The Great Highway Gallery is excited to present Rite of Spring a window installation by San Francisco artist Kirk Maxon.
Kirk Maxon’s work reflects his appreciation for the magic inherent in nature. This understanding was fostered by family walks and mushroom foraging with his mother growing up in Oregon. Kirk continues to forage for his botanical muses that he then turns into perfectly detailed metal sculptures. Living in San Francisco his recent work is influenced by urban plants that often go unnoticed or unappreciated. They represent a City of survivors.
Kirk manipulates metal in the same way you might see done with paper. His specimens are photographed, photocopied then cut into patterns that he uses to meticulously cut his metal herbarium installations.
Exhibition Statement In 1913 Igor Stravinsky wrote Rite of Spring when it was premiered in Paris, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography and possibly the anti Russian sentiment caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a “riot”. In the 1980’s a Heavy Metal band named Rite of Spring was a mainstay of the D.C. Punk Scene. They where considered the first emo band but they rejected any association with emo genres. In 2011 A horror movie named Rite of Spring was released to a plethora of bad reviews with a plot revolving around kidnappings and monsters. In 2021 a group protesting the loss of Donald Trump rioted inside the capital building.
A paganistic installation of brass prickly wildflower bushes will fill the window, referencing the protest and real horrors of these recent times.
About the Artist Kirk Maxson moved to San Francisco in 1992, and lived in the Mission and participated in the San Francisco Mission School art scene. He exhibited artwork in the seminal exhibition spaces of Adobe books, Scene/Asena, and ESP during the height of the Mission School. Subsequently he has created multiple permanent site-specific installation for corporate collections including ClimateWorks Foundation, San Francisco, CA, Kilroy Realty Corporation, Bellevue, WA, UBM, San Francisco, CA, Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, CA, Morgan Stanley Corporate Collection, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Collection, Avant Corporate Collection, Menlo Park, CA and Fresh Connection Corporation, Lafayette, CA.
He has also created numerous installations for private residences. He has previously worked with Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco, Eli Ridgeway Gallery and the Gensler Architecture firm in San Francisco.
Kirk is also a part of the Ocean Beach community. His expansive sand drip castles are an impermanent gift to those who stumble upon them or lucky enough to see him at work.
The Great Highway Gallery is excited to present P.W.D.s a window installation by San Francisco artist Leigh Barbier.
Exhibit Statement I began making Pandemic Worry Dolls in April of this year. By sending them to my close friends, family members and front line workers, it was my way to reach out and offer support and connection in the absence of face to face contact. They are constructed out of cardboard and hot glue, painted with acrylic, further adorned with fabric and found objects. Each one is unique and each one carries a specific worry. The worry is like a prayer, silent and heart felt. I continue to make them in batches of a dozen. And I will keep making them until we can live without fear of the virus. These are a few samples.
About the Artist I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, California, and grew up on a gravel road, running barefoot and free between neighbor’s homes. I attended a Christian Science church every Sunday and Disneyland once a year. I remember thinking as a small child that Sees candy was a religious destination and God looked like a tube of toothpaste. Later museums replaced Sees candy and I found order in the universe through art.
I am drawn to religious art, admire Thomas Hart Benton’s line and color, adore the muralist of the Mexican Revolution and can`t get the images of Disney from my 1960s childhood out of my visual vocabulary.
I have found that the work I have done to earn a living has impacted me more than anything I learned in college. From museum model-making to digital painting for the special effects industry; they have both shaped and condensed my hands on skills and sharpened my eye.The highlights have been working on dioramas for the California Academy of Sciences, being part of an all girl team to make a giant baseball mitt for the Giants stadium and digitally painting on Star Wars, Episode 2 and 3. My best freelance opportunity to date has come from my experience working with the San Francisco musical group, The Residents over the last 15 years. This has been the perfect combination of work and art, an opportunity to combine my vision with the narrative visuals of the Residents’ myth-making.
For me, making drawings, paintings and sculpture is a simple and direct process of giving emotions form. This compulsion, along with my over-active imagination that perceives peril around every corner, drives my image making.
The Great Highway Gallery is excited to present Your Turn To Look a group exhibition, of a San Francisco based drawing group that has been together for over 40 years. The exhibition features: a window installation and drawings.
Exhibit Statement We rarely get to regard another person in an extended, curious, active way. That is special. It keeps artists coming back, week after week, year after year, to draw from a model for hours at a time. Outside of this time, we use drawing in different ways—our group includes painters of landscapes and painters of abstractions, sculptors, printmakers, and new media artists. But all of us find the continual practice of life drawing helps us do what we want to do as artists.
Our group has been meeting regularly to draw from a model since 1979, when Meredith Tromble scored a storefront studio in Noe Valley that was big enough to host a group. The artists William Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner, Noe Valley neighbors, joined in and brought Jessica Dunne into the group. We have persisted for over forty years, through multiple studio evictions, the passing of Bill and Paul, and the coming and going of other colleagues. Our current home is Dunne’s studio near the Great Highway.
Like most long-term drawing groups, we have our own culture. We play music but we don’t talk while we are drawing. If the model is late, we start by drawing each other. There is tea but no food. We never, ever criticize each other’s drawings. We are there to tunnel through whatever is on our mind to a deeply focused awareness, the flow that connects what we see and what we do. The results of this process hang here. It is your turn to look.
—Meredith Tromble January 9, 2021
Artists Marc Duffett Jessica Dunne Karen Ely Joan Frenkel Grace Kennedy Olivia Kuser Amy Meyer Anne Subercaseaux Tara Sullivan Meredith Tromble
Marc Duffett Drawing and painting have always been at the core of my sense of self. Painting expresses dreams and energies for me, while drawing anchors me in the physical act of seeing. In the sixties I fell in love with life drawing at RISD, and Jessica Dunne’s drawing group has allowed me to continue this passion.
Jessica Dunne Jessica Dunne makes enormous paintings of the Bay Area’s tunnels, freeways, and schoolyards as well as smaller atmospheric monotypes and spit-bite aquatints. She lives in San Francisco when she is not off being an artist-in-residence somewhere. A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Kala Art Institute Fellowship, she has had solo shows in museums and universities around the country, including the Fresno Art Museum, The Flaten Art Museum, Saint Olaf College, and the Frye Art Museum.
Jessica has been awarded residencies by the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Ucross Foundation, Kuenstlerhaus Salzburg (a partner of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) and Oberpfaelzer Kuenstlerhaus, a partner of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, in Germany.
Her work is collected by the Oakland Museum of California, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and The Library of Congress, and Stanford Special Collections. https://www.jessicadunne.com Instagram: @jessicadunnepaint
Karen Ely Karen Ely is a semi-retired editor and life-long artist living in Sonoma County. She works in mosaic, watercolor, acrylic, oil, and pastel.
Joan Frenkel I was the Head Sculptor of the San Francisco Opera and of the San Francisco Ballet for over thirty-five years. I sculpted everything from props, statues, and prancing ponies to palaces and mountains. Sculpted large porcelain seashells and low relief tile murals. My work mostly involves painting and cutting paper sculpture mounted in shadow boxes. I received degress from Washington University, St. Louis, MO and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Grace B. Kennedy “Grace Kennedy has been a member of this drawing group since 2008, around age thirteen. She is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, as well as the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown at the Pafa Museum in Philadelphia, C.R. Ettinger Studio, and the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.” http://www.graceart.space/ Instagram @gray_sea23
Olivia Kuser I’ve been drawing since I was a little girl, but I didn’t draw from the model until my senior year in college, when I took a studio art course as a respite from writing my thesis. What a revelation, both in how hard it was and how fun it was.
Since then, I have looked for opportunities to draw from the model whenever I could. My work isn’t figurative; I’m mostly a landscape painter and printmaker, so drawing from the model doesn’t directly inform my work. It’s great for hand-eye coordination and for learning how to see. Also, since most art making is a completely solitary activity, drawing groups provide a chance to work communally with other artists. I’ve been in this drawing group since sometime in the late eighties or so. Since the pandemic began we have managed to meet only three times, outside, everybody masked, and when the numbers looked ok in the city. This is a drawing from one of those sessions. http://www.oliviakuser.com
Amy Meyer When I was a child in Brooklyn, N.Y. I loved to draw. In high school, I took after-school art classes at the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Students League. My interest evolved into a passion continued at Oberlin College where I earned a degree in art and art history. I came back to New York and pursued hopes for a career in art. I earned my MFA in printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (today, CCA) and we raised our family, but I eventually put aside my art work. In 1970, I began looking for a small community project to become involved in and stumbled into the biggest land protection effort in our region: the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). For fourteen years I thought of little else except my family and this open space while conservationist Edgar Wayburn and I led People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area. https://www.amywmeyer.com
Anne Subercaseaux I worked in architectural and engineering firms, initially as a draftsperson and later as a graphic designer, places of work that had a prolonged personal influence. I began to observe and study sights, those which I encountered within urban and natural settings. Commutes over the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge presented a spectrum of structural configurations cast by afternoon light onto the surface of the roadway span. http://www.annesubercaseaux.com
Tara Sullivan The pairing of art & medicine has been my path, with a lifelong interest in studying the figure for the visual discipline required. The ability to accurately see and assess is vital for both disciplines. I’m drawn to short, quick poses for the challenge of capturing the essence, the essential-ness of being. Receiving a BFA from the University of Hawaii led to being the founding director of an art studio program at the Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific in Honolulu. I currently live in San Francisco, my home of origin, in the outer Parkside after 30 years in Hawaii, and am inspired by the Bay Area Figurative artists.
Meredith Tromble Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer whose curiosity about links between imagination and knowledge led her to form collaborations with scientists in addition to making installations, drawings, and performances. Since 2011, Tromble has been artist-in-residence at the Complexity Sciences Center directed by physicist Jim Crutchfield at the University of California, Davis, collaborating with geobiologist Dawn Sumner and others. Her work has been widely presented at venues ranging from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. to BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn. She is also the editor of two books, The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, co-edited with Charissa Terranova, and The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman, University of California Press. She is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series “Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science, and Design” and a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies/Art & Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute. https://meredithtromble.net
The Great Highway is a fine art gallery and working studio featuring contemporary works in all mediums. The gallery has a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore where lands meet water.
