Notes from di Rosa is produced in conjunction with Art Practical's yearlong residency at di Rosa, in which the museum's collection serves as a focus and cornerstone for an in-depth exploration of Northern California contemporary art.
You walk through a gallery in the same way that you move through the world: with a shifting weather of sensation fucking you up and composing you.
More »
The female figure appears not as an interruption of her environment but as a continuation of it, an extension of the peaked cone on which she stands.
More »
Words (and artworks) may be an insufficient means to describe or represent our desire for connectedness to land, but these efforts nonetheless afford a great gain in the breath that language and art can bring to otherwise mundane, thirsty living.
More »
How will this collection be displayed, conserved, promoted, and carried forward into the uncertain future that institutions face today?
More »
Fascinating subthemes emerge in di Rosa’s vast collection of modern and contemporary Northern California art, as in one unexpected moment in the main gallery devoted to explorations of technology and gender.
More »
Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour ruminate on the di Rosa collection and its founder in writing, while Erin Jane Nelson provides her interpretation through altered digital photographs.
More »
One feels palpably that di Rosa is a place that has been cultivated, nurtured, grown.
I was particularly interested in the question of how things change us when circumstances beyond our control take place.
More »
We drove up from San Francisco to di Rosa on an exceedingly hot day in late September, shortly after the Napa earthquake and the same weekend a closure on Highway 37 slowed wine-tasting traffic to a walking pace.
More »We invited contributors to consider collecting as both an individual and instituting activity, as well as the relationships, intimate or problematic, that people have with the objects they live with.
These are artists who are taking on the medium and working to push beyond the traditional art exhibition, the all-too-trite blockbuster, or the indie romance plot structure. They aren’t simply adopting the standard entertainment format; they’re examining its structure.
For this assemblage, we invited a range of artists to create small, artist-led workshops devised to spur dialogue, action, and art making around questions of art, labor, and economics. Others led discussions and surveys on the wider Bay Area landscape of cultural labor.
Here, readership takes on multiple valences: an intellectual orientation, an activity implicated in identity and community formation, a mode of exchange, a site or location of acculturation, a group of consumers.
This issue of Art Practical is intended to be a highly personal selection of eleven exhibitions that cumulatively form a history of contemporary art in the Bay Area over the past half-century.
4.27
/ From the Archives: Crafts and ArtsAugust 20, 2013. In his interview with Art Practical, Glen Adamson states that he wants “craft to be not so tacit or unspoken, not so hidden offstage. I want it to be something that everyone sees happening before their eyes and thinks constantly about how it should be structured.” It’s hard to think of an art-related word as thorny, sticky, and slippery as craft. Anyone who has ever tried to translate the word into another language knows…
4.25
/ From the Archives: Worse Than QueerAugust 13, 2013. This issue’s title comes from the Bikini Kill song “Suck My Left One,” (1992) in which frontwoman Kathleen Hana exhorts her fellow sisters-in-arms to show the world that they’re “worse than queer.” I read the line as both a rallying cry for the radical possibilities and reminder of the high stakes of a life lived, to whatever degree, outside of dominant norms of gender and sexuality.
However, the stakes and possibilities of…
August 14, 2013. Art Practical and Daily Serving are proud to jointly participate alongside other art media in heralding A Day for Detroit. Eight writers from both publications have each selected a work from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a treasure trove that could inconceivably be sacrificed if Detroit’s emergency manager forces a sale of the collection to alleviate some of the city’s staggering debt. We present the works here along with commentary…
4.24
/ From the Archives: InstabilityAugust 6, 2013. Art produced on the West Coast often eludes easy definition. Its slipperiness does not stem from a lack of clarity or rigor, but rather from an embrace of the unstable. Its iconoclastic resistance to simple legibility springs in part from the unyieldingly sublime western landscape, which simultaneously underpins and threatens every westerner’s existence. California, and particularly the Bay Area, amplifies this unstable potential by combining a cacophonous cultural confluence with the most volatile and majestic aspects of nature.
July 31, 2013. Though Art Practical has always published profiles closely examining the work or lives of artists who give lectures or public workshops in the Bay Area, we’ve dedicated a portion of every issue to the Visiting Artist Profile series since our third year of publication. The profiles collected here represent the pioneering writers who have brought their own unique approaches to this regular feature since its inception.
Elyse Mallouk wrote the first installment of the Visiting Artist…
Each day, it seems, some “Fill-in-the-blank” collapse captures space as a front-and-center headline in daily papers. It is not surprising that during this time, artists are working to incorporate local, global and personal politics into their work.
July 16, 2013. It’s jocks vs. nerds: athletic and artistic abilities are unrelated if not mutually exclusive, if we are to believe our friends at Bad at Sports, who note, “if you were good at sports you were probably too busy dating to be that interested in art.” Enter Matthew Barney, who counters this limiting perspective with an athletic bravura grounded in metaphors of muscles and the body’s response to distress, which is central to his…
July 9, 2013. Photography is 175 years young. Throughout its lifetime, its uses and perceptions have shifted radically from novelty to ubiquity and from scientific tool to fine art medium. Not only has photography changed how we see the world with the naked eye, it has ensured that we always see with perceptive vision. People are more observant, more discerning of those decisive moments when one might want or need to stop and look, commit a sight to memory, whether mentally or digitally, as is now often…
July 2, 2013. The essays, interviews, and reviews chosen for this issue, whose title comes from the 1866 Bayard Taylor poem The Picture of St. John, reflect a particular willingness to investigate art and praxis in an open manner. These keen and thoughtful writings, as well as the events and exhibitions on which they report, are not prescriptive in their opinions nor attitudes, nor do they attempt to be comprehensive.
Instead, some of these articles offer snapshots of the here and now. For…
June 25, 2013. Building a life in an arts community is not always a straightforward task. Emerging artists, critics, curators, and arts workers all face multiple options when it comes to finding and defining their role in the Bay Area—not to mention the national and international scene, and the unwieldy Internet. In pieces from four years of AP archives, writers address a wide array of responses to these various forking paths, reflecting on institutional setbacks and local growing pains, but also on the…
