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At Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland What’s In A Name? The title of this show, Beyond the Frame, immediately gets us asking questions. Is the frame physical, or metaphorical? Actual or virtual? Is the idea about what is new, outside of the familiar? Or what is presented outside of what is conventionally allowed? A Celebration of Large-Scale Art, the subtitle for the show, then helps out: size matters . Now we know that what we’re looking for is an experience that size creates, which otherwise might not be offered by the work. One of my favorite riffs on this is “breaking” the Fourth Wall of theater: making the audience a part of the “reality” on stage by extending the action into the seats; it breaks through the imaginary wall left where the opened curtain has vacated. This is exciting because the stage creates a psychological  space large enough to contain us, and then that space gets even bigger and envelopes us. Got it; this exhibit’s subtitle tells us to be on the lookout for how works at large scale create a psychological space larger than ourselves. And as the central feature of the show, the artworks generally use a canvas or board so large that its original literal function as a working area for the artist turns the artist’s creative effort into a performance. As we “read” the work and follow the effort, that performance then projects the emotional and conceptual space into which we go. But hold that thought. What comes with the first few seconds of standing in the show gallery is a different emphasis. We hadn’t been told in advance that it is surveying how visual abstraction generates this emotional and conceptual space, even in the figurative work on display. Now, in the following, by investigating the variations on that theme, I’m flirting with making the meaning of “abstraction” less clear, not more. But I will say that all the works lean towards a certain effect in common: the work viewed is not “about” some other experience; the qualities of the work’s presence is  the experience.   Appearance and Reality So, what is this presence about? So often, abstraction generates an effect that we might for personal reasons call “beauty”; but that characterizes the finished object  that we’re calling artwork. More interesting, I think, is our awareness of what is going on in the work’s space and is coming out of it – which sees that object as an instrument  used by the artist to convey something. In other words, this is focusing more on the intent of a work as a “medium”. A medium is a channel that allows and helps transport something from one “place” to another one. We distinguish different mediums by how they get that done. And here the medium carries the artist’s concern to us. The artist picks and uses the medium and its characteristics, instrumentally. In that sense, what I noticed in this show is that abstraction facilitates what I’ve called the artist’s performance, and it’s the performance that connects us to the work. Throughout the show, we can peruse the varied “performances” of the artists along with the size that lets them do it. The Art of Work For example, few things convert a static image into a dynamic one as does the way a line, even with no intention of representation, triggers our impulse to follow along with it. This is directly comparable to the idea of a melody in music. Likewise, multiple lines can co-exist in ways that mutually affect how each is felt while followed – whether harmoniously or not. John Woods’ works remind us that drawing generates a sense of simultaneously creating a space and navigating it, finally inhabiting it. But a line’s work can of course segment that space into figures, or shapes, such as done by Christine Ferrouge; and while that line mainly sets edges (boundaries), it can also make the figures animated.    Wood Ferrouge  The common denominator there, in the drafting and figuration, is that line in the work is gestural , and gesture can be very attracting because it can be mimetic, evocative, or both. In Ferrouge’s pieces, gestural line makes body language  deftly indicate the kind of moment that is seen, but scale makes that gesture more physically equivalent to our own, generating sense memory as the kind of space we then inhabit. We might be more familiar with this phenomenon from sculpture, but here it is in the 2D imagery of the wall work. The other set of shape-sensitive work, by Judith Foosaner, also exploits what large scale offers, but in this case the effect is telescoping in on something, which makes it bigger in our field of view. Figuration here is abstract on the level of icons – shapes that have just enough information to point out something we are already familiar with. That creates orientation for us. But in the zoomed-in view, order and pattern that may normally miss our attention are revealed, and this revelation brings the energy of a small epiphany – that quietly, if not secretly, we are part of some greater plan in life’s organization. Foosaner Color of course also gets identifiable jobs in the exhibit. One, as seen in Simone Simon’s work, is as an indicator of spatial depth, inherently referring to light as a dimension of the real space in our living experience. But another job is to just be a form of energy that infuses us. Even if we don’t know who first said that red is passionate or yellow is joyous or aqua is soothing, most of us have no quarrel with given colors corresponding to given feelings. And here the color’s presence is not about solving the problems of a frame’s influence on image construction. Rather, it invokes a condition that we know makes a boundary meaningless to our encounter. The work’s size amplifies the presence of the color, which creates the psychological space we enjoy: empathy. Simon Manrique Meanwhile, in work by Javier Manrique a far more textural, nearly tactile handling of color as lines creates an all-over coverage of the surface, and like Simon’s ethereal work, needing no reference to borders. (Sidebar: I can’t resist noting that smashing textural  and tactile  together gives “textile”, and now I have more homework to do. But I defer to Manrique’s own artist statement on view – come read it at the gallery, or online here .) In two other cases, works by Michael Shemchuk and Mary Ann Leff bring the technique of contrasting two different scales within one piece, suggesting that differing scales already have differing built-in effects. It’s not news but again the work is not about  the experience; rather it is the experience. This time, one set (Leff’s) intentionally does show a preoccupation with the frame’s influence on the construction of the piece. From within the available area, some of the pictorial elements, usually the larger ones, get to reach the frame while other smaller ones usually do not. This is a simple drama that we can lean into, and the framing, like staging, does not restrict as much as it focuses attention. That attention further suggests things that aren’t even there yet or that could happen. The other large works, by Shenchuk, deliberately compare big sharply defined rectangular areas of somewhat industrial color coverage against small, ragged areas of apparently indifferent spontaneous removal. But mostly the work projects both occurrences as “intentional”. Due to large scale, each artwork in this set immediately echoes urban streetside walls, invoking a narrative that the piece wants to specify yet shows no attempt to make captive to time or place. Given all that, the even distribution of the “blemishes” on the surface of the works approaches parody but goes back to the aspect of seeing the artist performing the work. Leff                                                                   Shenchuk Finally, there is work that yells “free jazz” to me – an intentional refusal to direct the evolution of the piece in any way other than by reacting to (visual) discoveries that occur along the way. This work, by Dulama LeGrande, harkens back to the color line work I initially mentioned by John Wood. But in comparison, LeGrande’s is dedicated to being unrestricted in shape, color, or any aspect of form, in an exploration about what effects are possible, rather than about what is possible from a given effect. LeGrande Walking the Talk The dialogue between the sets of work by LeGrande and Wood is captivating and reminds us that the arrangement of all the works in the show purposefully get them engaged with each other, generating more layers of experiences for us. It rewards second and third looks at everything. Consequently, the more time you spend within the gallery’s walls, the bigger the show seems to get. This is exactly why you want to be actually standing among the collected works, on land not online. The show, in progress, remains mounted at the gallery  until March 8th.   --  Malcolm Ryder   Images included: excerpts of all works courtesy of Gray Loft Gallery and the artists. Artworks represented: property of the designated artists. All rights reserved. A special note: in a show like this, many things ranging from theater to conceptual and performance art, to flash mobs, graffiti, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly filter through the mind. Thanks here to artist John Wood, who in sharing our ideas about drawing and museum going, discovered and burnished our mutual appreciation of the idea of performance in art making, reflected in this article.

By any reasonable measures, Bill Weber is one of the Bay Area’s most established artists, celebrated repeatedly over many years and phases of work. His astonishing family history, spanning Germany, Missouri, and California, parks the listener in locales as diverse as Hearst Castle and Brentwood; and it weaves among people with names like Peralta, Dali, and Benny Goodman. At the drop of a hat, he’s opening one of many albums of memorabilia, unreeling the story. Most well-known himself as the surrealist artist El Gallo , his far wider range of skills coalesces in one of the most interesting yet unsurprising things about him: the ability to render images of spectacular realism, which accompanies his powerful imagination for things people have never seen before. Sitting alone at his gallery in the quiet afternoon before a First Fridays storm, he at first escaped my attention entirely, his demeanor lacking drama almost entirely. The space we enter to find him, though, radiates with his energetic attachment to a vast array of works (including his own) and to the artists behind them. The Grand Gallery, at 560 2rd Street, looks out over Oakland’s Jack London Square towards Alameda. And inside, Weber looks out over an excited community of over 30 artists, most of them long-termers with some hosted more on a month-to-month basis. https://thegrandgalleryoakland.com/artists/ Weber’s inner architect has come out: he has organized the space in a way that simultaneously creates numerous distinct areas perfect for two or three viewers, while leaving each of the areas feeling open to all of the others. Generous daylight from Oakland’s sky pours into the gallery’s large front glass facade and somehow manages to reach nearly all of the spaces despite the separating walls.   The variety of works is intensified by the artists wanting to use the available space to the maximum extent possible, and to offer more for sale. But those close quarters work out well because of the sheer variety of ways that the work is interesting. A seasoned curator, Weber instinctively manages  the wall allotments as easily as he does the floor plan. This is not about himself. His own presence in the gallery is clearly more about what he does for the artists than what they do for him. Grand Gallery is itself his latest work. Attached to Studios 11 Oakland, which is already a “family” of its own, Weber seamlessly extends that vibe into the larger street front area. It’s a combination of artists’ self-curated exhibits in a space that is more like a gallery made of multiple open studios, not of open studios trying to be galleries. Further strengthening support of the artists, the setup makes it clear to visitors that they are invited to look for the artists’ works in sizes and formats that make purchasing easy. No less important is seeing that the artists inspire each other’s quality and even use their works to show their awareness of each other. Works may clearly echo each other’s style; more literally, one artist will have a piece done in homage to another artist, such as with Ron Norman’s drawing honoring Bill Sala showing on an opposite wall. There are many ways to appeal to visitors, of course. Photography spans views of history, celebrity, and places. Paintings and prints explore the medium for its potential with materials, content, and ways of having impact as objects to live with. Books for sale wed background and narratives to the artists’ curation. The location is potentially brilliant. Access by foot, bike or car is completely unrestricted; and being minutes from Jack London’s other offerings make a gallery visit an easy choice to make when putting together a multi-activity solo, date, or group outing. Being at a good gallery is a special event, but getting to a good gallery easily makes the visit an especially attractive special event. This makes Grand Gallery a significant point of reference in the East Bay arts ecosystem. Numerous arts organizations, city government departments, entrepreneurs, and arts venues are working on learning what each other knows, to crack the code of revving up post-COVID arts engagement. They need affordability, safety, and sustainability in addition to compelling work. And not surprisingly, in these tough times, artists themselves are leading much of the resilience and revival. They are finding spaces, creating events, targeting probable attendees, and networking socially to develop a more constant anticipation, across communities, of new things in the works and of new works within reach.   Like Weber himself, artists bring a blend of realism and imagination to their efforts. But the key issue is longevity. On a case-by-case basis, some will make a discovery that has staying power, some will be too site-specific to reproduce elsewhere, and some will have the stamina to keep trying new things as conditions continue to change around them. Facing all that, Grand Gallery readily strikes me as a cooperative business development environment. For that, it already has some special practical advantages, but taking note of it is not meant to suggest that other organizations are not serving that purpose as well. Rather, the current environment of the art community suggests an increasing importance of galleries seeing artists as development partners. Grand Gallery is one way that galleries can model their effort.     Story and photography, including the portrait of Bill Weber: by Malcolm Ryder, In the photos, all works shown or excerpted are property of their original artists. https://thegrandgalleryoakland.com/artists/ Disclosure: I have exhibited work at the location covered in this article. - M. Ryder   East Bay resident and artist  Malcolm Ryder  is a photographer and writer creating and critiquing visual art as well as managing organizations for visual artists. He is the principal arts writer of Art About Town from Oakland Art Murmur . He exhibits across the Bay Area, publishes images online at  www.malcolmryder.com , and runs the multi-year collaborative art project Oaktown Pictures, at  https://www.oaktown.pictures  .

Photographer Steve Molnar knows quite a bit about places that most people wouldn't call their usual habitat. But through his pictures, having seen what he shows, we carry away a sense of being captured by the places just as he was. Molnar is known for work that is journalistic, following his instincts and concerns for people who live in some remote places without much attention except from each other. But this go around, his sixth at San Francisco’s 60SIX , he offers a meditative survey of the Mojave Desert, begun twenty years ago and boasting strong lasting power as a revelation of richness in what initially might seem severely sparse. Because the photographer is also an accomplished master printer chosen by other demanding photographers to render their work, it’s fair to call attention to the variety within his own set of 30 or so images on display. We get several distinctive ways of seeing, all anchored in a flair for making selected surface detail and graphic design equally significant in a way that makes the depictions not just economical but elegant. Their effects come forth partly due to the sequencing and grouping established by the gallery’s owner and curator, mixing different kinds of views. The effect expresses the photographer’s own investment in exploring the environment with what I would call emotional generosity. But for the purpose of this discussion, I’ll take some liberties, regrouping things to underline some specific thoughts about effects achieved by Molnar’s image craft. Early on in my tour of the gallery, there were pictures with motion, lines and shapes in a design that helps one understand nature’s activity, like Amargosa Dunes No. 1  (below) and perhaps a masterpiece in the show, Kelso Dunes No. 3 (withheld here; come to the gallery - through February 6th, by appointment ) . These also quickly announce his use of graphical abstraction as a character in the location on par with any standing object. Amargosa Dunes No. 1 And as if to press this notion even more, in images such as Desert Tracks Eureka Dunes  or Mesquite Flat Dunes No. 1 , he elevates the intrinsic abstractness of the desert expanse by making it the entire field of his picture, on which he places small etched figures that feel like drawing. This effectively converts the abstractness into the stillness of space punctuated over time. Mesquite Flat Dunes No. 1 The gallery notes tell us that Molnar shoots only in film and meticulously prints the work himself in gelatin silver format. Here in December of 2024, the availability of ultra-hi-res digital cameras argues definitively against any notion that film is categorically a more faithful medium of image capture. But what this note imparts is that when a photographer chooses a certain type of film, it is a critical aesthetic decision akin to choosing specific papers, inks, colors, and so on. Molnar’s choices are not specified, but that too is good: the “trade secrets” of his materials are like the prestidigitations behind his magic act. It’s simply more interesting to not know what they are than it is to know. That takes us to the next observation, in which pictures like Kelso Dunes No. 4  or  No. 6  hammer home that Molnar in general does terrific things to paper. You give him a piece, and it comes back like this: Kelso Dunes No. 4 Or this: Searles Lake And now, we’re sensitized to much of the grounding in his other scenes, where more evidence of action moves the shots into the subject matter of life on these locations. Wind Erosion is a vigorous example: Wind Erosion The proliferation of objects almost immediately gives us a sense of where, vicariously, we stand in the location and draws us into it, but there is still some ambiguity about scale. This makes some of these pictures suspend us, the way two magnets at the right distance from each other can hold each other in place. We can choose to believe that we are either near or far away. But the unchanging picture itself actually sets us up for both decisions, simultaneously. There are over 30 photographs on display, and careful juxtapositions established by curator Gwen Terpstra bring different views close together in an emphasis on Molnar’s versatility as an imagist in this desert setting. That heightens the emotional energy of participating in his exploration. In my visit, this settled into a kind of duality where his use of scale sometimes drove towards intimacy and sometimes towards spirituality. One does not need to choose between them, though; the tactile and the ethereal amplify each other. That synergy is most pronounced with the numerous Pinnacles pictures, each offering monolithic, iconic figures against a blank sky, in postures that show them as surveyors and masters of all they see. Monumentality comes with dramatic size included, but these pictures argue that the vastness of the open space asks for something big enough to tame it. It means here that the hills and mountains seen in the background of many pictures have dutiful help from these “natives” for holding the desert in place. They're not just standing there; they're doing something. Trona Pinnacles No. 5 But what about our place in it? By the time Molnar gets us close enough to really touch things, the scene has become a stage of things that look and feel like they are assuming gestures reflecting us to ourselves. And in what even counts as foreshadowing his sensibility in human documentary as well, the desert images begin to move into storytelling. Joshua Trees All images above: (c) Steve Molnar, courtesy 60Six . Malcolm Ryder is a photographer and critic based in Oakland, CA where he also publishes for Oakland Art Murmur and is a board member there as well as at the East Bay Photo Collective (EBPCO). Info: malcolmryder.com/contact

Judson King Smith at Transmission Gallery August 1 through September 14   I got to Judson King Smith’s current show the day before  his planned public reception. Transmission Gallery’s handout flyer accompanying the exhibit had to substitute for the artist not being there with me, but it went like a guided missile to the thing that should aid me the most: Smith’s central idea. Slightly reworded: all that we know about ourselves occupies just a moment in the passing of time.   The show flyer prepares us to experience that concept from all of the works. We then look at the pieces on display, each one of them indeed clustering multiple historical references (whether personal or public); each one in effect collapsing time. But that effect makes us wonder. Is any given work telling the same story as the others, or instead telling its own story? Well, the list of titles of the works in the show reads beautifully on its own, like the table of contents in an anthology of various  poetic allegories. It argues for separate meaningful stories, which sets us testing the success of the works in that way.   The style of substance Smith’s pieces are complex constructions rich with representations, not abstract elements or gestures. Their density is a very consistent feature across the works. This gives us a first impression that their style has the same meaning across the collection. The uniformity supports each piece's status as an example of the central idea. It’s fair to say that in  in some collections , especially in abstract art, style is itself the subject, and each work intentionally explores that same subject. Their various ways of blending the same constituent effects are like multiple proofs that the observed style does generate meaning, as if style is a fully functional grammar that some people already know or with enough effort will discover. In that way, the initial overall impression of a work is a "statement" by the work, affiliating it with the others. But on closer look, an opposing second impression forms, that each work intends to use its particular details to go beyond the group's common grammar into a separate statement, its own narrative or story, whether its title is prescribing it or describing it.   The telling form Smith’s sculptures, which are assemblages of many, many parts, have the interesting character of being more like a story when seen from a distance, and being mostly a collection of pregnant facts when inspected up close. But our overall sense of the works is equally informed by both points of view. How does that work? More like wall pieces than free-standing structures, each piece presents a composition showing us what it wants us to know from pretty much a one-sided view. We zoom in on it to pick up what is mostly a psychological depth in the details, and then zoom out again to resume considering if their arrangement in the given case is telling us something distinct from what the other works do.  Above: details from three separate works, and the fourth lower one illustrating an overall crucifix motif. Assembly lines Smith’s compositions are sophisticated and yet seem readily improvised. Many of the details appear not because other details logically require them to be included, but instead because they conveniently help realize larger formal patterns or shapes. The strongest comparison I can make is to dreams, infamously populated by things that in waking memory didn’t belong to each other but show up like appropriate furniture in assigned times and spaces of sleep’s improvised script. Just as we have long been fascinated by “dream logic”, a Smith's work can fulfill us aesthetically by how the different effects of its elements become formally associated in the flow of form being performed, a stream of subconsciousness. Smith’s “performance” is in the huge number of decisions that we see he made in adding one thing to another. His decision might seem convenient, or strategic; emphatic, or nuanced; funny, or poignant. Angels, astronauts, talismans and arbitrary detritus can be equally important, because they each can point at a distinctive time-stamped frame of mind. And while his personal choices might seem idiosyncratic, many of them make (or use) references that cross different cultures. That reference, which provides the sculpture’s psychological depth, won’t necessarily determine where Smith decides an item is going to be used in the structure. Rather, composition seems to get the first nod, then the included item’s resonance as an emblem gets to poetically do its thing. I’ll admit that one could argue the opposite; but come to the show and see for yourself.   In the house The title of the collection, The House of Miraculous Recovery , could itself be read several ways . Implying a powerful place, does it mean that recovery is miraculous, or that remembering miracles is what’s going on? Can it be both? Sure, why not? The visceral presence of the work puts a less binary spin on it. We enjoy how a piece winds up intuitively feeling like it makes sense, even despite what might seem just opportunistic or unexplained choices of the observed components. This invites the apropos thought that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”   But I was struck more strongly by a different aspect. Like the Tardis in the famous science fiction series Dr. Who, any given piece of Smith’s work, and likewise the whole “house” of them in their assigned corner of the gallery space, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland March - April 2024 In a part of the U.S. where diversity is one of the most prominent social features, the East Bay in California increasingly feels more like the real destination of the Bay Bridge than just one of its two anchors. But historical arrivals of peoples of African descent need not have had any earlier stop in San Francisco before arriving in Oakland or its contiguous neighbors. There are many ways in, and the land mass taken up for habitation is surprisingly large to survey. Scholars of migration note that multiple communities form at the resting points of a diaspora  (dispersion), and we naturally wonder what cultural features survive the trips and still represent the origin throughout the various new grounds. Do we see it in art? Well, the nature of art means that knowledge of both the old and the new  of people’s experiences will get representation that is meant to communicate. So when we go visit any art gallery participating in the Richmond Art Center’s annual Art of the African Diaspora  event, we are likely to encounter a range of experiences both historical and current.   Those experiences also vary across one’s attention to memory, identity, desire,  and discovery . It is tempting to see that “attention” as a  four-part storyline about diaspora, one that is a recurring theme spawning endless variations. And the story can be one individual’s story or a story of a whole community. Importantly, as one of the annual event’s several satellite galleries, founder Jan Watten’s Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland’s “Jingletown” district ( www.grayloftgallery.com )  is virtually one of the communities that are formed of African American artists who have arrived in the East Bay.  Eleven of these artists went on view together there in early March, for a stay deep into April. Gray Loft shows continually distinguish themselves by the way the works are positioned to resonate or even reveal each other’s inner workings. Watten, who curated this event, is masterful with arrangements that illuminate connections and themes. And an additional dimension this time is the reappearance of several artists who exhibited different work at this same event one year ago. At the opening, that allowed the show to also host conversations between artists and visitors about how the artists’ recent experiences, both in and outside of art, became new works that turned corners, or dove deeply, from their previous ones. More than any particular pieces, those inner workings are the star and subject of the show. Artists of course are always their own first audience and are deeply responsive to the work they have made real. As their next audience, we viewers have first impressions that are not necessarily the same as those reached by the artist; but all of the artists here made the work of finding expression a work-in-progress that we could join now. So, what does that mean, work in progress? Several of the artists spoke about how their work allows for open-ended meanings. We are intended to not just receive a meaning but to help decide it. In some work (Cynthia Brannvall), vintage materials become both social critique and anthropology, neither excusing the other, while pulling us into an active conversation. And in one prominent other piece (Malik Seneferu), ritualistic craftwork assembles found objects into a form that oscillates between being an object exposed to us and a persona felt by us. Brannvall: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Another artist (Arthur Norcome), compared to a year ago, found a deceptive fusion of assertive flat design and understated expressionist color space that now projects room-like emotional chambers. A not-so-obvious correspondence here is between those works and some large abstract expressionist works done by an artist (Anna W. Edwards) who came from a long journey in external urban landscape to her current concentration on her internal spiritual landscape, which she offers to us as a place for ourselves. Three more groupings (Ray L Haywood, Jimi Evins, and Dawn Rudd) show their artists’ decision to take elements from within earlier more complex paintings and grant those elements the freedom of being soloists apart from their previous roles in group performance – a simplification that triggers intensity through our intimacy with the gestures, while we also imagine making those gestures ourselves. Some works that are more like drawing (Kelvin Curry, Dulama LeGrande) initially seem highly contradictory of each other, one with a quiet orderliness and the other an energetic rawness. But they both have refined their way to personal and somewhat glyphic iconographs that are holding a story in place rather than organizing space. We “read” these as much as see them. LeGrande: Self Portrait as a Temple   Storytelling, meanwhile, has more overt display (Chuck Harlans, Tomye Neal Madison) in works that, unlike most of the others in the show, are specifically illustrating people. We can feel their commonalities, and our connection – or perhaps biographically, measure our current distance and differences. Harlans: Ghana – The Jamestown Girls Considering the sweep of subjects and expressive strategies, the show’s major statement is that the diaspora naturally expands migration into exploration and exploration into diverse values. But in turn, this says that the human spirit on the journey of the diaspora is a rich spirit.   All the more notable that at the opening of the show, numerous artists spoke of the most recent few years as a time in which something that gained especially high priority in their endeavor was finding Joy.   The Art of the African Diaspora exhibit at Gray Loft Gallery opened March 9th and closes April 27th, 2024 at 7pm. See more of the works online at www.grayloftgallery.com during this time.   Malcolm Ryder, an Oakland-based Black photographer and critic, writes about art at www.artdotdot.com and particularly about East Bay art at Oakland Art Murmur’s Art About Town, https://oaklandartmurmur.org/art-about-town/

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2024 (Note: see the terrific thumbnail gallery of artworks in this show at grayloftgallery.com while reading this review…) A real tree person doesn’t just see trees; and not even “the tree ”…   For a real tree person, it’s always my tree. But when I show someone else my  tree, there’s always a chance that they just aren’t going to “get it”. What’s worse, the one thing all of us tree people begrudgingly know is that trees can do without us, yet we can hardly do without them. Far beyond curiosity, we’re in unrequited (?) pursuit of their love. Well, it’s okay. The “love” we seek is usually inspiration – being inspired to have the tree’s grace, or dignity, or power, and some of its purity of innocence, along with the bonus of some kind of beauty. Something like that. That’s why, although Gray Loft Gallery’s new show “ Among The Trees ” explores what a tree is “about”, the key word in its title is among – which makes the show about us. What is it like to experience trees? What does that experience tell us about ourselves? And why does that realization so readily turn into a deep connection with them? Of course, as an art show, that’s not only what the event explores. It’s just as much the case that  curator Jan Watten’s sprawling selection of paintings, photographs, and mixed media examines how the artists variously get the artwork to express what they care about. In that expression, there is a dialogue. On the one side: trees heightening our experience as being part of nature ourselves. And on the other side, the artists, using tree-like forms to mean something even when we are absent.   A Language of Nature For all of the artists, “making a tree” involves the most abstract matter of representing something.  What does something need to look like in order to get called a tree? While any real tree, like a fingerprint, is unique in the specific arrangement of its details. But the images in this exhibit are by and large far less documentary than impressionist. They don’t want to explain the experience; they want to invoke it. For some artists, creating an image of trees is about the most concrete act in visual art:  making a mark. In this case, drawing the mark on a blank surface puts the artist in the exact position of the tree itself; the mark’s essential purpose is to branch outward from its beginning, and its underlying life force need explain its decisions to no one but itself. But when portraying a tree, there is no single particular real-world instance of one that defines “tree” for all the others. An image that we invent from scratch as a “likeness” of a tree can have just as much psychic authority as would an exact copy of an actual tree. A few of the show pieces - an assemblage or mix of selected parts, as done by Lorrie Fink and Marsha Ballan - are literally object lessons in this. But then curiously, a photo by Tony Bellaver achingly projects the same thing in an opposite and literal way, by emphasizing what we feel is missing from what is shown, and known, as a tree.   The Substance of Style While the variety of imagery in the show covers many different techniques and moods, those numerous distinctions don’t leave us thinking of the show as a big collection of different things. Instead, soon enough, we’re there thinking of a tree as one thing that has a tremendously imaginative range of ways to show up, when given half (or even less) a chance. Still, there are a few rough groupings of work, distinguished as below by features which, however, some pieces also overlap or combine. That’s a good thing, like being served multiple flavors to work with in a fine meal. About half of the show consists of works exploiting a distanced point of view, in which the spread of branches across the view is the subject matter. From those works, one thing that kept echoing in my mind was the famous phrase “architecture is frozen music.” Each such work is in effect a snapshot of a narrative, of something getting from one place to another. These highly gestural works hold a tension that comes from knowing that the displayed forms did not occur to be about us, yet we trace them especially to get a feeling, a feeling that we want to believe they also had. It’s as if to finally say that all trees dance. On the other hand, there is Jen Cranes’ close study of single leaves and Cynthia Brannvall’s installed real branch segments. Superficially they have almost nothing in common with each other, but they both wind up offering experiences of the same thing: not distance, but intimacy. What comes from the closeness is a heightened awareness of how we ourselves are structured - a mix of free informality constrained by rigor. And although featuring just parts of a tree, these pieces give a distinctive idea of what, both as an experience and as an artifact, can be considered “complete”. Regarding completeness, it’s interesting that very few of the works in the show had any strong interest in bark (!) Artistically, however, that is notable because of how much of the show’s work, without the additional detail, is more visually abstract. The abstraction functions to make the images more graphical.  In turn, that makes some of them more directly gestural, and in that way more emotional; while in other images, it leaves more room for us to “fill in” our own predisposed emotions, adding them to the works as if we were busy making the pieces ourselves while looking. Also, from that abstraction, we find works having trees with a monumental presence, their bold mass keeping them standing firm, beyond time. That can bring out our humility in knowing we are ourselves so impermanent, which is usually a strong feeling even if brief. But in most of these other works, we don’t get a mood from the tree. Instead, we find trees giving the work’s pictured space a mood, in a theatrical way. In effect, the artists have worked to elicit drama from the stillness of the trees. And finally, in certain works, we find emphasis on the trees “giving life”, a crucial solace for our times, and due to the threat of losing them, one having political urgency. On Your Walk It seems unfair to pick out just two of the many fine pieces in this exhibit, and you’ll leave it with your own favorites, possibly many. But one of the most unusual of the works is a show-stopper hanging piece by Sarah Grew featuring dozens of transparent images suspended on wires, that together practically offer an index to all of the other works in the show. The best word to describe what this intensity conveyed to me is “passion”. And nearby to that is the largest wall work in the show, by Steven Andresen, which has a joy of execution all across its surface that feels like what we’d always want trees in their setting to be able to do for us.   “Among the Trees” runs August 3 – August 31, 2024, open by appointment any Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

Jamie Treacy at Gearbox Gallery April - May 2024 Gearbox Gallery stands street level in a West Oakland building two stories tall. It has enough space to accommodate the group of artists who form and run it, such that all artists have always at least one work on display. In this scheme, it makes a one-person show on the lower floor as special to the members as it may be to us. The current featured work is testimony to how the gallery, as an organization, highly motivates individual members to freely pour energy into a lot of work. Currently, at this location, gallery member and lifelong swimmer Jamie Treacy has his first solo show, Creatures of Duality, running through April 30th. The first impression that the collection of paintings gives is not of creatures. When you enter the gallery and (almost instantly) stand in the center of the square exhibition space, you are immediately surrounded by beautiful intricate surfaces. It makes you wonder where to start but also says that you can start anywhere. Committing to it, I started with noticing that the many hues of green were not like the water of blue vacations but the real water of oceans and ponds. Places where if you leave something alone long enough, something else will grow on it. Some of Treacy’s works make this into outtakes from languid movies, shot perhaps on other discovered planets. But instead, they are from the inner spaces of where we are – waters where Treacy dives, and the imagination. While not arranged in order this way, the set of paintings offer a progression that sets artificial structures or manufactured forms against organic, natural ones – but ultimately subordinates their difference into flattened composed motifs.  There’s an implication that Treacy shows us “found” artificial items and “invented” natural one, but his use of all-over color and placement of things evaporates that implication as it emphasizes his decisions about what to show. Another key element in many pictures is the vantage point that he offers. Across the collection, we are sometimes high up looking down, or pointed towards a horizon, or fully immersed in the thick of organisms or being underwater. The points of view inject a narrative dimension by “placing” us in the sensory field of the picture, as if we were Treacy seeing what is shown. It makes us imagine, or ask, what he was doing there. In his statement, the artist speaks of being a “new diver”, struck by the co-presence of opulence and desiccation, and as a queer artist, given to making spaces that can hold contrasting experiences. Treacy’s painting requires a lot of drawing, and while his color work is the pronounced emotional driver, his line work provides most of the “text”. We see not only de facto shapes of things that seem familiar but verge sometimes on science fiction; and we also see “cutaway” views of the usually hidden internals of those things – their fibrous chambers or framework. Then, for example, while these innards usually are revealed to us when plants meet death or violence, Treacy mainly makes them part of the intricate surface patterning of his canvas. It moves us away from piers and sunken boat hulls, on to a type of imagery that becomes more an abstract fabrication of his visual vocabulary – perhaps more about personal symbology than shared sensation. This description should not be taken as stating Treacy’s actual intentions or any evolution. All of the works were made during 2022 through 2024 and have the artist’s own evocative titles. But as audiences, we bring a great mix of aesthetic backgrounds, and we look at things both to find out what we have in common with the reality of the work and, separately, with the imagination of the artist. Together they create the dialogue in our own sense of the work. All excerpts of paintings provided above are from works © Jamie Treacy.

Scientists are fond of surprising children with the news that nothing in reality is colored, but instead has color when excited by light. This makes every crayon a small magic wand, applying a liquid prism on whatever they touch. Three Lost Years photo by YelenaZhavoronkova But perhaps our first experience of pink comes from something we can’t reach – the sky. One of the signature images in Pretty in Pink at the Gray Loft Gallery reminds us that the sky is where we learn pink is almost pure, ephemeral energy. It doesn’t have nature’s constancy of a field of green or the planet’s umbrella of blue, with one dramatic recurring exception: flowers. In their dazzling variety, flowers have an infinite capacity to capture and shape pink, where we can touch it. Yet they conform to an ebb and flow, a seasonal disappearance, that echoes what we already knew of impermanence in the sky. Perhaps that is why when we grab pink and fix it in place, it grabs us back. Pretty In Pink’s curating jurors Ann Jastrab, Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art, and Gray Loft Gallery founder Jan Watten, have taken note of how graphically photographers have either portrayed pink’s capture, or have done it themselves. And the show’s numerous display walls give us a variety of groupings that highlight their differing approaches. One grouping is mainly about pink’s appearance as contrast: its brightness far greater than the space it occupies, and making that space feel more lit than it is. Another group presents pink in open environments where, used by some anonymous party, it is poised exactly between being arbitrary or aggressive. But a third group is hosting pink as an emotion in imaginary or psychological theaters, while a fourth set is a primer on how femininity traditionally both owns and is owned by pink. All of those scenes push the impact of deliberately applying pink when some other color would have served a practical purpose – but using something else would have missed the point of having pink’s energy. One of the most initially eclectic groupings similarly shows pink injecting life into, this time, what might otherwise have felt ordinary or indifferent. We get a clue about the way these pictures work from the electric effect of the wall they are hanging on, painted an intense hue of pink – magenta – the only wall like it in the gallery. Then on cue, a different wall in the show emphasizes pink occurring elegantly through the hand of nature; botany is the decision maker, yet it is as if pink just decided on its own to show up, instantly adding spice. Finally, some photographers have pictures that are most strongly about the pictures themselves being objects made with pink. In these items, the artists’ edge-to-edge exploration of form and surface texture relies on pink not so much as a subject but as a key element in their graphic design. There is a great comparison, made by being shown next to each other, of how the formal attention can equally hold a garish festivity or a meditative nuance. And of course, it tells us to pay attention to how design works in all of the other pictures in the show as well. (c) Edie Hoffman To be clear: none of the many effects above are in any case describing only one way to engage the world of the related image, and the show walls are not rigid about holding one group or another. In fact, as we look at any given picture among the others, and then look at it a second or third time, we start appreciating how multiple motives coexist in the artist’s creative process for the image, and have reached a point of being balanced, where the photographer is willing to say they’re done. Show runs Saturday, January 20 – Saturday, February 24, 2024. www.grayloftgallery.com

TRACING PASSAGES Until November 11th, Oakland’s Gray Loft Gallery boasts a genre -bending trio of artists whose works erase the presumed difference between the abstract and the concrete. In very differing ways, Ruth Boerefyn, Tom White, and Cuong Ta take strongly visceral materials and work them into forms of imagery that also readily float back and forth from echoing nature to insisting on the artifice of their own invention. One of the hallmarks of shows at Gray Loft is the studied relationships that different works can have with each other, displayed in a way that makes this difficult curatorial insightfulness all seem like that was easy to do. But the effect is that individual pieces wind up being more distinctive, as the show guides us to heightened levels of attention. In this show, that nuanced touch is nearly suspended, and quite dramatically so, by the first piece we reach at the doorway, a room-sized Boerefyn installation that dazzles as a sculpture, a living drawing, and an environment all rolled into one. Photo: Malcolm Ryder | Ryder Foto Video: Opposite that installation, things settle in per Gray Loft's usual. Tom White’s pieces continually vibrate between feeling 2D and 3D. Meanwhile, meditating on the work allows it to increasingly seem like an organic evolution of its parts into a whole. It is cultivated, and while its final coherence need not refer to anything more than that it found its “rest” state, it is still highly evocative of things other than itself. Both White and Boerefyn also have more than one kind of work on display, and in the gallery space it is irresistible to consider how their respective differing works inform each other within the show. As if to make that very thing a point, the design of the exhibit allows the placement of ceramic works by the third artist, Cuong Ta, to both share the space with other works of Boerefyn and White, and to visually comment on them in sympathetic character. But on their own, Cuong Ta’s pieces survey ways that artists intervene in natural forms. Artists often elevate Nature’s abstract qualities to make its presence even more pronounced. Here, the pieces are vessels but also highly graphical. The artist finds various ways to sharply highlight forms that already had natural meaning of their own but now also carry the imprint of our human hand. Additional introduction to the unifying currents of this exhibit and its immersive experience is found presently at www.grayloftgallery.com through November 11th while the show remains on view. All pictures courtesy of Gray Loft Gallery, except where noted otherwise. Gray Loft Gallery is located at 2889 Ford Street #32 in Oakland. www.grayloftgallery.com

The demand for creativity as a staple of business operations has never been more broadly intense. So we assume that it is somehow in supply and in practice more than ever as well. Yet when we survey (e.g. as on LinkedIn) the ability to describe what it is, and therefore to know how to make it happen or find it, the common definition is as stubbornly elusive as the demand for it is intense. The unresolved debate of "creativity" as a "problem" to solve is a performative ambiguity, more interested in philosophizing than in resolving. Both the ambiguity and the debate reveal a lack of clarity about what is present with creativity and what is absent without it, and finally what is still absent when it is present. But clarity begins with ending the fuzzy language used to describe what it is and what it is like. From there fuzzy thinking can also be ended. The simplest way to distinguish creativity is to recognize what is missing when it is NOT there. In a given situation, the evident INAbility to generate something new from what is there is precisely the lack of creativity. Creativity is the converse: the demonstrated CAPAbility to generate, in a given situation, something new from what is there. A possibility of opportunity. Creativity is not supernatural and it isn't even ambiguous. It does not have to produce something that is absolutely unprecedented beyond all contexts. And it is just as possible from a sole independent Agent as it is from a co-operating group acting as an agent. There are many things that may account for this capability being absent, including confusion, fear, ignorance, and bias. Whereas the fundamentals of its presence are pretty consistent: freedom, experimentation, curiosity, open mindedness, and enough knowledge to recognize significance independent of an agenda. Creativity assumes a hospitable environment. We can say that a culture is fertile when it offers an ecology supportive of those fundamentals. But that is not the same as creativity being present. In creativity, there is always an agent, not just an environment. Possibility is a neutral binary. Potential is affirmative, because there is an agent. We can say, further, that an agent is original when it is the recognized source of whatever exercised capability has generated what is new. Within the scope of that exercised capability is both the formulation of ideas and the formulation of method, but in a given situation, either one of those, or both together, count as originality. Originality does not exist outside of the ecology and context of the capability. Let's be clear. Capability is a potential. Ability is an actual. Capability can be cultivated, taught, and recruited. So can creativity. And Creativity, like capability, is not a measured production output. Creations are measurable production outputs. Like capability, Creativity is not synonymous with any imposed degree of product value. Creativity is a prior condition of a way to pursue end value. There is no fundamental correlation between the level of creativity and the level of production value. Yet creativity, because it is an obtainable option, has independently intrinsic value. Production output has no value without an identified context establishing relevance. Now, we drop the debates, because using what is clear is more interesting.

Why does someone make art, and why do they make it the way they do? Even though we want the answers, that question is too big and abstract, so we rephrase it as a matter of experience: why did this person make this art, and why did they make it like this? I. I'm letting that question float in the background as a steady position while I look for my overlapping thoughts about the Self-taught, the Unfamiliar, and now the Artificial -- together a steadily increasing proportion of my daily visual intake. Recently I've seen more and more frequently that "Outsider" is becoming the primary point of reference for inclusivity and equity in the so-called "art world" of visual art, and here is my main new thought: it's probably time to stop saying "outsider". Here's the issue... Diversity -- a standard dimension of today's societal DEI evolution, is not a basic problem in the world of people who make art. And once we decide that we prefer attending to diversity in art-making, there is no real difficulty in the volume of supply; the matter is instead about satisfying the search. But exploration does not always culminate in selecting what is found. There's no getting around the fact that while selection means approval or elevation, it also means exclusion of other things at that time and in the selector's context. Too much of the time, blinders and biases willfully ignore much of what is there in favor of serving a system of exclusivity that we more clearly see now as being institutionalized. And making the excluded "chic" is not a solution when the excluders are still the ones doing the deciding. There is the "Insider" art world, in which Cultural, Market, and Personal influences come to dominate both expectations and terms of evaluating art. Any critic, collector or exhibitor may be in business to pursue some difference that passes some fairly specific Who Cares Test, subject to myopia, rewards, and privilege. The same is true, of course, for non-professionals and general art lovers or appreciators, factoring in where and how they were raised, and likewise educated. But selection criteria can readily become a vocabulary of value - signals sent, grown and shared for groups of common interest, more or less like currency. If you take the wrong currency to where you're going, your money's no good there. How do we retire the predisposition of the perspective that frames "outsiders"?How can these selection criteria either cross-pollinate or evolve among differing selectors, eroding or re-evaluating exclusion and instead exposing the true world of art as created by the makers? II. My approach to an answer points at the prominent (and I think permanent) changes in three dimensions of how the art maker's are dealt with in the art world. First, the Media vs. the Market: borrowing a description from Raw Vision Magazine, there is a population of art makers who are "untrained, unschooled, and uninfluenced by the art world." What would be stunning, except that we are already so accustomed to it, is the default presumptuousness of what the so-called "art world" comprises: institutionalized arbitration of quality and value, servicing a cultivated audience, for financial consideration. The presumption is on a par with some sports league in the USA automatically declaring its best team "world champs". Regardless, given television plus social media, there now exists another organized world of selection and arbitration with a massive distribution and exposure platform that can lay claim to being self-validating, unconcerned with other institutional precursors. For an artist , being discovered and shared in streaming or online not only circumvents the conventional gauntlet of juries, agents, galleries, and auctions but pressures those conventional agents to take a look at what gets traction online and why. Conventional markets do not determine the importance of Art. They determine the importance of an asset in a sales category. Artists meanwhile must themselves determine how to make being online meaningful. But the point is that they are not trying to get into the art world; when they show up, they are in the art world. Second, the Milieu vs. the Meaning: We are used to evaluating artists based on "mastery". But for artists who are inventors, the degree of development achieved in their work is about what they learned by doing, which may be something few others at first know. Here, the force of personality over time blends a talent and an idea into a new expression. If given enough production support, the effort might succeed at having an impact with recognized high value -- especially within the environment of its own origin. Also, that value might be due to innovation, and it is perfectly normal for high-value innovations to at first be primitive, not masterful. It's especially important that this artist-driven value can readily persist in a community unconcerned with any milieu other than where the work came from. Whether we have called its milieu tribal, religious, indigenous, outlaw, or some other classifying label, work that carries persistent meanings can sharply contrast with what people from elsewhere are familiar with. It can change their frame of reference, and can flip the script on who is deemed an insider or an outsider. In fashion, music, and street art, for example, we know this happens all the time. Third, the Methods vs. the Means: Over the span of formalized art history and criticism, there is the aggressive attachment of differing perceived value to different mediums. And in association with a medium, materials themselves have become signals of hierarchical importance and value. But originating with makers, new preferences regarding how structured materials associate with meaning can manifest as forms, language, or style. It is also common that forms, languages and styles get appropriated by the art makers -- purposed and repurposed -- for experimentation, entertainment, or design of expression. We know of course that this has been acknowledged in "mixed media" and "conceptual art" being given passports into the institutionally elite -- not to mention photography's epic battle for recognition. Now, digital automation of production democratizes the means of making things as well as of publishing (distributing) them. Commodity supercomputing is a reality now in the form of consumer A.I. tools for creation and production, and the explosion of trial-and-error experimentation in composition and content constitutes massively parallel aesthetic researches worldwide. Meanwhile, studios may be the size of a laptop, operating with anyone, anytime, anywhere. III. Summarized almost too simply, the above sees that the conventional artworld institutions cannot control today's forces of visibility, multiculturalism and technology enough to sustain the illusion of being the authority on value in art. Today, an artist cultivates, at will, both concepts and materials from a dramatically expanding world of resources. And, as many artists today are people whose work would not have been deemed "art" 120 years ago, the next normal in the world of art occurs not because of the past but despite it. I see two things in particular that dominate as influencers of upcoming change. One: value in the self-conscious "fine art" world has long been married to the idea that important art is unique. But now, compared to the earlier moments of say Duchamp and Warhol, the notion of uniqueness as a major default criterion of value in artistic production is under unprecedented pressure to justify itself. If the meaning of the work is not pretty exclusively an effect of uniqueness, then uniqueness loses relevance and can be simulated only by scarcity. The most profound influence to date of A.I. (artificial intelligence) in art is that it so easily eliminates both uniqueness and scarcity as default values unless those are specific chosen strategies for expressing a certain meaning. And as happened with movable type and then with the photographic camera, culture's boundaries are suddenly thinned by an order of magnitude in permeability. And two: artists themselves increasingly and inventively borrow expressive forms from each other across the boundaries of their differing milieu. And in that, the artificial constraints of genre and medium are still very useful as an option to art-makers,; but as a default criterion of value, they are increasingly challenged by the expansion of the artists' own recognition of the real creative world. Much more as in music, "fusion images" are an outcome -- the improvisational composition of diverse multiple expressions in a work, whether some conventional genre or medium can logically contain it or not. IV. All together, I take those things as arguments that emerging artists are not how we find emerging art. Rather, emerging art is how we find emerging artists. Supporting art-making obviously is what supports most artists. The art world going forward is not about the market's colonization and farming of so-called emerging artists. What those observations also tell me is that the "art world" is shifting from being proprietary to being open source, even as the art "market" spawns new discrete channels with their own particular barriers to entry and elevation. The real significance of this is in the mythbusting impact on the primacy of the proprietary art world's notion of Refinement as artistic maturity and quality. This proprietary world is built for artists "emerging" into attention in a graduated process, then pulling more of their artworks into the market. What is replacing that legacy is mostly an emphasis on Idiosyncrasy as artistic authenticity and importance. This open world is built for personal artwork to emerge in communities, then to have the originating artist recognized in the community as someone exemplary of its interests. Now, conventional art institutions have neither the first nor only say in defining the "communities" of art. That combination of the art world restructuring and the shift of emphasis is what re-defines the "outsider" presence in art as mainstream, and why we need to educate each other away from the perspective that defines "Outsiders"...

Nine Notes on how Kehinde Wiley makes Black Lives Matter 1. More is More August, 2023 – As of this writing, there is plenty of time left for the de Young Museum’s general audience to make it to the Kehinde Wiley show, An Archaeology of Silence. Much of that audience will be attracted to the show by the celebrity Wiley earned through being the selected artist for the official Presidential portrait of megastar Barack Obama. But that very large painting, with its curious leafy background, and the near-laconic expression of a specific real person, famously adored (or hated), gives no real clue to how this extensive new installation, of many pieces about anonymous persons, works. There is, however, one obvious similarity: like that Presidential painting, almost everything about Wiley’s show at the de Young Museum is big. The place itself, the artist’s talent, the works themselves, and the mission of the work. First: there is the assertively theatrical de Young exhibit space created for the show. And in that space, we find right away that Wiley’s sheer productivity is gargantuan and fills it up, making it seem even bigger, in our eyes. Next: there’s his huge skill. How long does it take to achieve this level, anyway? In this show, Wiley reaches back centuries and dares us to compare his work with that of Old Masters, many of whom had a life expectancy only in the forties. Today, in his forties, Wiley’s skill portends much more. And winning the dare, the dramatic impact of his own craft does not wear off at any point during the long trek from the exhibit’s beginning to its end. And finally: there’s the main issue; what that skill addresses. The show is very specifically positioned as a “message” show; systemic, global violence against Black people cannot be allowed to go unnoticed and uncorrected. No small thing. The sizing of the show is grandly impressive. But in the end, the show’s real importance, its value, rests in whether the message gets received by audiences. Each of the following notes looks into a way that this value emerges. 2. Getting the story On arriving at the exhibit’s theater-space, we experience the works, appropriately, in two ways: influenced on the one hand by our attention to “the plot” and on the other, by the “stagecraft” both around and within the pieces. Naturally the show intends the two things to be complementary. The stagecraft must make the story accessible, not compete with it. But in this show, there is a significant amount of competition anyway – between what the presentation offers, and what mindset an audience may bring to the show. In a classic tenet of theater, theatrical “reality” is an artifice, composed entirely of what makes sense to the play’s characters, regardless of the audience. A “suspension of disbelief” allows the artists to present the audience with something that feels plausible without the burden of being feasible. At this show, Wiley appropriates centuries-old art conventions as stagings for the persons seen in his sculptures and paintings, their modern actors. That means the audience will be trying to grasp a current message through that use of the past. But that’s not the only gap that the audience’s interpretation must deal with. As an audience, we arrive already having our own reservoir of visual knowledge. That knowledge, in effect, makes up the belief we have in our own familiar sense of reality. Of course, not all audiences are alike, but there is clearly an enormous potential audience – a modern audience – whose familiarity is predominantly with a pervasive media-driven culture that doesn’t easily acquiesce to being subordinated. Now, a museum, just like a church or a school – or a theater – exists specifically to signal a particular shift in the mentality expected as one walks through the front doors. The de Young asks us to be willing to suspend the familiar, media-driven reality in favor of the invented realism of Wiley’s scenes. But what makes that happen? How does the intended interpretation of the show work? Here is the objective, surface description: Along with the de Young’s curators and programmers, Wiley himself prefaces our direct experience of the works by defining them as a historic excavation of overlooked global violence against the Black race. To show that, the exhibit consists of works using imagery drawn from art history, featuring highly iconic figures now renovated in a modern style. The technique of repurposing old forms for new effect relies on how our visual experiences have created our sense of knowing something. Through that overall three-part configuration, Wiley’s works intend to communicate. In process, each of the artworks does most of its work through portraying body language. Collectively, the statements made in that language intend to substantiate the message of the show. In effect, those statements made in body language are Wiley’s lexicon. One of the definitions of “lexicon” easily found on the web is this one: “the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge.” In that description, the key part I am calling out is “a branch of knowledge.” That, and the space between Wiley’s knowledge and our own. As an audience, what do we already know that we bring with us to his show? In communicating with this show about a matter of current urgency, our vocabulary starts out as the lexicon of what is “modern”. 3. Seeing is Believing? Wiley places a stereotyped version of contemporary black men and women into staged scenarios. The scenarios each imply a narrative – a potentially violent one – that would have led to the final or climactic moment apparent in each particular artwork. But despite how we are coached by the artist and curators to see the works, these narratives are not assuredly certain in the viewing. There are issues. One issue is that the figures shown in the work are generally decked out in high profile name brand clothing. We understand that corporate brands represent the largess of commercial capitalism, but this show’s argument highlights that its pervasiveness has failed to be protective. That observation could further dramatize the violence we’re told to notice (“wow, even cool people aren’t safe!”) But there are two flavors of tragedy here, each about the ignorance of innocence. In both, the artworks suggest that the portrayed persons, embracing the brands, may have unwittingly nurtured their antagonists and their own demise. First, the subjects’ brand adoption may have attracted violence to them, just as does wearing the wrong gang colors. And second, perhaps the brands are the bad guys. Brand power, which the subjects intended to use to enhance themselves, appears to have been quite indifferently hostile to their aspirations of it, actually making them its victims as if by unexpected overdose of some favored drug. Another issue: we, the audience also know that these brands are expensive. In these paintings and sculptures, does the subjects’ preoccupation with pricey style devalue their status as victims, in our eyes? Feeling sorry for privileged people is probably not a natural instinct for a viewer who is not privileged. (there’s no headcount here, but in a general audience some people are going to have a lot less wealth than others.) And since, as well, the stereotype of Black victims is historically so strongly associated with their being poor, this consumerism introduces more dissonance into our experience of the images. Furthermore, today many people already take it for granted, in a way that undermines the proposed message, that the subjects’ preoccupation with this style comes along with being urban and Black. Thats includes the notion that Blacks use style very assertively to project among themselves “the right way” to be black, a standard of being black enough. Between the bling and the hint of internecine racism, Wiley’s stereotyping of his high-styled figures raise a question of what priorities Blacks have even while being under both economic and cultural siege. And a third issue: in the year 2023, it is probable that we viewers have long ago digested the body language iconography of Hollywood Westerns, war movies, horror films, newscasts, crime dramas and fashion advertising. Here, let’s also recognize that “TV shows” actually contain all of those other forms, distributing their content farther and faster than any of them otherwise can separately. And the internet has merely amplified the earlier established hegemony of radio-wave broadcasting. In short, we have a common visual language learned from, and now driven by, always-on media, a literal stream of consciousness. With all that in place, then there is what we see in Wiley’s works, unless persuaded otherwise… What is displayed in many of the works is contorted bodies, creepy things that wrap around you, and inscrutable eyes featured as if they are the leftovers of dangerous encounters with snipers, monsters, and drugs. And, there are as many other works that show what appears to be far less tense -- the figure taking a nap; daydreaming; maybe just dropped to the ground somewhere kind of random, now tired after chasing or being chased; or, merely being caught up in a psychic selfie. These are the ordinary reality, the default references (narratives), of a modern general audience’s grasp of imagery, in particular an iconography of body language. (In the remainder of this writing, I will caption illustrations to point out differences such as the above.) For modern audiences, coming to a museum of arts, how much energy does it take to not see Wiley’s images in terms of the icons of other media – to suspend our “belief” in our familiarity, and instead attribute Wiley’s displayed body language to something else the artist and curator claim is real? Yes of course, many of us also have substantial familiarity with imagery in the fine arts both historical and contemporary. But for general audiences, the viral propagation of icons and memes in media and social networking predisposes what the figures in Wiley’s work “intrinsically” convey. This means that without the show’s perspective-setting wall texts and other directions, something qualitative about the art works must enable them to express the advertised ambition of the work, to encourage as necessary the suspension of disbelief. To get us to suspend our attention to our already familiar references, to that composite lexicon from media and social culture. And instead to allow Wiley’s paintings and sculptures to mean what they intend, as art. 4. Subject Matters “Black lives matter” is both the super-theme and the subtext of the show. The very large number and scale of works in the show is an appropriately proportional response to the global ubiquity of anti-Black abuse that is the exhibit’s subject. But it’s a challenge. The introductory “narrative” (rationale) for the show tells us to presume that all of the various works, with their shared iconography, refer to the same insidious phenomenon – chronic violence. Armed with that, we walk through the show, “testing” each piece as some expression of that presumption. The show’s curator tells us that we’ll be doing that with a special point of view -- a privileged one, up close. The curator’s text continues, coupling precariousness … … and elegy. Oxford Languages describes precarious as: “not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse. dependent on chance; uncertain.” Wikipedia tells us this about elegy: “An elegy is … usually a lament for the dead. However, [it] remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead… for a departed beloved or tragic event.” So it turns out that “elegy” is a pretty good name for the variety of emphasis that the works apply to their shared theme. And by setting the overall context of the works as a somber meditation on the riskiness of being Black, the show’s curatorial notes set the goal of the exhibition very clearly as Gained Awareness.+ But this privileged view heads towards another goal as well. Objectively, it will also be a questionable voyeurism, one that asks why these subjects are allowed to be harmed, or that scolds the viewer for not having paid sufficiently close attention before. From that angle, the value of the show is ultimately in what people do about the awareness; it aims for Activism. The explicit curation of the show ambitiously tells us what to expect. But Awareness raises the question of who the audience is that materializes for this show. And Activism, in turn, requires the works to influence that audience – whether by shame, support, or inspiration – to do something about the awareness that it would gain or have. 5. That Body Language The generous number of paintings and sculptures in the show emphasizes that awareness is a goal. And the artist’s statement suggests that we will recognize in every piece some flavor of undeserved vulnerability of the figure portrayed. Their highly repetitive uniformity of style combines with the wide variety of their scenes to establish the show’s theme about Blacks suffering a certain kind of treatment everywhere they are. So overall, the show comprises a body of evidence. Wiley makes the primary objective of each work to present a body as evidence of the artist’s theme. In each case, then, we as viewers can ask about the person shown in a work, “how did they get this way?” The “answer” is a narrative that we ourselves imagine, informed whether subtly or overtly by the details in the piece. This is all about what the works tell us themselves, rather than what we are told to look for. Each artwork that we are viewing needs to drive the imagination– to provide the details that will take us from our conventional wisdom, our habits of seeing, to the way that the piece wants to be seen – that is, to Wiley’s wisdom. What we mostly see in the show is the postures of the bodies. But, even in the compelling 3-dimensionality of the sculptures, there is not always a convincing case made for the proposed theme. For example, some works appear to be showing people not wounded or injured but sleeping. We already know what sleeping looks like. The artwork needs to get through that. [Seen: uncomfortable, perhaps, but tired enough to sleep anyway.] In others, the initial appearance is that something abnormal is attacking the person, or already has. But the piece triggers our visual memory of silent creepy monsters in the movies or tv dramas. [Seen: caught, and soon dragged under, or starved…] Finally, in yet others, we see aftermaths – lost causes. But we first work from our memory of crime scenes… [Seen: found after the ransom was already paid…] …or of gladiators, cowboys, or generals killed by enemies on the trails or fields around the far bend. [Seen: fallen heroes brought back home by their horse.…] In another case, an entombed figure looks like he may be there only temporarily, his head turned in a way telling us that fairly soon rising among the walking “undead” is definitely in the cards – joining other zombies awaiting. Having arrived at the show with a wide range of pre-established associations in mind, we are asked by the artist and the curators to see these pieces differently, and to see their different meanings as all stemming from the same common cause. But along with how easily the displayed postures associate to other ideas, the monochrome surfaces of the sculptures makes their figures’ presumed misfortune initially easy to “read” as not being about a specific race. That challenge is at the heart of the artist’s pronounced need for the show. “Excavating” the truth that is the show’s message would not be necessary if the world at large was not so insensitive to it or misdirected from it. When we see the works as the show intends them to be seen, we do that despite our real life’s ordinary reinforcement of other imagery and memes – a different and literally endless repetitive presentation by TV’s dominant broadcasting, and now from the internet’s maturity into a social and commercial always on medium as well. That accumulated visual language, that stream of consciousness that we bring with us to the show, is easily activated by these art works. Because of that, the pieces then need their own strategies and differentiating qualities that ensure they can establish themselves, and communicate to us, on their own terms instead. For example (as seen above): in sculptures of apparent sleepers, we first work from our own memory of the places where, by choice or even involuntarily, one sleeps. But in those pieces, there may be a visible disjunction of the body and the place, such as the stoniness or sliminess of the ground underneath the Sleeper – a clue that something is not right. That disjunction is a key device of Wiley’s method to break through our familiarity and get his point across. 6. Intending Art We see disjunction in the paintings as well. Wiley is especially well-known for his unusual juxtapositions of subject (person) and setting (field or ground). And in the painted illusions, his talent offers him the freedom to precisely render Black persons as subjects in a hi-fidelity facsimile of important legacy art conventions historically devoid of Blacks. They dazzle with color along with surface detail, giving them a three-dimensionality that is illusory but equally strong as the sculptures. With the sculptures, we do not get those color qualities brightly projected as backgrounds or surfaces. But the sculptures serve to intensify our recognition of the signal bodily gestures and shapes that we find in the paintings. And this again means that the works get tested against what the audience brings. Case in point: outside of the fine art context, nothing makes more continual use of iconic body language, at all size scales from pages to billboards, than does commercial fashion advertising (see Part VII). It is just not difficult to find displays of subject matter and attitude in advertising that correspond to many of Wiley’s images. © doodko | Credit: Depositphotos Given the combination of television, cinema and social media, there is rarely a case where body images such as those in this show have not already been fully exploited in the acculturating narratives of style and fiction. As a result, Wiley needs for us to look for how their use in art makes them affect us differently, enough so to make them central to our ongoing attention. Seen that way, Wiley’s work could be “read” as a systematic effort to reclaim those body images a repurpose them for a specific kind of consideration more serious than style or fiction. But it doesn’t make sense to assume that style and fiction haven’t already thought about the same issues that Wiley’s work takes as motivation, and that they are not serious when they intend to be. What works harder than fashion, after all, to advocate the freedom of expressing multiple cultures and their right to exist? That is, there is no strong case that art makes these kinds of images more important than they already are elsewhere. Instead, what is important now about their appearance in art channels is that we count on art to meaningfully alter perception. Something that, for example, Warhol’s work did. Or Dali, or Duchamp, or Munch, or Bacon, or… 7. How does the art work? As a Black audience member, I did not attend the show to be enlightened about something I already knew. But as an artist, I came to see how the work functioned, how it gets its job done. Addressing our perception, Wiley is notable among a contemporary world of brilliant image-makers. By setting his own skill to the task of producing portrayals of Blacks in historically classic forms, he performs an act that dignifies his subjects – an act that was beforehand withheld from them by predominant northern and western cultures and is still today uncommon as history. His effort directly targets the problem that history is “written by the winners” and by being normalized that way becomes not just obscuring but oppressive. The punchline here is that Wiley’s art is, as much as anything, about how art itself has been at least complicit, if not intentional, in the systemic violence against blacks. But again, it also means that the work’s strategy is essentially theatrical. Meanwhile, the most obvious source of fresh impact that comes from the works in the show is Wiley’s enormous technical virtuosity in creating material effects. Whether it be through skin made of bronze, or shoelaces made of oil, the images simply have a visceral influence that makes (or at least helps) one’s mind work differently for a while. To emphasize that point, we can compare Wiley’s work to that of artist Arinze Stanley, a virtuoso draftsman whose focus on Black subjects was described this way with clear relevance to the Wiley show’s ambition: “The striking series of thought-provoking images guide the viewers ‘into what is almost a psychedelic and uncertain experience of being Black in the 21st century.’ ” (Sara Barnes, December 13, 2020, Hyperrealistic Pencil Portraits Offer a Surreal Look Into Being Black in Today’s World, Mymodernmet.com) [images: https://mymodernmet.com/arinze-stanley-hyperrealistic-pencil-portraits/ ] Wiley’s pieces have a similar hyperrealism, one that makes us feel like we are there with the figure being portrayed. This is what bridges the gap between what is real to us and what the artist fabricates– between what we already knew and what Wiley asks us to see. Readily situated in an artistic current that stretches back to the 1970s, Wiley’s hyperrealism is familiar to many regular art-viewers. Yet at the same time, it is not dogmatic about the style. Instead, it baits us in that mode and then pulls off a switch. Physically, neither the sculptures nor the paintings are comprehensively high-fidelity to both the textures and touch of what they show. Case in point: the reality of skin is that it is not hard or cold as with the sculptures, and it has color variation and pores far more than is seen in the paintings. But far from being a drawback, the glossy stylizations done by Wiley in metal and in paint abstract the figures, like mass-produced dolls, into an iconic use as tokens. The effect of the visual reductions is to make the figure typical, in a way that Wiley defines Blackness for recognition – representing all Blacks present among us. With the sculptures, especially where the works are smaller than us, spotlighting isolates the figure from its surroundings, and those surroundings are psychologically replaced with what you are sensing in your mind. The staging makes us focus, and in that concentration, we spot the abundant, fluent, detailing of human shape – something we immediately identify with. We don’t feel that other information is missing. The paintings are all larger – several of them dwarfing us as we approach. In a different way, this size has us “zooming in” on the subject at a detail level, made even more apparent by the very bright lights on the paintings. But again, what’s being pursued is a degree of identification that dispels a need for more than what is there. The iconographic effect resolves the tension between the body language as offered by Wiley versus what an audience might bring. Although somewhat subliminal, it makes Wiley’s intention clearer. But this still doesn’t mean that the paintings will communicate correctly against audience predispositions. [Industrial gloss connotes both commodity-grade value and idealization…] [Crime scene, or accident?] So how do the paintings successfully communicate when they do? Let’s go back to being big. The first thing that happens with figures at a scale larger than our own is that they feel as if they are occupying our own physical space. This starts fusing our thoughts and feelings into one impactful experience, somewhere on a spectrum between intimacy and imposition. It’s essentially what people are talking about when they say that they find something to be “captivating”. And more emphatically, hyperrealism pulls you into its space. You consider what is happening to the subject portrayed, but you do it with a big dose of imagining that it was happening to you. Put simply, while the collection of works is theatrical and visceral, the most important effect is that it is sympathetic. As described by the Meriam Webster dictionary: “In general, sympathy is when you share the feelings of another; empathy is when you understand the feelings of another but do not necessarily share them.” In this description, “share” – meaning “also have” – pertains to what we think we know about the feelings of the subjects. But that is mostly what we ourselves attribute to the poses they have in the setting Wiley has given them. We can make our own attribution in a couple of different ways. One is by relying on a conventional meaning that we have already learned to associate with the poses. Another, by relying on our intuition of what we would feel like in those same poses. Wiley’s work attempts to give us a third way: by newly adopting what is claimed by someone else, namely, the artist – and trying it on for size. 8. Conventional Wisdom, Popular Belief Psychologically, say communications experts, getting a message through might rely on sheer repetition as much as on anything else. But in art, as in media, that is highly familiar as the practice of variations on a theme. A major feature of the Wiley artworks is the “sameness” of the figures from one picture to another, It is intentional; it establishes that there are not especially personal dramas being portrayed to make a point. Rather, the point is that the vulnerability or precariousness being shown applies indiscriminately to “any Black, anywhere.” But the works also run through a wide variety of postures. The postures communicate something that the viewer thinks they already understand. The question is, does that understanding correspond with what Wiley intends to signal? [Death, or euphoria?] These days, the strategy of providing scenarios that viewers already understand usually plays out somewhere already culturally ubiquitous: and it’s not in religion; it’s in fashion advertising. [Leisure, longing, or simply demure beauty?] In this type of advertising, the fashion artist’s device is to provide context which makes the figure’s condition meaningful. But what is the meaning? In the abstract, fashion might be pursuing surprise by generating a new understanding, an expansion of recognition; an awareness. Or it might be pursuing inspiration by generating sympathetic sharing, a reinforcement of aspiration or identity; a motive to act. More concretely, fashion’s scenarios span from fantasies on the one hand to contradictions on the other, with exemplary propriety parked in the middle of the range. That is, fashion imagists routinely rely on being able to engage the viewer through daring, through affirmation, or through shock. Regardless of which way is chosen, what usually makes those images gripping is the sense that the artist’s imagination on display is really about the viewer’s imagination (a sympathetic engagement). It matters hugely that these Wiley works can have the meaning that the artist intends. But it matters even more that the works must entice the viewer to allow the artist’s meaning to emerge in competition with what the viewer already knows – and then be embraced. Either the audience wants to help do that, or it finds that it happens involuntarily. For the former, the works recruit us. For the latter, they both compare and reflect us. The latter is a way to raise awareness; the former, a way to call for action. 9. The Secret of Success Some people who come to see the show might bring the special visual learnings of historically advocated formal art. With that point of view, sensitivity to art conventions sets the expectations about what the artist used to make decisions and communicate as well as the sensitivities to it. That viewer perceives the work as being personally offered to achieve personal relevance to that viewer. But everyone else who comes to see the show might bring mainly the general visual learnings of mass media with them. With that point of view, art’s ability to challenge conventions is its most interesting aspect. The broad scope of mass media is impersonally offered, yet hoped to become personally relevant. For the show to really be impactful per its message, the challenge is to create an experience that, whether originated personally or impersonally, is shareable either way and is shared in both ways for the same reason. What is the most probable shared experience across the de Young’s differing audiences? The curators explicitly recognized that for many Blacks, the show’s message is not one that they needed a show to convey. And aiming for art history connoisseurs does not on the surface seem to serve the mission of the work even though it likely would be beneficial to Wiley’s career. Above and beyond all ambiguity, the main sharable ingredient in Wiley’s work is the passion of his artistic effort. We know passion as a devoted intensity and emotion, and we know emotional intensity as being dramatic. This drama communicates how much he cares about what he says. The goal is that it will be something that motivates awareness into becoming activism. Wiley is undeniably performing a kind of activism by rescuing and completing these works from a project he had years earlier abandoned, and by doing it passionately. His effort metaphorically asks us to leave behind, now, those things that have been keeping us from paying attention before, including the way we have gotten used to seeing things. The show’s true ambition is to establish that our comfort zones are actually the fictions. The real world is the one the show intends to bring forth. What we come away with from the Wiley show is the aesthetic excitement of the effort he invested in the message. Its intensity asks us to permanently leave behind any lingering indifference or inattention that we may have had to the issue addressed by the show. It wants us to instead take it upon ourselves to not only notice the problem but to look for it. To respond to its theatricality, is viscerality, its sympathy. The goal of this intensity is to make that awareness unforgettable. It asks us to question our comfort zones, whether they be historical, artistic, in pop culture, or any combination thereof, and not allow them to obscure present realities. We learn from the curators that this show came about when Wiley decided to revive an earlier abandoned effort and make it effective for now. The parallel of that with what the show asks of us is both close and poignant. The show overall, in its exceptional artistry, is essentially an activist’s effort, deliberately using the past to influence the future, and recruiting us into its advocacy. The challenge of transcending the audience’s various differences is met with this: through the sheer force of his works’ aesthetics, the works can heighten viewers’ awareness to an unforgettable level – one that will mean the audience will leave the show not just noticing things they should have noticed before, but now actively looking for them. (c) 2023 Malcolm Ryder