Category: To Do List

MarinHealth Medical Center

May 18, 2021 In: Collecting Stories To Do List Tags: Clare Rojas, Emily Filler, Healthcare, hospitality, Karen Lederer, Katy Stone, MarinHealth Medical Center, Mel Prest, Michael McConnell, Tessa Perutz, Thomas Hagar By: Kerri Hurtado, Curator

Can fine art in a healthcare setting be inspirational, purposeful, bold and intentional? Can it make a hospital feel warm, give it character, and maybe even put a smile on your face? And can the art give patients and staff a moment of diversion, distraction and stress release? Yes, was our belief and these questions became our driving force for the art program at MarinHealth.

For the last five years, we have worked collaboratively with the architect Perkins-Eastman, clinical staff, construction team and many artists to curate this 240 piece collection which includes seven interior site-specific art commissions as well as framed wall works throughout the new Oak Pavilion expansion of the original Marin General hospital.

Tessa Perutz, left: “View of San Francisco Bay from Bayview Park”, Vitratek porcelain on panel; right: “views from Highway 1” oil on paper. Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

By layering brightly colored shapes, Perutz transforms one of the oldest themes in painting, the landscape, into an almost abstract composition. Working from her visits to Marin, her paintings render nature as an experience of color. While the artist’s abstracted landscapes depict specific places, they also allow the viewer to imagine their own experience.

The artwork in this collection reinforces a humanistic healing environment tailored to the needs of patients and their caregivers. The art program at its core is purpose-driven; it serves as a key element enhancing the experience of being cared for. A broad range of artists reflect the diversity of the region and the patients the hospital serves. Artwork mediums including painting, photography, works on paper, mural painting, enamel on metal panel, and textiles all express the hand of the artist which contributes to a human-centered environment. At MarinHealth the artwork both engages and distracts, by bringing the natural world in through imagery that both represents and evokes the feeling of the natural world. Didactic wall labels allow visitors the opportunity for further exploration, distraction and discovery.

Katy Stone “Bloom” oil on aluminum. Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

The design team emphasized their vision of where hospitality and healthcare intersect. We understood this, and responded with work that is high quality, sophisticated and also purpose driven. In the lobby level of the building, Katy Stone paints on metal and layers the elements into sculptural assemblages and installations that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture, acting as both kaleidoscope and microscope. This site-specific composition suggests a hillside bursting with California poppy blossoms. Stone uses an atmospheric perspective composition that gradually decreases in scale, suggesting a terrain that invites the viewer on a journey.

Mel Prest “Florescence” hand-painted wall with fused glass blocks. Photo credit: John Janca

It was very important to us to ensure that the artwork provide a sense of the feeling of nature. The idea that the artwork might take you away for a moment, distract you and remind you of a positive feeling or memory. Mel Prest is a non-objective painter whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships and synaesthetic response. She created a site-specific work of glass panels that are interpretations of the colors and scents of California wildflowers such as iris, larkspur, lavender, poppy and wild rose.

Mel Prest detail. Photo credit: John Janca

left: mid-construction site visit with Tessa Perutz and Mel Prest. Right: members of the Ship Art International installation team.

Building a site specific and unique art collection for a hospital is a complex job. The technical aspects of our role involved collaborative engagement with architects, engineers, OSHPD, contractors and the client. We led a cross functional team of stakeholders including the project manager, clinical staff, executives, and the Foundation in the development of the art program criteria and process for artwork selection. Early collaboration with the architect and interiors team was essential to ensure that art was well integrated and strategically placed. Pre-construction planning with contractors and engineers ensured proper backing and lighting would be incorporated to support and highlight the art.

Karen Lederer, left: “Above and Below” right: “Sunny Side” water based monoprint.

Emergency rooms are high-stress places so we approached each room with artworks that emphasized a sense of warmth and familiarity. Scale and visibility were also very important, we wanted the art to be very intentional and not an afterthought.

Stacey Beach “Hawaiian Print Vases” sewn fabric collage.

Michael McConnell “California, I Love You” (detail) acrylic on panel. Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

Long corridors are typical in a hospital, so to make this one engaging, we commissioned artist Michael McConnell to create a 52 piece journey that takes the viewer from the ocean in West Marin, up Mt. Tam and into Marin through his painterly depictions of animals and landscapes from the area.

Michael McConnell “California, I Love You” (detail) acrylic on panel.

Clare Rojas “Bird Song” hand-painted mural. Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

In another corridor, approximately 80′ long, we looked to West Marin artist and musician Clare Rojas to bring her unique visual language to the space. This site-specific mural is inspired by Rojas’ observance of forms in nature and continues the artist’s study of geometric abstraction. By removing the subjects from her paintings and nurturing her instinctual disposition toward certain shapes and colors, Rojas constructs an exercise of simplicity and self-reflection. The forms are elegantly balanced with bold, white negative space of which Rojas has said, “I see it, and almost hear it, like you would hear the resonance of a sound in space.”

Left: Thomas Hagar “Ocean Beach #1” archival pigment print; Right: Emily Filler “Paper Bouquet Series” mixed media on paper. Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

Nurse stations are busy, high traffic and high stress areas. At MarinHealth, they are the core of each department. Art is clearly an important and purposeful component to these space.

Here, Thomas Hager uses traditional photographic processes to explore the intricate details and subtle beauty of nature. Emily Filler’s work walks the line between the real and the imaginary. There is a sense of the familiar but also the feeling that you are falling into a dream, where flowers act as a departure point to a world that dissolves into abstraction.

Thomas Jackson “lates No. 4 & 5 , Kool-Aid No. 2, archival digital print . Photo credit: Francis Baker Photography

Marin based artist Thomas Jackson’s playful photographs feature California landscapes juxtaposed with constructed installations which utilize unexpected materials. The photographs evoke curiosity and perhaps a sense of wonder. It’s works like this that provide a distraction and a moment of joy to the healthcare setting.

We are pleased that the project is the cover feature in May, 2021 of Healthcare Design Magazine.

May To Do List

Apr 29, 2021 In: To Do List Tags: Clare Rojas, David Adjaye, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Johansson Projects, Joy O Ude, Lezley Saar, Miguel Arzabe, Minnesota Street Project, Raymond Saunders, Southern Exposure, Stuart Robertson, Teresita Fernandez, Wangechi Mutu By: Kerri Hurtado, Curator

Clare Rojas “Here We Go” acrylic on panel. Image courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery.

May 4 to 22 – Clare Rojas: Here We Go at Jessica Silverman Gallery: Here We Go, a solo show by Bay Area artist Clare Rojas, is the gallery’s first in-real-life exhibition in over a year; it marks the soft opening of an almost completely renovated, new gallery space at 621 Grant Avenue (between Sacramento and California Street). Rojas is best known for her magic realist and otherworldly abstract paintings. This exhibition, is a virtuoso display of Rojas’s formal and spiritual evolution in oil on linen and acrylic on panel. Her distinct style of high-folk, figurative-abstract art enlivens art history and elevates popular culture. Jessica Silverman Gallery is open by appointment, please schedule your visit here.

Joy O. Ude. Image courtesy of Southern Exposure.

Ongoing to May 22 – Once Removed at Southern Exposure: Southern Exposure is reopening for in-person viewing by appointment with the group exhibition Once Removed, curated by Kija Lucas. The exhibition includes works by artists who are incorporating traditional textile and movement techniques alongside new material strategies. Artists in this exhibition draw from their ancestral traditions as well as personal experiences to create works that explore tradition and belonging while living in an in-between space, weaving together quotidian materials and contemporary art practice with traditional craft techniques. Artists in the exhibition: Miguel Arzabe, May Gaspay, Mik Gaspay, Melissa Joseph, Charlene Tan, Joy O. Ude, and Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana. The gallery is open by appointment only, please schedule your visit here.

Teresita Fernandez and Sir David Adjaye. Image courtesy of Stanford University.

Monday, May 10, at 5:00pm – Teresita Fernández & Sir David Adjaye in conversation on Stanford YouTube: Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by interactive self-reflection and conceptual wayfinding. Her immersive, monumental works are inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Sir David Adjaye OBE is a Ghanaian-British architect who has received international acclaim for his impact on the field. Adjaye’s largest project to date, The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC opened on the National Mall in Washington DC in 2016 and was named Cultural Event of the Year by The New York Times. RSVP for the conversation here.

Wangetchi Mutu “I am Speaking, Can you hear me?” Paper pulp, wood glue, soil, charcoal, bone, feathers, shells, wood, metal stands. Image courtesy of The Legion of Honor Museum.

May 7 to November 7 – Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at The Legion of Honor Museum: Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies, Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. Mutu’s exhibition at the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.” the Legion of Honor museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday with advanced tickets required. To purchase tickets, please visit here.

Raymond Saunders “Untitled” mixed media on board. Image courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby.

May 1 to June 12 – Raymond Saunders 40 Years: Paris/Oakland at Casemore Kirkeby and Andrew Kreps Gallery: Casemore Kirkeby and Andrew Kreps Gallery are co-presenting the exhibition 40 Years: Paris/Oakland, a retrospective of works by Raymond Saunders. A cult-like figure in the Bay Area art scene, Saunders’ paintings and installation-based works are loaded with rich swaths of paint, interwoven with found materials and his own notational marks, and white-pencil drawings. Blackboard surfaces, left visible through a heavy accumulation of marks and material, tie Saunders’ works inextricably to his role as an educator, as he handwrites simple equations, lettering, and childlike notes onto the work’ s surface. The exhibition is held in 2 locations: Andrew Kreps Temporary Gallery at 657 Howard Street and Casemore Kirkeby at 1275 Minnesota Street.

Lezley Saar “Chelove is steeped in the mist of longing for fragments of her past” acrylic on fabric over panel in found antique frame. Image courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery.

May 1 to June 12 – The Ambiguities of Blackness at Minnesota Street Project: The Ambiguities of Blackness is the first of five exhibitions by the inaugural grantees of the California Black Voices Project. Curated by Dr. Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, the exhibition examines who and what defines “Black art.” The answer’s complexity is central to the exhibition, and considered by the seven participating artists: April Banks, Lavialle Campbell, Karen Hampton, Raymond Holbert, David Huffman, Lauren McIntosh, and Lezley Saar. The exhibition will be installed in the atrium space of Minnesota Street Project, located at 1275 Minnesota Street and will also be presented on Adjacent, the Project’s virtual space for art, here.

Stuart Robertson “Big Man Ting II” (detail) acrylic, interior paint, aluminum, paper, cardboard, glitter foam, textile and foam core insulation on wood. Image courtesy of Headlands Center for the Arts.

May 2 to 23 – Tarsal by Metatarsal Graduate Fellows exhibition at Headlands Center for the Arts: This exhibition explores the seven Graduate Fellows’ varied engagements with the body in its expansive and multivalent manifestations: as archive and ecosystem, instrument and metaphor, specter and source. Tasked with creating work under the extraordinary weight of the current moment alongside the bone-crushing persistence of ableism, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the participating fellows utilize a spectrum of strategies and tactics to assemble a body of work that is simultaneously an encounter of the present and an index of what the body remembers, endures, and survives. Artists in the exhibition: Calum Craik, Jillian Crochet, Xandra Ibarra, Yétundé Olagbaju, Jessica Eve Rattner, Stuart Robertson, and Lena Tseabbe Wright. Headlands Center for the Arts is open Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. To visit, schedule your appointment here.

Miguel Arzabe “Isla del Sol” woven acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of Johansson Projects.

May 8 to July 24 – Miguel Arzabe: Condor de cuatro cabezas/Four-Headed Condor at Johansson Projects: Cóndor de Cuatro Cabezas is a solo exhibition of recent works by Oakland-based artist Miguel Arzabe. The works included feature intricate canvas and paper weavings that are crafted from strips of painted reinterpretations of artworks by pre-war American abstractionists, which Arzabe weaves into new visual interpretations using improvised patterns inspired by Andean textiles. The four heads of the condor referenced in the exhibition title represent the various ‘authors’ of each work: the two artists whose works Arzabe deconstructs; Arzabe himself as the third artist who then reconstructs their work into a new, mixed form; and the viewer, who then engages with and creates new meanings from the resulting woven piece. The gallery is located at 2300 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. To schedule an appointment, please email info@johanssonprojects.com.

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