November 14, 2008
Proper Behavior, Damas Malcriadas…Buen Comportamiento, Ill-Bred Ladies
November 13, 2008-April 29, 2009
The work of artists Rosa M. Valdez and Heidi Forssell is installed in Rosenberg Library.
The artists describe their collaborative exhibition:
As artists and women, we are deeply concerned with the societal value of women. In this exhibition, we seek to address the ways in which women are valued and defined while exploring the tension between external representations of women and real women’s realities. In our work, we each utilize humor and earnestness to delve into preconceptions about women’s roles in society while examining the stereotypical objectification of women. We both aim to throw a wrench at the societal values that distort and misrepresent us in an effort to create critical dialogue and alternative feminine identities for all women.We hope to inspire laughter, curiosity, skepticism, hope and action.
Heidi Forssell
Heidi co-opts the symbology and metaphor of found objects to challenge the attitude they solicit. She works with objects such as high heels, lipstick, and ball gowns that exist as satellites revolving around the issue of gender, love and sex. She subjects these objects to interventions which simultaneously exaggerate and counter their original meanings. The work is repulsively fascinating and comically macabre.
Rosa M. Valdez
Rosa’s draws on her experience as the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her work explores the tense space between cultural expectations of women in her community and the creation of a new feminine identity through the use of photography, video installation, garment-making and image transfer. She utilizes humor and the ridiculous as well as personal and public images to invite viewers to participate in creating alternative spaces for women to define who they are.
The artists ask you t consider these questions as you look at the exhibition:
How much of your identity is defined by your gender?
What messages did you receive as a child about your gender?
What was the source of these messages? (school, home, church, pop culture)
How does your culture affect your behavior as a woman?
What are some great things about being a woman?
Check out these great resources on Women in the Arts:
Library Resources: Women in the Arts Bibliography
Check out Heidi Forssell’s Blog
November 14, 2008
¡Juega Loteria! A Chance to Win Friends and Neighbors
October 6, 2008-March 24, 2009
Celebrating Latino/a Heritage Month
Loteria, the Mexican game of picture bingo is beautiful and incredibly flexible. In addition to being a traditional game, it has been adapted as an educational and political tool and in the examples here, as a vehicle for creating a community portrait. It has been used to teach English, healthy ways to live with diabetes, traffic rules, as well as information about the World Trade Organization and the corporations that belong to it. The structure of the game makes it an easy formula for conveying visual information.
Artist Teresa Villegas created the gorgeous and subversive lotería to your right. Her images of “El Destino,” “El Revolucionario,” and “La Telenovela,” update and expand the game with abstract concepts and images from contemporary popular culture.
The artist Carmen Lomas Garza brought the tradition of handmade loterías to the Bay Area from her native South Texas in the mid-1970s. Lomas Garza’s etching of neighbors playing the game shows prizes heaped in the middle of the game table surrounded by participants of all ages.
As long time Loteristas, we first began to adapt the game when we worked together at the Galeria de la Raza. María created a Día de los Muertos lotería in 1977. As a California Arts Council artist in residence, Kate worked with seniors to create the Centro Latino Lotería. She and Oscar Melara developed the concept of using Loteria to describe a community and bring it together, which María then applied to a community she’s close to for the Lotería de Mata Ortiz.
Kate Connell and María Pinedo
Check out Porto-Loteria, the handmade Loteria game about the Portola District in San Francisco
November 14, 2008
Caught Reading: The Intimacy of Books
September 19, 2008-February 27, 2009
Caught Reading, at the Rosenberg Library, features the photographs of André Kertész, a Hungarian photographer who photographed readers between 1920 and 1970, in Europe, Asia and the United States. When his photographs were first published, critics praised the way he’d caught the compelling nature of books and the way that people engaged in this the intimate act of reading in public places, removing themselves from their surroundings and traveling to another world.
Where do you like to read? What do you like to read?
After looking at these photographs, we’re reminded that we have the opportunity to read constantly throughout the day-in the street: signage, headlines, and flyers on computers: in the library, at home, in cafes. And of course there are always books and magazines which we can take anywhere.
Come into the library and take a look at Kertesz’ book On Reading.
November 14, 2008
Fall 2008 Library Exhibitions
New Poster by Tatiana Gordevitch of the Graphic Arts 68 Class
November 13, 2008
Mark Your Place: Bookmarks
September 1-September 30, 2008
The Rosenberg Library is participating in Bookmarks VI Infiltrating: Europe and the USA, a bookmark series that has visited venues in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania and the US. The goal of the project is to promote the format of the artist’s book. Participating artists who work in book arts have each generously produced and donated an edition of 100 bookmarks. Early each month, we will distribute a new set of the bookmarks in a box near the library’s reference case. Come by take one or leave one! New batches will be put out in early October, November, December and mid-January. The bookmarks of Mary Marsh, City College staff member at the John Adams Campus Library, are included in this project.
May 22, 2008
Artists Working for All the People: Art in Action and the Work of Pauline Teller
April 25-November 4, 2008, Rosenberg Library, 2nd Floor Atrium
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“Artists are people, working for the pleasure and profit of all the people. This is the new concept of art in a democracy as exhibited in the “Art in action.”
-Report of WPA Activities of the Golden Gate International Exposition, Works Projects Administration, 1940.
City College of San Francisco is home to the monumental mural, Pan American Unity painted by Diego Rivera at ‘Art in Action’ during the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940. This exhibition is to honor all of the other artists who created art in view of the public during this unique event on Treasure Island in the summer of 1940.
“Here the visitor is privileged to observe a kind of twenty-ring circus of art…..On the floor, in a series of little ateliers, sculptors, painters, lithographers, etchers, ceramicists, weavers and whatnot are at work under the direct observation of the public.”
Alfred Frankenstein. “Diverse Attractions at the Golden Gate Fair.” New York Times, Jun 9, 1940
Most of the 68 artists demonstrating their craft while the public watched were volunteers. Some were paid by WPA and the San Francisco Board of Education. Research revealed the artists lives, their diversity, a special time in history, and the art they created. Many of their works can still be seen today throughout the Bay Area. City College of San Francisco is home to Organic and Inorganic Science, the mosaics of Herman Volz on Science Hall, the limestone bust, Leonardo da Vinci carved by Frederick Olmsted, and the Bighorn Mountain Ram and Goddess of the Forest carved by Dudley Carter. All of these monumental works were created “in the pit” at Art in Action while tourists stood behind a small railing and watched.
“[Government sponsorship was] the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me more of an incentive to keep on working, where at the time things looked pretty dreary and I thought about getting out of it because, you know, I come from a family of people who thought all artists were drunkards and everything else. I thought I’d give it up at one time but I think the WPA helped me to stay.”
-Sargent Johnson San Francisco, CA, 1964
This project expands the representation of Art in Action in the Diego Rivera Archives at the Rosenberg Library at City College’s Ocean Campus. In a process of research begun with the City College Art Guide, Mary Marsh and Chloe Ramos curators of this exhibition, help us to look beyond the accomplishments of Rivera to those of his colleagues and to better understand the artistic exchange between all Art in Action artists.
Through their research Marsh and Ramos found one of the Art in Action artists, still living and making art in the Bay Area. Pauline Ivoncovich Teller demonstrated wood-carving at Art in Action, she shares with us her scrapbook, memories and artwork from 1940 to today.
City College Library Resources
California’s Living New Deal Project
Artists Working for All the People Bibliography: Books, Articles, Websites
Sites to See Handout: Public Art by Artists in ActionPauline Ivancovich Teller
We are pleased to present the life and work of Pauline Ivancovich Teller as one of the Art in Action artists still making work today. These paintings represent her career from the original works presented at the GGIE to her recent work. We have included selections from her scrapbook to provide other artifacts of an artist’s life. Keep reading →
April 18, 2008
Six Degrees of Separation, A Hungarian Experience
February 19-September 12, 2008, Rosenberg Library, 3rd Floor Atrium
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In 6 Degrees of Separation, 12 Artists Explore their Connections:
“By the Time I arrived in Budapest, my head was full of Echoes. This is my word for coincidences and reverberations of the collective unconscious. They’re clues, reminders that reality is but a dream…
Bridget Riversmith, Artist in Residence, Hungarian Multicultural Center
“On the second night…a soft snow was falling and I took a walk to the Parliament Building and photographed the trees at night…at Csopak, Lake Balaton…the bleakness of the trees intrigued me and I took photographs and drew them at many locations..if the trees were barren then, within that bleakness lay of promise of bloom and growth…”
Frances Velasco, Artist in Residence, Hungarian Multicultural Center
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City College Library Resources
Six Degrees of Separation: A Bibliography with Books, Articles, Websites
City College Departments with Related Classes
Six degrees of separation is the hypothesis that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five intermediaries. It was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, in a short story called “Chains.” The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with a number of links in the chain. Only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population. By extension, the same term is often used to describe any other setting in which some form of link exists between individual entities in a large set.
April 15, 2008
Be A Friend!
February 7-September 2, 2008
Rosenberg Library, 2nd Floor Atrium
Join the Friends of the Library!
The Friends of the Library at City College of San Francisco support the library by funding books and other resources for the collection, programs, events and exhibitions. When you shop at the Friends of the Library (FOL) store or become a member of the FOL, you’re helping the library to offer new books and other research resources. Join! Today would be a perfect day!
Special thanks to co-curators Marian Gallerani and Levi Leveridge
