HERE AS EVERYWHERE;

ART OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA;


On Saturday, April 11th, I attended an Art History Symposium as a part of Sacramento State University's College of Art and Letters Festival of the Arts. Five professors were invited--one a keynote speaker and four other speakers encompassing a part of a larger focus. The focus was on art of the 1960s-1970s from the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and upward, or a period come to be known as the beginning of the counter cultures and protest movements.
As we learned in class, many different art styles do not necessarily come in waves in which one starts and another ends and so on. Styles and movements usually overlap or are inspired by other movements.

MICHAEL SCHWAGER, Professor at Sonoma State University
"Don't Hide the Madness: Bay Area Art in the 50s & 60s"

Professor Schwager, the keynote speaker, starts off the symposium with giving a talk about the 1950s-60s historic events and artworks and moves through in a sort of timeline that would lead up to the big movements of the 1960s & 70s come from. It makes sense to start off with the 1950s as I learned in my History of Popular Culture class because this is a time that would cause ripples in American society and culture that would lead up to different civil rights movements as well as the art movements. The 50s seed was planted to create a tree of movements in.

He starts by talking about the Korean War, he was born when the war ended, since a lot of his friend's parents were in or seeing the changes that would spark the changes. Post WWII culture booms around this time and popular culture follows the consumer culture. Families would be surrounded by T.V. and advertisements, a "nuclear family" with no pun intended. He also brought up that the Beat Movement in San Francisco had had a major impact on the movements in the 1960s-1970s. Schwager would then, after giving you some background, give an example of an artist affected by the events like Wally Hendrick, who created an assemblage piece called Xmas Tree (1953), made of radios, various lights and bulbs with cords hanging out every which way, in a form of a Christmas tree. He joked that they used the tree every year during the season..I think he was serious. LOL.
Professor Schwager gave us a very extensive lesson on Bay Area artists I never knew about that I think are real cool.


NICOLAS G. ROSENTHAL
"Paintinga Cultural Resurgence: California Indian Artists in the 1960s and 1970s"

Professor Rosenthal had a short talk about a cultural revival in California Native American art in the twentieth century. In his twenty minute lecture, he discussed that the artwork being made preserved their past histories and their ceremonies and traditions.

Post WWII, these Native American artists are expanding into the art market, working outside of the "traditional" styles as well as commenting on contemporary issues and historical events. It is a marriage of their historic past experiences(or stories of their culture) and experiences of the artists themselves and their current involvement with their community.

He concentrated on the those Native American artists that lived here in the Northern California region  and had work in the 1960s-70s like Fritz Scholder, Frank La Pena, and Henry Fonseca--artists that I've been exposed to before in my Native American Art class last semester. These artists would use old images and symbols, myths and stories, and other reminders of their cultures in their paintings to bring contemporary issues up.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture, especially that this is something I want to make my specific concentration within the Art History field.

These two lectures together were very interesting and I learned a lot of new information. In addition to the new exposure, I was also able to apply previous knowledge from other classes about similar situations like the decades of protest, the counterculture against conformity of the Post WWII 1950s, and the contemporary arts of Native Americans.

There is one thing though. The whole time I was there, I knew Frank La Pena was there, an artist Professor Rosenthal was discussing in his lecture.

 I did not know I was sitting next to Frank La Pena the whole time. I felt awful foolish and slightly starstruck.

I asked him for a picture for my blog with some excitement and uneasiness, he seemed a tiny bit reluctant, maybe it's the fact maybe he didn't know what a blog was. Mr. La Pena awkwardly accepted my request anyway. I felt like I was meeting a very respected elder and was extremely nervous.