Winter/Spring 2020 to Summer/Fall 2021 Exhibitions (COVID-19 Seasons)
July 31, 2021 to June 26, 2022
Exhibition Curator, Susan Yost Filgate, Fresno Art Museum Education Director
The children’s book Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You teaches empathy through the illustrations of Rafael López. They help to tell the story by United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who bases the narrative on her own personal history of being different as a child, having been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age seven.
Rafael López’ vibrant illustrations celebrate the different abilities that each of us uniquely possesses and how people working together can accomplish amazing things through each one’s unique contributions. The child-friendly illustrations enhance the special qualities of people’s disabilities that are often-ignored topics. Sotomayor’s personal story and López’ delightful illustrations remind and encourage each of us to not make judgments about someone’s behavior or the way they look until we understand the whole story. They encourage us to “Just ask!”
The artwork displayed was created by combining traditional pencil drawing, watercolor, and acrylic with digital manipulation. While the Fresno Art Museum does not typically display giclée reproductions (with the exception of photographs), we are finding that many of today’s illustrators use a combination of traditional painting and drawing techniques and a computer to create their finished images. In order to share these works with the public, we had the artist supply us with digital prints to recreate the original image in the book. Along with those digital prints, the exhibition includes some of López’ original hand-painted and drawn elements that contributed to the final artworks.
Rafael López is an internationally recognized illustrator and artist whose work brings diverse characters to children’s books. He is driven to produce and promote books that reflect and honor the lives of all young people. Born and raised in Mexico City to architect parents, he was immersed in the rich visual heritage, music, and surrealism of his native culture which reflects in his illustrations. He is a two-time #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator for Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You written by Sonia Sotomayor and The Day You Begin written by Jacqueline Woodson. He has two Pura Belpré Medals as the award-winning illustrator of Drum Dream Girl and Book Fiesta!; and the three-time Pura Belpré Honor award-winning illustrator of Tito Puente: Mambo King; The Cazuela that the Farm Maiden Stirred; and My Name Is Celia: The Life of Celia Cruz.
In addition, López is a founder of the Urban Art Trail movement in San Diego’s East Village. His murals can be found in urban areas, at children’s hospitals, in public schools, under freeways and at farmer’s markets around the country. His community work with murals is the subject of the children’s book Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood. Rafael has also been commissioned to create seven United States postage stamps.
These days, López lives and works in an industrial loft in downtown San Diego and at his home/studio in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
July 31, 2021 to January 9, 2022
Moradian Gallery
Curator: Sarah Vargas, FAM Curator
Food is, and always has been, one of the defining elements of human existence. Food fuels our everyday lives and is a means of celebration. It should then be no surprise that the depiction of food in art spans all of recorded human history. As long as humans have created art, they have depicted food.
The way food has been depicted in art has changed over time. Food has been used as an experimentation in shape and form as demonstrated by the hyperrealism found in still life paintings. Food is also frequently employed as a metaphor or allegory, conveying meaning such as mortality, luck, desire, or decay. Artists have continued to explore the theme of food into the modern era, experimenting with abstracted forms, juxtaposition of color, and using the theme of food as a tool for social and political commentary.
Delicious: The Art of Food explores the role of food in 20th- and 21st-century art through a selection of works from the Museum’s permanent collection. From the classic still life to political prints to cultural explorations, food is an enduring subject that has inspired artists of every generation.
October 16, 2020 to January 9, 2022 (Extended!)
Lobby & Concourse Galleries
Curator: FAM Curator, Sarah Vargas
Another Glorious Sierra Day is an exhibition of narrative art about geography and science in the Sierra Nevada. Artist Bonnie Peterson mixes embroidery with a variety of source materials such as scientific data and early explorers’ journals. Wilderness experiences inform her work. Peterson grew up in the Midwest but has been backpacking in the Sierras since the 1980s. In 1997, she participated in an artist residency at Yosemite. Her selection of textiles and maps integrate the geographic features of the Sierras with 19th and 20th-century exploration and contemporary wildness encounters. Using rich fabrics and intricate stitching, her work provides a unique opportunity to create interest in further research on the Sierra environment and geography.
October 16, 2020 to January 9, 2022 (Extended!)
Fig Garden, Duncan, & Hallowell Galleries
Curated by FAM Curator Sarah Vargas
The year 2020 is a significant year in women’s history as it marks the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States. As an homage to the audacity and perseverance of early American women, the Fresno Art Museum presents the exhibition Here She Stands: Women Artists from the Permanent Collection. This exhibition highlights a selection of the phenomenal and groundbreaking work by women artists that the Fresno Art Museum holds in its permanent collection. Throughout history, women artists have been overlooked and excluded from the narrative. In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an article for ARTnews titled “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” Her argument wasn’t that there were no talented women artists but that systematic social, cultural, and political barriers prevented many women from participating and succeeding in the art world. In the forty-nine years since that article was published, much discourse has been produced on the subject, yet the art world still has much further to go. The Fresno Art Museum has long been dedicated to the promotion of women artists. The first work by a woman artist in the Museum’s permanent collection was Jean Ray Laury’s Tiger Garden (1962), acquired in 1963 just after the Museum first began building its permanent collection. Judy Chicago brought attention to women artists when she launched the first feminist art program at California State University, Fresno in 1970. The Fresno Art Museum was the first museum in the United States to devote a full year of exhibitions (1986-87) exclusively to women artists, and this launched the annual Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist award and exhibition program that continues to this day. The works selected for this exhibition reflect the diversity, depth, and creative vision of the many women who are represented in the Museum’s permanent collection. Some of these artists are world-renowned; some are best known in the local community. The works were selected with an emphasis on pieces that have not been frequently exhibited. The selected artists include such names as Helen Lundeberg, Claire Falkenstein, Isobel Sanford, Amy Kasai, Jean Ray Laury, June Wayne, and Marguerite Stix.
January 25, 2020 to June 28, 2020
Fig Garden, Duncan, & Hallowell Galleries
Exhibition Curator, Susan M. Anderson, Former Chief Curator, Laguna Art Museum
The Fresno Art Museum was pleased to host this impressive traveling exhibition of early to mid-20th century American Art, entitled Gifted: Collecting the Art of California at Gardena High School, 1919–1956. Approximately 70 oil paintings will nearly fill the entire Museum. Unfortunately, due to COVID 19, the Museum closed to the public on March 22, 2020 and thus the exhibition was not seen by the public after that date.
The exhibition contains works by key early 20th-century California artists in figurative, landscape, and genre traditions. The collection contains works by Maynard Dixon, Elmer Bischoff, Edgar Payne, Agnes Pelton, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel, among many others.
The works of art were originally selected, purchased, and donated to Gardena High School near Los Angeles by its student body between 1919 and 1956. The Students’ choices show a high level of sophistication due to the level of discourse and collaboration encouraged at the school and in the city. The story of how arts engagement can promote civic participation to strengthen the community is woven throughout the history of the collection.
When Gardena High School moved to a new campus in 1956, the collecting program ended. It had been locked away until this traveling exhibition was organized in recent years.
GIFTED: Collecting the Art of California at Gardena High School, 1919-1956 is organized by the GHS Art Collection, Inc. in association with the Gardena High School Student Body and curated by Susan M. Anderson. The exhibition and publication were generously underwritten by Yvonne Boseker, Simon K. Chiu, Keith and Sue Colestock, and Craig K. Ihara. The FAM exhibition was underwritten by The Daniel R. Martin Family Foundation and sponsored by John and Pam Lamborn, J.P. Lamborn Co., Fresno.
IMAGES ABOVE: Jessie Arms Botke, Cranes Under a Giant Fern, c. 1943, Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 40" x 32", Gifted to Gardena High School by the Class of Summer 1943; Maynard Dixon, Men of the Red Earth, 1931-1932, Oil on canvas, 36" x 41", Gifted to Gardena High School by the Class of Summer 1944
Photo: Gardena High School Library with Purchase Prize Exhibit on Display, 1933
Read more about this incredible exhibition of art by clicking here to download an article from the Summer 2019 California Art Club Newsletter.
Click here to see Gardena Art on Visiting with Huell Howser from KCET Television.
January 25, 2020 to May 3, 2021 (Extended!)
Moradian Gallery
Exhibition Curator: Michele Ellis Pracy, FAM Executive Director & Chief Curator
There is a particular challenge to organizing a group exhibition for three stellar artists who are also related: in this case, a father, a mother, and their son, respectively Richard Amend, Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend, and Wyatt Amend.
This exhibition is organized to highlight each individual artist rather than to focus on their similarities and familial influences on each other. However, it is apparent that they have inevitably been aware of each other’s work over the years as they all three work and live under the same roof that they call “The Amend Arts Compound.” Richard Amend’s giant black and white drawings alongside the two-dimensional studio glass by Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend as well as the sculptural ceramics by Wyatt Amend provide a variety of mediums, surfaces, and constructions.
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is a studio glass artist who has never blown glass. She explains, “I’m more about imagery and idea on the material.” Over the last decade, her work has primarily consisted of painting with vitreous enamels on transparent glass sheets. Susan’s works are in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. In 1998, she was included in the California Glass Today group exhibition here at FAM.
Richard Amend is a painter and an equally capable drawer. His compelling black and white oversized drawings of peopled and unpeopled landscapes can be realistic or abstracted. A career in the film industry allowed him to travel widely, photographing sites for various cinematic projects. His paintings and drawings are begun from many of these photographs producing arresting and mysterious panoramic views of life. He has exhibited his work throughout California and abroad.
Wyatt Amend is a master ceramicist. Only in his thirties, his vessels and Propulsion Drones exemplify his finesse at the wheel and his command of clay and glazing compounds. Wyatt has developed new techniques to make his functional objects look like glass. His interdisciplinary process involves the use of a wheel, a lathe, and carving and grinding techniques typically used by woodworkers and cold glass artists. Although widely collected, this is his first museum exhibition.
Images (L to R): Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend, HandMade 2016, Painting on glass with vitreous enamels, 36” x 24”, Courtesy of the Artist; Richard Amend, Woman at The Coronation, 2016, Chalk on paper, 54" x 72", Courtesy of the Artist; Wyatt Amend, Graduated Goblets, 2016, Clay with glaze reminiscent of glass, and wood, Courtesy of the Artist
January 25, 2020 to June 27, 2021 (Extended!)
Administration Lobby Gallery
Curated by FAM Curator Sarah Vargas
Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1932, Jack Coughlin studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at The Arts Students League of New York. A printmaker, draughtsman, painter, and sculptor, Coughlin is best known for his portraits of literary figures. He is celebrated for his combination of traditional and innovative techniques during the resurgence of intaglio, lithographic, and woodcut printing in the 1960s and 1970s.
A member of the National Academy of Design, Coughlin’s works have been exhibited internationally and are in the collections of notable institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. Coughlin is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he taught in the Department of Art for more than 35 years.
The portfolio Impressions of Bohemia was conceived by the artist as a way to feature literary figures and photographers who at one point in their lives resided in the Monterey-Carmel-Big Sur area. The Monterey Peninsula is known as an artists’ haven and since the 19th century has attracted artists of all types who were eager to capture the essence of the dramatic shoreline. The subjects of the etchings are Ansel Adams, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Sinclair Lewis, Lincoln Steffens, John Steinbeck, George Sterling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edward Weston.
Exhibition Curator: Sarah Vargas, FAM Curator
Images: © Jack Coughlin, Robert Lewis Stevenson (L) and Gertrude Atherton (R), from Impressions of Bohemia series, 1986, Etching 42/125, Gift of James and Barbara Johnson, FAM94.48.11a
General exhibition support from The Eaton and Gibson Family Fund of Central Valley Community Foundation, A Friend of the Museum, Christy V. Hicks, Elaine Lynn, Anita M. Shanahan, and David & MaryAnne Esajian.