Bay Area Exhibitions

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50

Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St, Oakland

October 8, 2016 – February 26, 2017

In October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale created a radical political party at the forefront of revolutionary change—the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On the 50th anniversary of its founding, the exhibition All Power to the People provides a contemporary view of the Party and its aims to serve oppressed people and fight injustice. 

In the gallery, uncover the history of the Black Panther Party—a history that is often misunderstood. Charismatic Panthers—both men and women—created programs to benefit the people, stood up against power, and earned the admiration of other struggling communities in the US and across the globe. Many still fear the Panthers and are unaware of their motivations and intent. Former Panthers admit some mistakes and acknowledge that their image as militants cast a negative shadow on their legacy.

Morgan Mandalay: Norman Amygdala

300 Jefferson Street Oakland, CA

January 7 – February 5, 2017

Morgan Mandalay lives and works in San Diego, CA where he is completing his MFA at the University of California-San Diego. Mandalay received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Yautepec in Mexico City and Helmuth Projects in San Diego. Other recent exhibitions include Le Domaine Enchanté curated by Domenico de Chirico at Galleria Acappella (Naples, Italy), The Originals s01 e 01, Galerie Tatjana Pieters (Ghent, Belgium) and Figuratism, curated by Jens Hoffmann for ArtBo (Bogotá, Colombia.) He’s represented by Yautepec in Mexico City. Mandalay is also the founder and director of SPF15, a beach-based curatorial project based in San Diego, USA

Danny Lyon: Message to the Future

De Young, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco

November 5, 2016 – April 30, 2017

Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is the first comprehensive retrospective of the career of Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) to be presented in 25 years. The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in summer 2016 before its San Francisco debut.

The exhibition assembles approximately 175 photographs, related films, and ephemeral materials to highlight Lyon’s concern with documenting social and political issues and the welfare of individuals considered by many to be on the margins of society. The presentation includes many objects that have seldom or never been exhibited before and offers a rare look at selections from Lyon’s archives alongside important loans from public and private collections in the United States. This is also the first exhibition to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker.

A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice. With his ability to find beauty in the starkest reality, Lyon has through his work provided a charged alternative to the bland vision of American life often depicted in the mass media.

Nicole Wermers: Grundstück

Jessica Silverman Gallery, 488 Ellis Street, San Francisco

January 10 – February 18, 2017

Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations, whose humor and deep psychological resonance derive from their diverse subversions. They sabotage their objects’ original function, radically rethink unusual combinations of materials, and destabilize expected spatial and social hierarchies. Wermers grew up in a small town outside Münster and, from a young age, aspired to live in a big city. Fascinated with urban environments, she developed an obsession with how they are constituted through design. “Grundstück” literally means a plot of land and connotes the process by which something flat springs into three-dimensions. The exhibition includes three recent bodies of work: “Mood Boards,” “Sand Shelves” and “Croissants & Architecture.”

Group Show: The Human Form

Berggruen Gallery, 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco

January 13 – March 4, 2017

Bringing together over 60 works by 20^th century masters such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud, as well as leading contemporary artists George Condo, Cecily Brown, Joel Shapiro, Antony Gormley, Kiki Smith and Kehinde Wiley, The Human Form will look at the formal and conceptual ways that artists have approached the representation of the figure. As Dr. Steven A. Nash writes, “The human body has been a lightning rod for creative imagination since humankind’s earliest impulses toward graphic representation. As the most common attribute of our shared humanity, it provides a powerful channel for empathetic communication of ideas, emotions, ideals, and beliefs. Throughout the history of image-making, the body has inspired countless varieties of interpretation, but it is safe to say that no other period of art history has seen the inventive, radical, and expressive explorations of this human vessel that characterize the modern era starting in the early 20th-century.”

Cary Leibowitz: Prequel Nyquil 

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS West at Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, Gallery 106, San Francisco

January 12 – 28, 2017

For decades, Leibowitz has been the New York art world’s master painter of abjection and neuroses, with mockingly self-abasing work that mixes elements of therapy, interrogation, social and institutional critique, and stand-up comedy routine. In both his cheeky multiples and his irregular-format paint-on-wood “text” works, Leibowitz turns a critical eye on subjects of identity, modernism, the art market, queer politics, and kitsch—making the gestures and reflexes of self-doubt and social skepticism into pictures of self-awareness as a theater (or satire? Or both?) of radical and universal vulnerability.

Leibowitz first came to prominence in the early 1990s, as Candyass, a prankster-critic of neo-expressionist grandiosity—and one whose self-mocking good humor belied a universe of anxiety below the surface, particularly as the AIDS crisis devastated both New York and San Francisco. (As critic Hilton Als has pointed out, his nickname was “yet another means of deflecting criticism.”) With uproarious text paintings of self-lacerating one-liners, typically composed against pastel-colored wood “canvases,” Leibowitz was celebrated as a wry and disconsolate Abject Art witness to the new pop-spectacle of the later 1990s and 2000s. But his work was also and always deeply personal and idiosyncratic, driven by anxieties, neuroses, and premonitions of difference that transform self-doubt and social skepticism into something much larger than niche art-world critique. That is, a heartrending and intimate meditation on our inescapable secret doubleness—the debilitatingly self-aware conscience that lies always beneath, or behind, or just around the corner, with a mocking and knowing wink.

Rigo 23: Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program 2

Anglim Gilbert Gallery, 1275 Minnesota St, San Francisco

January 14 – February 25, 2017

Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Rigo 23 and artisans and cultural activists from Chiapas, Mexico. Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program is organized around the theme “Another World, Another Path,” articulated by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) at the First Global Festival of Dignified Rage in 2009.

Based on the iconography and imagery of the EZLN, the work attempts to realize the possibilities of intercommunal and intergalactic dialogue through sculptures, tapestries, and painted murals that give shape and voice to the Zapatista community’s struggle for autonomy in the face of globalization.

GROUP SHOW: Eau de Cologne

Adrian Rosenfeld Gallery, 1150 25TH ST, San Francisco

January 14 – February 11, 2017

Adrian Rosenfeld Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Eau de Cologne, is a special collaboration with iconic art dealers Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers. Featured artists include Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Rosemarie Trockel.

Founded in 1983, Monika Sprüth’s Gallery in Cologne, Germany showed a deep commitment to women artists. From 1985 to 1989, she produced three magazines called “Eau de Cologne” and three shows of the same title that included works by the artists presented in this exhibition. In their most recent exhibitions in Berlin and Los Angeles, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers reconsider their own history together as the gallery Sprüth Magers. The works on view in San Francisco are an excerpt of these five shows and date from the early 70s through today, examining forms of political and aesthetic engagement from the perspective of five of the most recognized voices in contemporary art.