Gabrielle Selz's Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis has been awarded a silver medal in nonfiction in this year's California Book Awards! Founded in 1931 during the depths of America’s Great Depression, the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards will celebrated its 91st anniversary this year. The purpose of the awards is to highlight the work of California authors – a praiseworthy goal at a time when the publishing industry (then and now) remains focused on East Coast writers. Over the years, many of the most important voices in American literature, such as Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, Amy Tan, Hector Tobar, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, have been honored with California Book Awards. Light on Fire is a biography of the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis, who was deeply rooted in California. Congratulations to Gaby for this great honor! You can read the list of this year's winners here. … [Read more...]
Our Afternoon with Dirty Santa
A beloved holiday tradition of North 24th Writers is game that some people call a “Yankee Swap”, and others call “Dirty Santa.” Here’s how it’s played: Everyone draws a number from a hat – which establishes the order for picking from the wrapped books we’ve all brought. The person who drew number one goes first, picking a wrapped book. Number two can either steal the first player’s book or choose a wrapped one. It goes on from there until the ninth person has a book. Then it gets more interesting. Player one, who didn’t have the option to steal the first time, can steal any book on the table. Then comes a flurry of book thievery and laughter. This year’s most purloined prize? The Love Songs of W.E. Dubois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, with a surprising local contender as this year’s runner up, Lost Department Stores of San Francisco, by Anne Evers Hitz. There are no hard feelings because we share books with each other throughout the year. I was lucky enough to get the Lost Department Stores book, which several of us who grew up in the Bay Area coveted. Will I share it? Maybe! … [Read more...]
A Pioneering Feminist Artist
North 24thers took a field trip this weekend to see a retrospective exhibit of Judy Chicago’s work at the De Young Museum. In a surprising and welcome decision, the curators started with recent pieces by this feminist pioneer and moved back in time to her earliest creations. The show begins with ceramic, glass, and needle works that grapple with mortality, environmental devastation, and the Holocaust. It ends with exultant and joyful bursts of color in Chicago’s “Women and Smoke” series from the early 1970s, spotlighting some of the performances she staged with nude women and colored smoke in the California desert. I remember first discovering Judy Chicago as a teenager, when her show The Dinner Party opened in 1979 in San Francisco. The exhibit became a phenomenon, with its vaginal table settings that honored ancient female deities such as Ishtar and Kali, historical figures like Sojourner Truth, and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe. The sketchbooks and preparatory studies for The Dinner Party fascinated us, as did Chicago’s crediting of the many needle workers and volunteers who contributed to her projects over the years. The Birth Project, which followed The Dinner Party, drew female volunteers from the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand. As someone whose most recent book focused on the experience of women working collaboratively with each other to fight a social injustice, I was moved by Chicago’s ability to inspire so many volunteers to come together to make art. Her joyful fireworks of brilliantly colored smoke were also a jubilant sendoff to the show. Julia Flynn Siler … [Read more...]
Field Trip into TeamLab
On a recent Monday afternoon, five members of North 24th, masked up and vaccinated, took a trip to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to see Continuity, the immersive, interactive exhibit by the Japanese collective: TeamLab. IMG_2966 In a series of darkened rooms, TeamLab explores alternative forms of perception by projecting digital images on every surface--walls, floor, and ceiling. Using their concept of Ultrasubjective Space, a unique multi-dimensional perspective, their work dissolves the boundary between the physical world and the world of the artwork. By fusing art with technology, the viewer merges with the environment and is engulfed by lush cinematic imagery and sensation: flowers, butterflies, birds, stars, even whiffs of floral fragrances. Here are some thoughts and images from our venture into TeamLab's world: Gabrielle Selz: “I feel like I’ve climbed inside an anime…Spirited Away by Hayo Miyazaki.” Julie Flynn Siler: “It was transportive -- a welcome experience after being cooped up for so long. Also a little overwhelming after being cooped up so long!” Susan Freinkel: “I loved how boundaries dissolved: At moments it felt like the images moved through me.” Jeanne Carstensen: “I loved wandering through this environment where the images were constantly dissolving and forming and dissolving, with no fixed boundaries or locations.” Allison Hoover Bartlett: "I went thinking I was going look at art, but instead, I stepped into it. A truly inspiring experience." … [Read more...]
On warming up to the launch of my book on the artist Sam Francis
By Gabrielle Selz I’m less than five months out from my book launch, and it still feels unreal to me. The manuscript is finished, but the material thingness of it doesn’t yet exist. It is out of my reach, gone off to the printer, but I still haven’t held a hard copy in my hands. Galleys have been sent to trade reviews and long lead magazines. There are stirrings of interest that feel exciting and nerve-racking. Because my book is a biography of an artist, the actual “launch” will occur in conjunction with shows of the artist’s paintings at galleries in Los Angeles and New York. I’ll give a talk, and I’ve begun to think about what I’ll say. Writing a book is a solitary process (except when workshopping with my North24th tribe), but launching a book into the public realm is social. People want to know how you found your subject and what compelled you to tell the story. Many of my writer friends talk of their book birthdays. They describe launching a book as an actual birth. For me, the labor is done—and I do miss the labor. The book was fully born when I finished the last sentence. The launching feels like a wedding. It’s a celebration where I emerge from the private sphere and stand up and let the public know: this is what I chose, this is what I stand beside, and this is how our story came to be. … [Read more...]