In honoring sculptor Clay Jensen as the sole recipient of their annual Art Award, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s adjunct Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art—perhaps inadvertently—challenged the current hegemony of expressionistic painting. Considered less reactively, they recognized the deepening sensibility of a younger artist whose painted steel constructions synthesize planar color-field abstractions of harmonious beauty with metaphoric allusions to urban experience. The work’s hybrid format is expressively original and distinctly classic in spirit.

City Slicker, 1983,