Curated by Jens Hoffmann
Among the first crop of major shows at the CCA Wattis organized by new director Jens Hoffmann, “Pioneers” will mix thirty artifacts—culled from the collection of the Society of California Pioneers—related to San Francisco’s Gold Rush–era founding, with fifty works made in the past century by nineteen artists working in the city, to chart how its pioneer spirit morphed from one of geographic expansion to that of social and cultural liberation. Those inextricably linked with the Bay Area (Robert Bechtle, Jay DeFeo, Jess, Dorothea Lange) will be presented alongside surprises such as Diego Rivera. Hoffmann, long resident in Europe, continues his autodidacticism with a series of individual exhibitions, likewise mixing art and cultural history, about America’s fifty states, the first of which (on Alabama) opens the same day.
