CURATOR’S STATEMENT

When [BAC Gallery Director] Ann Trinca first came to see me in my office, I realized the Berkeley Art Center was a special place. I felt honored that she would grant me the privilege of curating an exhibition in this quiet space in a leafy park imbued with the creative spirit and covered with the atmosphere that makes Berkeley one of the most unique spots on this planet. Together we decided to create an exhibition of women artists. Stimulated by the explosion of Pop Culture media attention, the impact of Wonder Woman kept entering my consciousness. All week I thought of women whose work I admired, exhibited, and collected.

Wise women have filled me with wonder over the years. Some were from Riga, some were from Fort Worth, Texas. Some from Milwaukee, New York, Berlin, and Montana. I have been fortunate enough in my professional life to have had the good fortune to be mentored by and learn from some Wonder Women gallerists. Locally there was Ruthie Braunstien, one of the founders of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association, and Paule Anglim, a Geary Street neighbor who was never too busy to share a cup of coffee or explain why Louise Bourgeois and Deborah Butterfield deserved more recognition than they received. In the Big Apple, there was Bella Fishko, Mary Ann Martin, and Deedee Wigmore. All of these women sharpened my eye and made me broaden my vision as I began to shape my own art gallery.

But who would be the artists that we choose to exhibit? Wonder Women all … Helen Berggruen, Kay Bradner, Stacey Carter, Dana DeKalb, Lisa Esherick, Robbin Henderson, Naomi Kremer, Diana Krevsky, Tabitha Soren, and Jan Wurm. Each one of these artists has impacted our society with the creative results of their ability to blend talent, genius, paint, canvas, paper, and, yes, even technology. Each one — through their own lens, through the content of their artwork, and through participation in the cultural life of the Bay Area — has realistically created a picture of life as they saw it.

Whether it is a view of Three Mile Island’s ominous cooling towers, the blending of American Realism and European Impressionism to create a Bonnard-like interior, a smoky casino reminiscent of the German Expressionists, children playing on a California beach at sunset, a female soapbox orator in Greenwich Village, a unique and wondrous hybrid of oil paint and video, a surreal portrait of a child and a planet, archetypal runners struggling to escape into the 21st century, a terrorist headline aimed at our psyche, or images of the circus when it truly was the Greatest Show on Earth — all fill our imagination with amazement and wonder. As William Marston, who created the iconic Marvel comic book character, once said: “In a world of Supermen, there are also Wonder Women.” These are 10 of mine.

–George Krevsky

about the artists

HELEN BERGGRUEN paints landscapes, interiors, and still lifes. Born in San Francisco, Helen has exhibited work across the United States and in Europe.

“…my ambition has become to slow down in order to observe the land and cityscapes before me. Rather as a beekeeper in March awaits the special hum indicating the presence of a swarm of bees, I tend to roam with a sketchbook and canvas until I light upon a particular confluence of angles, textures, and objects of contrasting scale.”

KAY BRADNER received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 1975 and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute until the late 1990s.

“After getting my master’s in printmaking, I had a fine arts press working with lots of artists and printers for about 10 years. I had a baby and changed my job from helping others to make art, to making art of my own. I have had the very good luck to have kind and skillful galleries to help me. Now I play with my grandchildren and paint.”

STACEY CARTER received her bachelor’s degree in printmaking from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. She has shown her work across galleries in the Bay Area since the early 2000s.

“I am an artist whose work offers insight into the changing urban environment through creative observation. My artworks are layered multimedia compositions based on a photograph I take and then transform using a unique combination of skilled printmaking techniques and spontaneous expressionistic painting. My body of work is a study of how individual experiences define one’s environment.”  

DANA DeKALB received her degree in Studio Art from Pomona College and has been exhibiting her work in the Bay Area since the 1980s.

“My paintings are rooted in the narrative tradition. I’ve always been fascinated by visual storytelling, especially with legends and myths, but also with comic strips and high school yearbooks. My own stories are told from an outsider’s perspective, the result of years spent as an American living abroad — I was born in Indonesia and spent my childhood as an expatriate in first through third world countries. I am a perennial observer, with a deep appreciation for the irony in our mutual misconceptions, as well as for our moments of connection. In my work I present curious, open-ended narratives that explore the unexpected and exotic in seemingly familiar situations.”

LISA ESHERICK received her MFA in painting from San Francisco State University in 1993 and has been showing her work in the Bay Area since she was in college in the 1970s. She has given artist lectures in Beijing, China, and has taught drawing and painting across the Bay Area and in France.

“I am a figurative painter with abstract leanings. I choose my subjects from my surroundings and experiences. Underlying the subject matter, I am interested in the elemental concepts of painting itself — space and light achieved through color and form. My work has taken me through several different subject areas, requiring changes of approach, pace, medium, and scale or format. Throughout there is a common thread. I am interested in the expressive nature of painting. I want to convey the emotional presence that I find in the still world of objects. I want to feel the space between things and hear the silence. I want to explore shadowy things — things hidden from view, what cannot quite be identified, things unknown that yet have great power in our lives.”

ROBBIN HENDERSON has been a “plein air” painter for well over 30 years but in the last six years has begun to draw with scratchboard, a technique she learned during an artist’s residency in New Zealand, where she explored exotic landscapes and natural forms, and became more involved in a new-found medium. Henderson has served on the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission and the curatorial committee of the Richmond Art Center. She attended Reed College, holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and studied painting and printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, in Europe, Central America, and New Zealand, and is in public and private collections in Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles, Taos, Portland, New Zealand, Managua (Nicaragua), Istanbul, and Turin.

Paint and video are NAOMIE KREMER’s primary media — separately and together. “Though largely abstract, my paintings incorporate figurative and architectural elements, letterforms, and references to nature. Orchestrating detail, color, and scale, I use paint for its ability to describe an otherwise invisible world, eliciting a physical response that draws the viewer into the world of the work. Video structures the viewer’s time in a way a painting can’t, showing thought unfolding. I use video much like paint — layering, overlapping, and manipulating imagery until the source is transformed and no longer identifiable.

“Video is the medium for my set design work in opera, music, dance, and theater. The video work for the stage informs and sometimes incorporates elements of my painting. In 2008, working on my first video backdrop for the opera Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók, I began exploring projecting video on painting. I became intrigued by the surprising perceptual and psychological experience of viewing video and painting simultaneously, a new visual experience which is unique to this hybrid medium. I began referring to these as ‘hybrid paintings’ — a melding of painting and video that leaves the viewer uncertain which part is paint and which is projection.”

DIANA KREVSKY uses a variety of media and materials along with a playful sense of irony. Her work often focuses on conflict of cultural values and individual identity within a frame of a political or natural landscape. She’s a member of the Hunters Point Shipyard Artists Collective based in San Francisco.

TABITHA SOREN’s artwork speaks to the twists of fate in life that can unhinge us. She visualizes psychological states — the internal weather that storms through each of us. Her work is in many private collections, including LACMA, New Orelans Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum of Photography, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Cleveland Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and San Francisco’s Pier 24, among others. Her most recent solo exhibition was held at Palo Alto Art Center, Care and Feeding: The Art of Parenthood.

JAN WURM is an artist, educator, and curator engaged in expanding the community forum for contemporary art dialogue. Wurm taught for UC Berkeley Extension, the ASUC Art Studio, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. She served eight years on the Committee for Undergraduate Scholarships and Honors, and mentored UC Regents Scholars. She served on the Steering Committee of the Cal Art Alumni Group, organizing and moderating six annual symposia. She has lectured extensively as a guest artist and taught in the Sommerakademie in Neumarkt, Austria. Wurm organized and facilitated a Guest Artist Lecture Series for the Berkeley Art Center for five years. Her writings on art and society have been published by Routledge in WS, Women’s Studies Journal of Claremont Graduate University. She has juried and judged exhibitions as well as an artist residency for the National Park Service. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in a number of collections in the United States and abroad.