. It portrays the tensions brought about by huge events in history to the people who happen to be there during that time. The central figure is Hypatia, daughter of the chief librarian who wants to live an ordinary simple life, but events would not let her. Hypatia was one of the greatest mathematicians of her time, and head of the Academy in Alexandria. For her, the simple life was teaching day to day. Her assassination by a fundamentalist mob signaled the burning of the Library. In the ebb and flow of history, times of cultural flourishing are superseded by times of oppression and darkness. It seems that the great library was burnt more than once."
The intention of the theater piece is to raise the issue of freedom of expression from the level of rhetoric and complacency to a dialogue, to give vital insight into the meaning and depth of collecting and disseminating knowledge, and to illuminate the fragility of library collections and their keepers. To catalyze conversations among stewards of wisdom collections, Artship Foundation plans over next few years to convene an international committee of artists, thinkers, curators, librarians, and patrons to act as an unofficial United Nations that supports and promotes freedom of expression.
The whole project examines and inspires contemporary policy-making, helps us learn from history, and gives sanctuary to individuals and groups who, against obvious and insidious pressure, have dared to stand alone. More >>
Slobodan Dan Paich is the principal choreographer and artistic director for Artship Dance/Theater, and is the coordinator for Artship Visual Arts & Community/Cultural Commons initiatives. He also served as director of arts and culture on the board of directors of the International Peace Foundation, Berlin & Vienna from 1996 to 2002. Never far from the rehearsal process in the theater, he has taught performing visual arts and architecture at major performing, visual arts and architecture schools and studios in United States, England, Germany and Italy. Paich has received numerous local, state and national awards for his work in bringing arts and culture-making into the community.
The Heart of the Matter: a collaborative installation with Scott Hannan, Kelly Nicholson, Luis Maurette, Alejandra Ortiz, and many, many others. This exhibit showed at the Commonweal Gallery July 7th through 18th.
Jessica Dunne: Paintings, Monotypes and Spit-bite Aquatints.
April 28th through June 27th, 2008.
Jessica Dunne's current project is an exploration of night as seen through a car's windshield. The landscape and cityscape paintings, monotypes and spit-bite aquatints on exhibition at the Commonweal Gallery are reflective of the artist's opinion that 'the highway power cartel will replace the greenish mercury-vapor and pink sodium-vapor streetlights that dominate my work with sun-like halide bulbs, altering our nocturnal world (and my palette). My goal is to get my present experience down on canvas before it disappears.' Dunne's exhibition also encompasses her travels to various rural locations -- Virginia, Wyoming, Rome, Germany. She is particularly interested in studying the weather in places she is a meteorolical stranger to and considers most of her work a study not just of light but of atmosphere and weather, termperature and the sensation of being there; wherever there might be. More info >>
Paintings by Claudia Niseema Nolte
Reception was held at Commonweal on September 15th, 2007.
Exhibit continued through December 18th, 2007.
Claudia Niseema Nolte was born and raised in Europe and has actively pursued painting as an art form since the 1970's when she was a young teenager. She studied in England, Switzerland and Germany and traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and Northern America. In 1991 she moved from India to California where she still lives.
Her watercolor "MASKS" has been published on the cover of the award-winning Art & Literary Journal "Milvia Street." In 2000 she started a series of oil paintings featuring spirals, desert views and architecture. Her most recent work in called: Archetypes of the Greek Mythology.
"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible."
—P.Klee
Tarantella, Tarantula, with the Artship Ensemble, directed by Slobodan Dan Paich. Performance was held at Commonweal on August 19th, 2007.
Tarantella, Tarantula is a contemporary exploration of dance, music and storytelling that speaks of continuity and passionate age-old practices not alien to our modern needs: a delicate and poignant story. Artship's idiosyncratic style has been described by critics as being at the nexus of dance, theater, cinema and "zen." Tarantella has been employed for centuries by village elders, primarily women, in Italy and elsewhere. The dance's outward purpose is to ward off the negative effects of the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider, but its more general inward purpose is to offer tools to deal with oppression, unrequited love, and longings of the heart that do not have outlets in traditional societies. The performance is not a reconstruction of any particular regional type of Tarantella dance or music, but an immersion in the essence of Tarantella as a poetic framework for the production's narrative. More about Tarantella, Tarantula >>
"Actors-dancers bring lost art of physical storytelling to life."
—R. Howard, San Francisco Chronicle
"Why cannot those poisoned by Tarantulas be cured otherwise than by Music?"
—Athanasius Kircher, Rome, 1641
Slobodan Dan Paich is the principal choreographer and artistic director for Artship Dance/Theater, and is the coordinator for Artship Visual Arts & Community/Cultural Commons initiatives. He also served as director of arts and culture on the board of directors of the International Peace Foundation, Berlin & Vienna from 1996 to 2002. Never far from the rehearsal process in the theater, he has taught performing visual arts and architecture at major performing, visual arts and architecture schools and studios in United States, England, Germany and Italy. Paich has received numerous local, state and national awards for his work in bringing arts and culture-making into the community. More about Slobodan Dan Paich >>
Sculptures and Performance by Sha Sha Higby. Performance was held at Commonweal on July 7th and the exhibit continued through August 9th, 2007.
International performance/sculptural artist, Sha Sha Higby has performed her unique body of work throughout the United States, and internationally in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Slovak, Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Germany and Holland. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theater Artist Fellowship, The Zellerbach Family Fund, the California Arts Council New Genre Individual Artist Fellowship.
She studied for one year in Japan in 1971, observing the art of Noh Mask and theater and then received a Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship to study dance & shadow puppet making and performance arts in Indonesia for five years at the Academy of Music, Central Java, Indonesia. In addition to traveling throughout Southeast Asia to Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), she received an Indo-American Fellowship to study the textile arts of India, and a Travel Grants Fund from Arts International to study in Bhutan. She has also recently studied lacquer arts in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan, through the auspices of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. More about Sha Sha Higby >>
Artistic Statement: "I approach dance through the medium of sculpture. I interweave painterly manipulation of physical materials and textures, which I make one by one from wood, paper, silk, ceramic and gold leaf with a labyrinth of delicate props. My work strives to create a path where movement and stillness meet. Shreds of memory lace into a drama of a thousand intricate pieces, slowly moving, stirring our memory toward a sense of patience and timelessness."
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday from 11am - 4 pm, and by appointment.
Please contact: Jacqueline Mallegni at gallery@commonweal.org
Fragrance-Free Events: Please refrain from wearing perfumes and colognes when attending events so that those who are sensitive to chemicals may also attend.
Commonweal Gallery is not wheelchair accessible.