Visiting Jessica Silverman’s new gallery space at 621 Grant Avenue in San Francisco is special for a couple reasons. One is the gallery’s location. It is squarely in the middle of San Francisco’s famous Chinatown, as far as I know the first such contemporary gallery ever located there. The second is that the gallery reminds the visitor of important New York City art sites, with the kind of design and sophistication that has seldom been in evidence in San Francisco. High-ceilinged, beautifully lit, very large (as galleries go in San Francisco) and, especially, notable for its quite adventurous taste in art, the gallery is one of a kind in this city.
You may remember the Fluxus movement in American art. Concerned that established museums were simply exclusionary in the choice of the work they would show, Fluxus in the 1960s and 70s was a kind of liberation movement, in which artists felt that museums were not the only arbiters of what’s good in art. They wished art to be available to everyone, and that everyone have the opportunity to make art themselves. The artists felt that the act of defining themselves in some formal artistic cubbyhole was way too limiting. Avant-garde composer and conceptual artist George Brecht wrote of Fluxus: “The bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed. Art’s certain long-established bounds are no longer very useful."
The quality of Fluxus art does waver. It remains, nonetheless, an important movement, worth study.
Jessica Silverman was introduced to art by her grandparents, Gilbert and Lila Silverman, who were important collectors of Fluxus in the United States. Jessica herself discovered her taste for meaningful innovative art content early in her education. She furthered this interest through her studies in Studio Art at Otis College in Los Angeles, from which she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where she received a Master’s Degree in curatorial practice. Thus readied by her grandparents and her education, she wanted to bring adventurous innovation to the art public in a formal way, and she opened her first gallery in San Francisco in 2008.
That gallery became known for its very inventive new art by both known and relatively unknown artists. Says Silverman: “We support artists whose relevance to contemporary culture is such that museums also want to understand and embrace their work. We look for innovation, working outside the box, and for experimentation. We’ve found that one of the best ways to ensure this is through collaboration with other institutions.” So, a combination of something like Fluxus’s adventure and the more formal interest of museums and their viewers is what one finds at Jessica Silverman. Many of her artists have also been shown by such as The Tate Gallery in London, The Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others internationally.
Here’s an example of that collaboration….
Building on the success of her first gallery, Silverman recently opened the new Grant Avenue space, and has put up an exhibition of work by Oakland artist Sadie Barnette, titled Sadie Barnette: Inheritance.
After a tour of duty in the Vietnam war, Barnette’s father, Rodney Barnette, returned from the conflict and joined the Black Panther party in Oakland. Ever vigilant in its pursuit of what it considered dangerous black people, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. compiled a dossier on Barnette that was positively Tolstoyean in length, at 500 pages. (You can bet that Tolstoy was the better writer.) The dossier provided Sadie, many years later, with material for a series of large pieces that use pages from her father’s dossier as the basic design element.
It is a dark piece…literally, as Barnette reverses the government dossier form and the wording upon the individual pages, so that they read white on black, rather than vice versa. She has then decorated the pages with white flower and other design figures.
This is an expression of Barnette’s deep love for her father despite the oppressive nature of the original F.B.I. images. Its effect lies in how she wields the personal inheritance from Rodney Barnette in ways of design and artistic expression that remind us of the urgent struggles still faced by black people in this country and worldwide.
Other work in this exhibition includes a series of reworked photographic images that celebrate Barnette’s father’s founding and ownership of the first black gay bar in New York City.
With regard to collaboration, Sadie Barnette’s show at Jessica Silverman has been running simultaneously with a joint exhibition, “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend,” at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries. The gallery and the museums coupled to present work by this artist in ways that, given Barnette’s adventurous mind and creativity, may not have been possible in previous times. The museum shows closed on December 18, 2021. Barnette’s show at Jessica Silverman is up until this January 8.
When next you’re in San Francisco, do go to Jessica Silverman. The gallery is a beauty, and the work is a fine artistic challenge, a tribute to Silverman’s important presence in this city.
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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