Label Curatorial

This book is the first comprehensive summary of the most critical artist and poet run galleries and alternative spaces in the Bay Area. The publication chronicles how each offered a dynamic role to the gestation of the new modalities of Californian and American contemporary art.

This book expands the interest of alternatives art spaces and the cross pollinating genres of the arts that became a signature dynamic of the Bay Area. These alternative art spaces showcased the new strains of Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Figurative, Funk and what became known as Beat era art. These were the first venues to show Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis and many other key American artists that hailed from the Bay Area. The book provides an ideal opportunity to explore the gestation of the mid-century Bohemian movement and its planting of the seeds that soon germinated into the late 60’s flourishing that revolutionized culture and was the most radical cultural shift in American history. Many of these participants had come to San Francisco through the migrations of Black Mountain College bringing post Bauhaus Utopian goals of community and art practice and found the Bay Area’s affordable rents, Bohemian enclaves and dilapidated nostalgic architectural vistas an artistic wonderland. The book presents for the first time the little known facts that artists such as Hassel Smith, Ed Corbett and Sam Francis had their first shows and made their first sales in the notable bars of San Francisco’s Montgomery Street. These alternative spaces were the venues where Eastern philosophical systems melded with West Coast abstraction and its influences of biomorphic strains of Surrealism and the found art assemblages of Dada to form a cohesive Californian aesthetic and autonomous identity. These spaces hosted Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl as well as Harry Smith’s first convergences of jazz and film, and ruth weiss (sic,) the first poet to read to jazz on the West Coast. It was through these alternative spaces that poets, artists, filmmakers and play writes melded their processes, theories and ideologies to create a cohesive philosophical momentum that was woven into the fabric of cultural life. It was in these spaces that the gestating influences of Fluxus, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Psychedelic/Visionary art were presented.

It also uncovers for the first time the art shows staged at City Lights Book Store, The Coffee Gallery, and The Jazz Cellar. It follows the author’s scholarship presented in both the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art’s exhibition and catalogue based on the S.S. Vallejo in 2018 and and the Dilexi Retrospective of 2019.

This book is the first comprehensive summary of the most critical artist and poet run galleries and alternative spaces in the Bay Area during a critical cultural moment that segued the cold war/McCarthyism into an era that nested the seeds of the Sumer of Love. The publication explores how each gallery offered a dynamic role to the gestation of the new modalities of Californian and American contemporary art.

This book expounds on the interest of alternatives art spaces and the cross-pollinating genres of the arts that became a signature dynamic of the Bay Area. Many of these participants had come to San Francisco from somewhere else; some came through the migrations of Black Mountain College bringing post-Bauhaus Utopian goals of community and art practice. They found the Bay Area’s affordable rents, Bohemian enclaves, and dilapidated nostalgic architectural vistas an artistic wonderland. These alternative spaces were the venues where Eastern philosophical systems melded with West Coast abstraction, biomorphic strains of Surrealism met up with found art assemblages of Dada. The result was an elusive but cohesive Californian aesthetic and autonomous identity. These alternative spaces, which have never been examined in their totality, hosted Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl as well as Harry Smith’s first convergences of jazz and film. It was through these alternative spaces that poets, artists, filmmakers, and playwrights intertwined their processes, theories and ideologies to create a philosophical momentum with far-reaching impact on the fabric of cultural life. It was in these spaces that the gestating influences of Fluxus, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Psychedelic/Visionary art were first presented. The book provides an ideal opportunity to explore the gestation of the mid-century Bohemian movement and its planting of the seeds that soon germinated into the late 60’s, a flourishing that revolutionized culture and was the most radical cultural shift in American history.

The publication also uncovers for the first time the art shows staged at City Lights Book Store, The Coffee Shop, and The Jazz Cellar. It provides a West Coast follow-up to the Grey Art gallery’s Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965, which featured many of the Bay Area artists who brought the co-operative concept of an artist run gallery with them to New York. This book continues the public sphere of interest stemming from the intersection of the exhibitions that presented the flourishing and outcome of these artistic endeavors recently such as the Walker Art Center’s Hippie Modernism (2015) and the De Young Museum’s Summer of Love: Art, Fashion, and Rock and Roll(2017).

This book is the first comprehensive summary of the most critical artist and poet run galleries and alternative spaces in the Bay Area exploring how each offered a dynamic role to the gestation of the new modalities of Californian and American contemporary art.

This book expands the interest of alternatives art spaces and the cross pollinating genres of the arts that became a signature dynamic of the Bay Area. These alternative art spaces showcased the new strains of Abstract Expressionism Bay Area Figurative and were the first venues to show. Many of these participants had come to San Francisco through the migrations of Black Mountain College bringing post Bauhaus Utopian goals of community and art practice and found the Bay Area’s affordable rents, Bohemian enclaves and dilapidated nostalgic architectural vistas an artistic wonderland. It was through these alternative spaces that poets, artists, filmmakers and play writes melded their processes, theories and ideologies to create a cohesive philosophical momentum that was woven into the fabric of cultural life. The book provides an ideal opportunity to explore the gestation of the mid century Bohemian movement and its planting of the seeds that soon germinated into the late 60’s flourishing that revolutionized culture and was the most radical cultural shift in American history.