Glen Helfand

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  print October 2021

  Wangechi Mutu

  A bronze cast of Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, 1880–81, has long welcomed visitors to the exterior courtyard of the Legion of Honor, a faux-French edifice built in the 1920s through the efforts of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels. The city-affiliated museum primarily focuses on European art. Its sister museum, the de Young, is where collections of art from the Americas, Oceania, and Africa are housed. Like many cultural repositories of its era, the Legion is steeped in constructed narratives.

  Given its setting, at the coastal edge of San Francisco, this museum

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  print Summer 2019

  Willie Stewart

  Willie Stewart was two years old when the Cure’s “In Between Days” was released. The song is an earworm that can get you to dance to dour lyrics: “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die.” Stewart took this former nightclub staple as the title of his recent solo exhibition, which, like the band’s music, was austere, showy, and well-crafted, more thoughtful than its slick finishes suggested.

  Stewart, who is also a musician, used the arena of arty punk and synth bands from the 1980s to explore layered notions of time, in an era when any decade’s records are instantly streamable. A sense of

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  picks May 23, 2019

  Conrad Egyir

  The tone is springlike, with crisp whites and bold graphic patterns rendered in sunny colors strategically punctuated with bright fake flowers. Conrad Egyir’s mixed-media paintings gathered in the exhibition “Ameliorations” serve as emblems, portraits, and quasi-religious narratives that honor black bodies and allude to iconographies of the African diaspora. Some works take the form of giant postcards or sheets of dot matrix paper. Within the compositions, bodies are arranged and iterated in geometric ensembles with shifts in scale that position some as deities and others as civilians embodying

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  picks February 22, 2019

  Desert X

  Southern California’s deserts are geographically sprawling, environmentally diverse, historically fraught, and ever dramatized. Their appeal to artists and curators is understandable. In its first iteration in 2017, Desert X, a biennial intended to “engage viewers, and focus attention on the Valley’s environment,” veered toward spectacle, with architectural works by Doug Aitken, Richard Prince, Tavares Strachan, and others. The nineteen artists and collaboratives in the 2019 edition, which has expanded to cover some fifty-five miles around Palm Springs, has a few heavy hitters, including Sterling

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  picks January 23, 2019

  Wardell Milan

  Composite bodies constructed from pages of Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious Black Book, 1986, populate Wardell Milan’s collages, drawings, and paintings. These fractured compositions of physical sensuality and social tension often include shards of images from other sources as well as renderings of lines and shapes glued onto the surface.

  While the show is titled “Parisian Landscapes: Blue in Green,” the first large work one sees has a deep red background and is inhabited by distorted, Frankenstein-like figures that could have been drawn from the paintings of Francis Bacon: Muscular men in posing

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  slant December 14, 2018

  On the Ground: San Francisco

  FOR MUCH OF NOVEMBER 2018, raging wildfires made particulate matter levels dangerously high in the Bay Area. Eyes watered, schools closed, art openings and lectures were canceled. People fled to LA, never known for its air quality, for bluer skies. It became matter of course to wear N95 respirators if you could find them. Lines snaked around hardware stores, and San Francisco’s young, affluent demographic patiently waited for theirs, just as they do in queues for the latest must-have artisanal ice cream.

  This is not to draw too emphatic a comparison between the arts and the effects of global

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  picks July 20, 2018

  Will Rogan

  “Albatross,” Will Rogan’s strangely potent exhibition, is timely in multiple senses. The sculptures, found objects, and photographs allude to the effects of climate change and also to the concept of time itself, in its varied scales and paces. Immediately, seascape photographs and rocks placed like Minimalist sculptures on the floor establish a geological baseline. Weights and chains from cuckoo clocks droop from photographs in small handmade frames, and elsewhere, horological mechanisms have been reconfigured to make die-cut shapes of urns, keys, and faces that rotate at their own, sometimes

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  picks June 29, 2018

  Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri

  You feel an aesthetic electricity when you enter this modestly scaled gallery that has brought together work by Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri, artists who studied together at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s—art and life pals ever since. Back in the day, they were both focused on making art in the street and often had cans of spray-paint in their hands. The thrill of hissing aerosol is still visible in their work, albeit in discrete objects of their own making—McCarthy’s kaleidoscopic, interwoven abstract matrices in spray-paint and house paint, and Neri’s voluptuous ceramics,

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  interviews April 27, 2018

  Alice Shaw

  With wry wit and deceptive literalness, Alice Shaw has been making work for over twenty-five years that cleverly focuses on a few core issues: doubles, photography, and the hegemonic history of landscape photography in her native Golden State. Her current exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, “Cloned,” is on view through May 26, 2018. Here, among other things, she reveals some reasons for her current focus on sheep.

  IMAGERY OF FARM ANIMALS seems somewhat unpopular these days. I was watching some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films a while back and noticed how much animals used to play

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  picks April 10, 2018

  Matthew Angelo Harrison

  The twelve works in Matthew Angelo Harrison’s 2018 series “Dark Silhouettes” are a handsome provocation. Traditional wooden African sculptures, many sourced online, are encased in smoky resin and placed upon pedestals of the artist’s design, echoing Minimalist furniture from the 1970s. It is intriguing to know that Harrison, who is based in Detroit, worked in prototyping for Ford Motors, as some of the resin has been carved into with a CNC router, creating topographical rivulets in these industrial arrangements. Some of the blocks have holes drilled as if to offer oxygen to a captured deity;

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  diary December 24, 2014

  Dancing in the Moonlight

  THE BERKELEY ART MUSEUM BUILDING, a bold but seismically iffy piece of Brutalist architecture, has been on borrowed time for a while now. Bracing was added more than a decade ago, but it still rates poor on the safety scale. A new, more stable, and conveniently located building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro is nearing completion, and so the museum threw itself a daylong celebration of its soon to be former home on the shortest day of the year.

  Architect Mario Ciampi’s edifice, which opened to the public in 1970, is all about exposed concrete, verticality, and buttress landings overlooking

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  picks July 18, 2013

  “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle”

  The artist Jess and the poet Robert Duncan exchanged romantic vows in 1951, more than sixty years before the Supreme Court weighed in on marriage equality. Posthumously, the couple still inspires much of San Francisco’s creative community. Titled after a Duncan collection published in 1960, this exhibition reveals a group of creative individuals who lived and worked in the Bay Area during a romantically bohemian era of alternative lifestyles and artistic as well as social experimentation. The Jess-Duncan crowd may have crossed paths with the Beats, but their scene was more intimate, and too