Culture Collective Studio Review Round Up: Little Raven, SOMA Arts, Arc, 111 Minna
by Taylor Snowberger (a.k.a. Ruthie Day)
Little Raven Gallery
Little Raven Gallery, owned by long time SOMA business owner Laura Kudritzi, hosted a two day exhibit of photographs with artist and donkey-parent Beth Berman. Beth is a previous business partner of Laura Kudritzi, the two shared a wedding photography business on the corners of 5th and Howard ten years ago. Beth received a cancer diagnosis and leaned on her donkey and her love of photography for an artistic outlet. The results were romantic and whimsical, large prints of donkeys dressed in bouquets, on a stark black backdrop. We talked about Beth's hair loss and Laura's daughter having her picture on the front of the newspaper for fighting a rare illness. These two create a lovely corner of the art community in SOMA.
Laura wants to get people out to the 12th Annual 2 Blocks of Art event that she helps to plan, on Saturday, October 11, from 11 am to 6 pm
The event will electrify two blocks of Market Street, from 5th to 7th, with over 20 art exhibitions. This year's theme, "Site + Sound," explores the connection between music and art, showcasing Mid Market’s rich history of movie houses, radio, live music venues, and culture alongside today's creative arts community.
Admission is free and no registration is required, but the first 150 people to RSVP on Eventbrite and attend will receive a free drink ticket.
SOMA ARTS
Jasper Wilde invited me to the opening night of Artlaunch, an exhibition promoting Open Studios. Organised by Artspan, the event turns 50 this year. As the communications and special projects lead at Artspan, Jasper had a huge hand in producing the event, and recommend that you visit to experience art in its raw formation stages. Without the hand holding of museums, seeing where work is created and getting the opportunity to meet the artists on their own terms is invaluable.
ARTlaunch is composed of works from about a third of the artists participating over 5 weekends of Open Studios all over the city. Hundreds of artists whose studios will be open all over the city this September and October had their work selected to represent each section of the city where their studios are located, which is how the show is organised. Browsing the walls, I was able to see what would be up for viewing in SOMA.
Jasper themselves is an artist at Root Division, and recommends people stop by to see some of the exciting talent in the 2 story gallery and workspace. Root Division exhibits early career artists as part of their ethos. ARC will exhibit a mix of veteran ARC resident artists as well as a few guests invited by owner Michael Yokum for their previous participation in exhibits. Room and Board should also be worth a stop, with 9 artists on their roster whose work stood out amongst the others of the Weekend 4 wall, as well as the personal studios of the Sizeloves, which Jasper recommended.
ARC
Michael Yokum met with me to show me around the gallery and explain the exhibit on view, an annual affair known as Four Squared. The artists are hand picked by Michael every year, and in the room to the left are a handful of curated pieces from years previous.
Small designer ceramics, accented steel boxes, miniature oil paintings, giclee prints of flowers, the artists on view together represented a smorgasbord of everything you could conceivably hang on a wall or place on a pedestal.
I was given a preview of the studios upstairs and loved to see the workspace of wire-and-tchochky artist Rachel Leibman, whose painstakingly exact arrangements read like 2-d abstractions, or an obsessive compulsive I Spy. The artists in-studio here are decades into their career and have an aptitude for tight display and well honed style.
111 Minna
I met with Michelle Delaney from 111 Minna, who has been the owner and president for 25 of the gallery's 30 year history. She talked to me about the three women exhibiting in the space for Open Studios, and the variety of offerings the gallery has in addition to bringing art to the community.
“The show up right now is Year of the Snake. It's the third or fourth time we have done this, so it's become an annual tradition. We have tattoo artists make the work, so the style fits in well with the sort of work we exhibit, which we call urban contemporary,’ she told me.
Between the coffee bar and the cocktail lounge, the diverse offerings of the place during the day are enhanced by the careful curation and exacting display of the works on view. Each painting is gorgeously executed with masterful technique, uniform in size, framing and general style and theme. The approaches to the theme range from traditional Japanese woodblock style, to thick, black filigree around coy naked ladies a la 1930’s Americana tattoos, to erotic science fiction book covers from 1975.
Michelle kindly invited me to a birthday celebration open to the public the following Thursday and made sure to highlight the work by three women rolled up into the middle of the space specially for Open Studios. The artists listed on the artspan Open Studios website are Erin Fong, Lena Lee, and Ria Sharma.