Magnolia Editions Blog

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2010-03-09T17:01:00.001-08:00

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Video: Carnwath, Liu, Storer at Bedford Gallery

2010-03-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a very engaging video (Windows Media format) from Story Painters, a show featuring work by Inez Storer, Squeak Carnwath, and Hung Liu, at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. The video includes interviews and commentary by all three artists and the curator, Carrie Lederer.

Story Painters runs from February 16 to April 11Please check the Bedford Gallery website for more events related to this show, including a collage workshop, a happy hour with the artists, a morning presentation by Inez Storer, and more.

Clare Rojas at Ikon Gallery, UK

2010-02-23T15:50:00.000-08:00

Clare Rojas - We They, We They
Installation, 2010
photo by Stuart Whipps
The first UK museum exhibition by Clare Rojas is currently on view at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and features a work created with the help of Magnolia Editions, as well as some awesome works both large and small, and even paintings on antique banjos!

The Ikon Gallery website has a gallery of pictures of the show, which we highly recommend. It is an amazing looking installation and we only wish we could see it person. Rojas also has a suite of small paintings on calico and a new children's book called Pidgy for sale through Ikon's web store.

Below, some images from the fabrication of the piece Magnolia Editions collaborated on. Rojas brought in numerous older paintings on panel, which were chopped up using a CNC cutter and re-assembled in the style of a quilt. The final work is secured to the wall via a magnet system developed by Donald Farnsworth.

Installation photos: Stuart Whipps

Panel discussion at SOMArts Saturday 3 pm

2010-02-19T18:04:00.000-08:00

Enrique Chagoya's One Recession (2009) at SOMArts
Magnolia's Don Farnsworth will moderate a panel discussion, The Politics and History of Printmaking, featuring Art Hazelwood, Robert Flynn Johnson, and Steve Lopez, on Saturday, February 20 from 3:00 – 4:30 pm at San Francisco's SOMArts.

We highly recommend both this discussion and the Prints Byte exhibit currently at SOMArts, which features several innovative new editions created at Magnolia by Enrique Chagoya.

3 - 4:30 pm
Saturday Feb. 20
SOMArts Cultural Center - 934 Brannan St, San Francisco
(415) 863-1414
http://blog.somarts.org/

Clare Rojas print at SFO Airport

2010-02-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

Blue Deer, a mural-sized work by Clare Rojas printed at Magnolia Editions, has been installed at Boarding Area G in San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Blue Deer was printed on 16 wood panels, each measuring 4 x 5 ft. See below for pictures of the installation and be sure to check out the work if you're traveling through SFO.

Magnolia offers sincere congratulations to Clare Rojas and thanks to Susan Pontious of the SF Arts Commission.

Photos courtesy of Andrew Wood

Story Painters at Bedford Gallery

2010-02-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

Inez Storer - World Map, 2010
Mixed media on panel; 40 x 70 in. Edition of 5
Story Painters, a show featuring work by Inez Storer, Squeak Carnwath, and Hung Liu, opens tonight at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek.

The show runs from February 16 to April 11, 2010; please check the Bedford Gallery website for more events related to this show, including a collage workshop, a happy hour with the artists, a morning presentation by Inez Storer, and more.

Prints Byte opening tomorrow night

2010-02-04T17:07:00.001-08:00

Branches, courtesy of Christina Empedocles
Prints Byte: the cutting edge of printmaking opens Friday, February 5 from 7-9 pm at SOMARTS Cultural Center in San Francisco.

Co-curated by Justin Hoover and Hanna Regev, Prints Byte looks at new ways that the field of printmaking is redefining itself with new technologies, new processes and new direction. The show includes work by a wide variety of artists from Kara Maria to Nancy Genn, Yuzo Nakano to (Magnolia neighbor) Kamau Patton, and features several recent prints by Enrique Chagoya published by Magnolia.

Also, Magnolia's Don Farnsworth will moderate a panel discussion, The Politics and History of Printmaking, featuring Art Hazelwood, Robert Flynn Johnson, and Steve Lopez, on Saturday, February 20 from 3:00 – 4:30 pm.

For more information, including details on printmaking workshops at SOMARTS this month, please check their website.

Magnolia at Pence Gallery in Davis, CA

2010-01-13T12:07:00.000-08:00

William Wiley - Buddy Dharma at your Surface, 2005
Mixed media drypoint, 83 x 37.25 in.
A unique and thoughtfully curated show entitled "Past Traces" opens on January 26 at Pence Gallery in Davis, CA. The show is entirely comprised of works from Magnolia Editions' twenty years of printmaking:

Printmaking is the physical act of layering visual information. Artists have utilized this quality of the print as a metaphor for the layering of personal and cultural memories that inform their own work, often through art historical allusions. Past Traces explores this subject through prints produced at Magnolia Editions, an established printmaking studio in Oakland, that has played a vital role in collaborating with artists for two decades. Work by artists Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Conner, Hung Liu, among others, is included.

The show includes a seldom-seen work by William Wiley, Buddy Dharma at your Surface, a seven-foot-tall mixed media drypoint etching; several of Enrique Chagoya's latest editions, including New Illegal Alien's Guide to Critical Theory, a combination of print and painting on multiple layers of plexiglas and amate paper; four editions by Bruce Conner; and many more.

"Past Traces," sponsored by Far Western Anthropological Research Group, runs January 26 – March 5, 2010; there will be a reception on February 12, from 7-9 PM.

Pence Gallery website

Tapestries at RIS

2010-01-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

Tapestry editions by Donald and Era Farnsworth and Robert Kushner at RIS, a new restaurant from chef Ris Lacoste in Washington, DC (photos by BizBash).

Hung Liu reviewed in Denver Post

2010-01-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

Hung Liu - Candles, 2009; oil on canvas, 80 x 96 in.
Kyle MacMillan writes enthusiastically about Hung Liu's recent show "Apsaras" at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art in this Denver Post review, making the case for Liu's work as a modern continuation of the history painting tradition.

William Wiley in WSJ

2009-12-09T15:25:00.001-08:00

William T. Wiley, Kali-fornia Dreamin, 2006/2007; Etching w/ watercolor on 40 buttons with leatherbound box, 11 x 17 x 1.2 in. Edition of 20
Sidney Lawrence reviews William T. Wiley's current exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, "What's It All Mean: William T. Wiley In Retrospect," in the Dec. 9 Wall Street Journal (online edition). Lawrence is effusive about Wiley's wit, style, and significance:

...Mr. Wiley's work is unlike any other in recent art, a visual analog to the stream-of-consciousness strain in 20th-century literature. Likening Mr. Wiley to Virginia Woolf or James Joyce is dicey, of course, but his swirling cornucopias of images, words and associations are every bit as intoxicating, operating beyond their medium, in the subconscious. He is less a contemporary artist than a national treasure.

"What's It All Mean" travels next to the Berkeley Art Museum, where it will open in the spring of 2010; the show includes Kali-fornia Dreamin, Wiley's 2006/2007 edition of etching and watercolor buttons inside a handmade leatherbound box, published by Magnolia Editions.

Magnolia at Brand66 Design Blog

2009-12-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

Brand66 is a blog from design guru Michael Rylander, whose company Rylander Design has an impressive roster of clients including Apple, BMW, PBS, and NeXT, to name only a few.

We were thrilled to discover that a fellow with such obvious visual acumen and taste is a fan of Magnolia Editions tapestries! Check out his recent post about Don Farnsworth and the Magnolia tapestry method.

Newsletter No. 19, Winter 2009

2009-12-03T13:51:00.001-08:00

Featuring new editions from Hung Liu, Squeak Carnwath, Deborah Oropallo, Enrique Chagoya, Alan Magee, William T. Wiley, Richard Wagener, and more.

Available to read or download at our Newsletters page:

Darwin's Origin of Species 150th anniversary

2009-11-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

Donald Farnsworth - Origin: Specimens IV, pt. 2, 2007
Pigmented inkjet on rag paper, 30.75 x 26.5 in. Edition of 24
Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. First issued on November 24, 1859, Origin laid much of the foundation for subsequent advances in the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology.

In these images from Donald Farnsworth's Origin: Specimens series, specimens selected from Farnsworth's collection and the California Academy of Sciences are depicted atop entire chapters of Darwin's treatise (click any image to see the full series):

Donald Farnsworth - Origin: Specimens VII, pt. 1, 2007
Pigmented inkjet on rag paper, 30.75 x 26.5 in. Edition of 24

Donald Farnsworth - Origin: Specimens II, 2007
Pigmented inkjet on rag paper, 30.75 x 26.5 in. Edition of 24

A visit to Magnolia Editions

2009-11-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a handsome flickr set documenting a January visit to Magnolia Editions, courtesy of photographer Harlan Crowder.

Harlan also took the excellent photos from Hung Liu and Michael McClure's Deer Boy reading included in Era Farnsworth's The vortex touches down.

Click the samples below to see the full set:

Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009)

2009-11-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

Photo by Bryan Obrien, Sydney Morning Herald
A favorite memory of Jeanne-Claude was seeing her and Christo being interviewed in a documentary about Ray Johnson. While recounting a lengthy anecdote about Johnson, neither of the two ever issued a single sentence by themselves. Instead, they continually and effortlessly finished each other's thoughts, as if speaking from one mind.

The vortex touches down

2009-11-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

by Era Farnsworth

The night after Hung Liu and Michael McClure's presentation of their artist's book, Deer Boy, I woke in the middle of the night, thinking about how during the quite amazing reading by Michael McClure the moment began to feel historic, like touching the vortex and maybe hitching a little ride on its high energy.

Era Farnsworth, Michael McClure, and Hung Liu - photo by Harlan Crowder
I've been around long enough to recognize what that energy feels like, and maybe some of you reading this recognize it also. I was born in Berkeley and was, in fact, a flower child during the sixties. I attended Be-Ins in Golden Gate Park, the Fillmore, and the Avalon Ballroom in their hey day. I saw and listened to Jack Kennedy when he visited the UC Berkeley campus, and to Mario Savio. I went to most of the anti-Vietnam marches in San Francisco and the Bay Area and, more recently, almost all of the "Please, please, please let's not invade Iraq" marches in San Francisco and the greater Bay. Certainly some of the rarefied energy swept thru those massive gatherings at times.

I was in London when the Beatles were recording "Get Back" on the roof; I could plainly hear them, but couldn't quite figure out which building they were on. We threw a party in our London apartment and Pink Floyd came. Many of the great names in art from the Bay Area and elsewhere have passed through Magnolia's doors and many have worked here. Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery came to Don's and my opening in Santa Fe and performed their deeply resonant throat chanting. And most recently, we were blessed by the Dalai Lama and couldn't help noticing the wake he leaves wherever he passes.

When I look back on my life, I have found myself, over and over, in situations, mostly unplanned (I don't think you can plan exactly where the vortex will touch down), which have this feeling of riding the wave, of tasting the essence of the large, sweeping cultural changes, of touching the vortex.

(I was also in Berkeley and Oakland when the police cracked down on the anti-Vietnam protesters and the Free Speech Movement and people were shot; and I was in Paris in May of 1968, known even now to the French as Les Manifestations, when the entire city was shut down and gendarmes shot fiery grenades into buildings along the Left Bank. I've seen the darker, more violent side of the vortex; it imparts a similar feeling, but cruder, heavier, angry, even hateful.)

So I lay in bed thinking about the vortex as Ezra Pound described it in one of his cantos – except I couldn't think of Ezra Pound's name. I got up in the middle of the night and searched online for vortex and poetry. The first four or five entries concerned The Wichita Vortex Sutra by Allen Ginsberg, an antiwar poem of the Vietnam era, which references Michael McClure:


to Wichita where McClure's mind 
 burst into animal beauty
 drunk, getting laid in a car
  in a neon misted street
   15 years ago--

There were several sites commenting on the poem, which not only mentioned McClure but also several other familiar names: Bruce Conner, who actually went to high school with Michael McClure in Kansas, and who worked with Don Farnsworth at Magnolia Editions twice a week for years; Terry Riley, who wrote the scores for Bruce's short films, among other things; and David Haselwood, who ran Auerhahn Press with Andrew Hoyem for years before becoming a Zen Buddhist monk.

With the coming together of the amazing Hung Liu – a highly accomplished artist, and a person in touch with and creating a vortex in her own right – and the legendary Michael McClure, and a whole room full of interested and energized people at the Rena Bransten Gallery (currently featuring an elegant show of work by the illustrious Ruth Asawa) – no wonder I felt the energy.

As Jeff Kelley said, McClure's delivery was reminiscent of performance art – at least for those of us who, going backwards in time, had seen performance art before they heard much reading of beat poetry. The pauses, the stresses, the cadences go far toward delivering the impact of the poem.

Michael McClure - photo by Harlan Crowder
The combination of Liu's art and McClure's poem in the Deer Boy book is amazing. I encourage you to take a look at it at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, or at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California.

If you are curious about some of the sites I found in that middle of the night search, please see below:

The Wichita Vortex Sutra

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore's Memorial and Memory Lane Meditation to Bruce Conner

Liu/McClure Book Preview - Pictures, Video

2009-11-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

Era Farnsworth, Donald Farnsworth, Hung Liu, and Michael McClure
Thanks to everyone who came out to the preview of Hung Liu and Michael McClure's Deer Boy at Rena Bransten Gallery last night. As Era Farnsworth commented, it was a historic moment, as two local luminaries came together to celebrate a gorgeous and heartfelt collaboration.

McClure gave a powerful reading of his eponymous poem to a crowd that included local artists such as Don Ed Hardy, Andrea Way, and Carol Ladewig.

Prints and sculptures by Ruth Asawa hanging in the gallery provided a reminder of the rich history of the Bay Area's art scene; one felt that Asawa was there in spirit, giving the event her blessing.

Below, pictures and video clips from the preview by Nick Stone:

More pictures coming tomorrow!

Hung Liu & Michael McClure book preview Nov. 12

2009-11-02T13:56:00.001-08:00

On Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009 from 6 to 8 pm, Rena Bransten Gallery will host a special book preview for Deer Boy, a new artist's book by Hung Liu & Michael McClure, published by Magnolia Editions.

The event will feature a reading at 7 pm by Michael McClure of his poem, "Deer Boy," composed especially for this publication.

Please don't miss the chance to encounter this handsome book, to meet the artists behind the project, and to hear a Bay Area literary icon read one of his most evocative works.

Rena Bransten Gallery is located at 77 Geary St in San Francisco (click for map).

For more information about the book, you can also check out Magnolia's press release.

Magnolia in art ltd. magazine

2009-11-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

The Nov/Dec 2009 issue of art ltd magazine is a special issue devoted to printmaking on the West Coast. With feature articles on Raymond Pettibon, Gemini G.E.L., and artist's books in Northern California, this is absolutely a must-see issue.

Magnolia Editions is covered in the issue's survey of Western presses, which includes a photo of the studio by Donald Farnsworth. Many thanks to Mick Cripps, Molly Enholm, and George Melrod for making us look and sound so good!

Hung Liu reviewed in NY Times

2009-10-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

Hung Liu - Richter Scale, 2009
oil on canvas, 80 x 160 in. (click to enlarge)
In The New York Times Arts section from October 22, Holland Cotter reviews Hung Liu's "Apsaras" show at Nancy Hoffman Gallery:

[Her] mural-size paintings at Nancy Hoffman [...] combine documentary immediacy with myth. In one picture a young woman sits, holding a child in the ruins of a building that may have been their home. A flock of pigeons, white and graceful against the wreckage, flies toward her.

In a painting titled “Rescue,” a line of people in hospital scrubs and military camouflage struggle to carry a figure on a stretcher up a rocky slope. A giant butterfly coasts along beside them, as if marking the way.

Other winged creatures hover in a close-up image of a girl’s bandage-swathed face. They are Buddhist angels called apsaras. Ms. Liu has lifted them from the walls of ancient cave temples and monasteries at the Silk Road city of Dunhuang near the Gobi Desert, where she spent time in the 1970s copying and conserving religious images.

Evocations of protection and mourning recur. The form of a dead deer floats angelically in space. Memorial candles flame against a dark ground. A bird descends. An old woman weeps. It’s easy to imagine such paintings turning sentimental. In Ms. Liu’s hands they never do. Everything — the images, the overlays, the forthright brushwork, the pictures as a group — is soberly judged, deeply felt, mature. It’s hard to ask for more.

Wild Wild West.Show closing at Wirtz Gallery

2009-10-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the last day to see Deborah Oropallo's "Wild Wild West.Show" at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. Don't miss it!

Here are two video walk throughs of the show, courtesy of Donald Farnsworth and the Magnolia Editions YouTube Channel:

New and improved books from Magnolia Editions

2009-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Resident writer Nick Stone has updated and expanded two of Magnolia Editions' made-to-order books – The Magnolia Tapestry Project and Chuck Close: Tapestries. Please check out our Blurb bookstore for details, full book previews, and order information, or click below to go directly to each book:

The Magnolia Tapestry Project, 154 pp.
A comprehensive survey of the tapestry editions published by Magnolia to date, with full color images of over 100 woven editions and commentary by Nick Stone.
Chuck Close: Tapestries, 58 pp.
An exclusive look at Chuck Close's 15 (and counting!) tapestry editions, with notes by Nick Stone.

Tree Thangka I at Greens Restaurant

2009-10-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

photo by Donald Farnsworth- click to enlarge
Visitors enjoying creative vegetarian cuisine at Greens restaurant at Fort Mason in San Francisco may be curious about the artwork on the north wall of the airy Greens dining room.

It's Donald and Era Farnsworth's Tree Thangka I tapestry, published by Magnolia Editions in 2008:

Donald and Era Farnsworth - Tree Thangka I, 2008
Jacquard tapestry, 96 x 75 in. Ed. of 6

Rick Dula at Denver Art Museum

2009-10-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

Rick Dula, master printer at Magnolia for nearly 20 years, is one of the artists included in "Embrace," an exhibition of 17 unique, site-specific installations opening Nov. 17, 2009 at the Denver Art Museum.

Dula is currently at work on a photorealistic, true-to-scale painting that appears to give visitors a view inside the walls to the steel girders and underpinnings beneath the finished interior:

photo: Alex Dominguez
Rick Dula prints from Magnolia Editions
Flickr: More photos of Rick working on his mural
Rick Dula's website