Robert Hudson,
Hudson was born in 1938 in Utah, and grew up in Richland, WA. It was there during high school that he became acquainted with William Wiley, with whom he later attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Although interested early on in Abstract Expressionist painting, Hudson eventually began to experiment with sculpture, creating elaborate, multi- colored steel pieces, interwoven with geometric and figurative forms. Hudson subsequently expanded his range of materials to include industrial substances, with which he created minimalist monochromatic works, and eclectic gatherings of found objects which he incorporated into assemblages. During the 1970s, Hudson and friend, former student, and neighbor Richard Shaw began to work together on a series of ceramic collaborations that incorporated elements of both artists’ work. Hudson’s work has been widely exhibited and is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He currently resides in Northern California.
Collaborations at Magnolia
In 1997 artists Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, and William Wiley created at Magnolia a rich series of collaborative pieces. These collaborations came about as the fortuitous result of an endeavor to raise funds for the San Francisco Art Institute. SFAI Alumnus Jack Bowers approached all three artists, themselves alumni, to collaborate on a lithograph, which could be sold to benefit the school. The edition was to be printed at Magnolia Editions, in Oakland, under the supervision of Donald Farnsworth, also a graduate of SFAI. The selection of these three artists seemed a natural choice, as all three were good friends and shared similar artistic preoccupations.
The Magnolia collaboration project evolved over a period of three months, during which time the artists produced almost fifty different unique pieces en route to arriving at a final image, to be used for their editioned print. Each artist had prior experience with printmaking, but working at Magnolia provided the trio with an opportunity to experiment with new approaches to printed imagery. They were able to explore the potential of the collagraph, for example, an intaglio technique that allowed them to create richly textured backgrounds for prints involving collage elements. In addition, all three artists utilized digital equipment to generate pencil-plotted images or ink jet- pigmented prints, which they then incorporated into works on paper and assemblages.
Hudson, Wiley, and Shaw addressed their collaborative prints in the same uninhibited manner with which they tackled individual sculpture and painting projects. All three artists are considered seminal members of the Funk and Super-Object art movements that grew up in the Bay Area during the 1960’s. They have, for the past several decades, successfully mixed genres, used figurative and abstract imagery, employed unconventional materials or found objects, and included elements of narrative as well as aspects of popular culture, to create works that are simultaneously humorous, personal and anecdotal.
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