While not exactly blockbusters, two important exhibitions will be featured at the de Young Museum this month. Both are delicate celebrations of understated imagery and quiet craft.
By Paul Duclos
Published: October, 2012
While not exactly blockbusters, two important exhibitions will be featured at the de Young Museum this month. Both are delicate celebrations of understated imagery and quiet craft.
Tucked away in the Anderson Gallery of Graphic Art is Crown Point Press at 50. This marks the press’s anniversary and features prints by 15 internationally renowned artists made at the press over the course of five decades. Some, such as Robert Bechtle and Wayne Thiebaud, have returned to the press throughout their careers; others, including Darren Almond, Chris Ofili and Kiki Smith, are more recent additions to the roster. All share an enthusiasm for expanding their artistic practice by making prints.
When Kathan Brown established Crown Point Press in the Bay Area in 1962, she expressed a commitment to etching that was remarkable for the time. Most workshop-based print publishing ventures in the 1960s focused on lithography and screenprinting. Brown offered an alternative and welcomed artists who were new to intaglio, giving them an opportunity to explore an alternative printmaking possibility that was ideally suited to contemporary expression.
Witnessing the evolution of artistic movements such as Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Neo-figuration over the last 50 years, the press has applied a constant level of innovation to etching while working with visiting artists, regardless of style, to realize complex ideas. From the late 1960s, Brown and her staff of printers have developed ways in which photo projects could be realized, first as photoetchings, and then, beginning in the 1990s, in the revival of photogravure, a printing process that has been around for as long as photography itself. This process, along with that of color aquatint—which has become a trademark of the press—permits artists to swathe their compositions in printed tonal fields, merging ink and paper.
The press has two active websites (www.crownpoint.com and www.Magical-Secrets.com) and operates a public gallery and two large private etching studios in San Francisco with a staff of 10. Each year five or six invited artists work at the press for two weeks at a time with the technical assistance of Brown’s printers. Kathan Brown is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life. It deals with ideas about creativity that she has learned from working closely over four decades with some of the most influential visual artists of our time.
Also at the de Young is This World Is Not My Home: Photographs by Danny Lyon. This exhibition of more than 60 photographs and photographic montages from 1962 to the present traces the fascinating and wide-ranging career of a dynamic and ground-breaking artist. A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon distinguished himself from peers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander through his direct engagement with his subjects and his concern for those on the margins of society.
Working in the style of photographic New Journalism, Lyon immersed himself in the world of his subjects, cultivating relationships and frequently capturing his subjects’ stories in highly descriptive, opinionated texts, which he published in several books alongside his photographs. Lyon rode with bikers, marched against segregation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spent hours inside the notorious death row "Walls Unit" of the Texas State Prison at Huntsville. His goal to present a charged alternative to the insipid documentation that pervaded the mass media led to the creation of hundreds of striking psychological, political, and aesthetically powerful images.
The 1960s were an extraordinarily productive decade for Lyon. He became the first official photographer for the civil rights movement, captured the members and mores of Midwestern motorcycle gangs, documented the destruction of housing and traditional architecture in lower Manhattan and made intimate portraits of death row inmates in Texas prisons.
Since then, Lyon has tackled a broad range of subjects: life with his family in the mixed Native American and Latino neighborhood of Llanito in Bernalillo, New Mexico; abandoned street children in Colombia; the political turmoil in Haiti; the chaos of life in China’s booming, polluted industrial outposts; and most recently the Occupy movement in New York and Los Angeles. Throughout the years, he also made numerous films inspired by these and other subjects.
Drawn from the artist’s studio and the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas, with supplemental works from private collections in the Bay Area, This World Is Not My Home features a selection of images from all periods of the Lyon’s career. Also included are a number of rarely seen montages in which the artist has arranged old and new photographs, in both color and black-and-white, to create poetic reflections on memory, family and friendship.
