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Bill Owens: Suburbanites and Socialites at Mills College Art Museum

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 08:00:40 +0000

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Maria Porges’ review of Bill Owens: Suburbanites and Socialites at Mills College Art Museum. The author notes, “When I think about the tidal wave of changes that were moving through the political and sociocultural landscape at that time, there is something both tender and awful about the reality Owens captured. It is a reality we are fortunate to have a record of, as imaginary as it now seems.” This article was originally published on February 19, 2015.

Bill Owens. Untitled (Baton Practice), ca. 1973; gelatin silver print; 7 7/8 x 10 in. Gift of Marion Brenner and Robert Harshorn Shimshak. Courtesy of Mills College Art Museum, Oakland.

Three girls carrying batons parade across hideous houndstooth wall-to-wall carpeting. They look focused on their practice; a fourth girl, dejected or maybe just bored, sits in the background by a wall of trophies (awards for twirling, possibly?). This black-and-white photograph from 1973 is one of thirty-three featured in Suburbanites and Socialites, a small but compelling research-driven exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. The photographs—recently donated by Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner—were selected from Suburbia, Owens’s 1973 landmark book of images and text, later followed by Our Kind of People (1975), Working—I do it for the Money (1977), and, decades later, Leisure (2004).

In the early 1970s, when Owens took these pictures in and around Livermore, California, few photographers had shown an interest in portraying life within the vast sprawl of housing developments that would become home to sixty million Americans in the decades after World War Two. Having discovered photography during a stint in the Peace Corps, Owens took a job in 1968 as staff photographer for The Independent, a small newspaper in Livermore. Going out on up to six assignments a day made it easy to get to know the people, places, and events of the community Owens was documenting. Along the way, he became one of the most important chroniclers of his time, known for images so memorable that they have become part of our unconscious template for how suburbia should look.

Read the full article here.

Sarah Oppenheimer at Mills College Art Museum

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 08:00:00 +0000

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Lea Feinstein’s review of Sarah Oppenheimer’s current solo show at Mills College Art Museum. Feinstein notes: “[Oppenheimer] creates immersive experiences for participants, in which literal reflections inspire personal reflection and wondering is a product of wandering. […] But without hours of serious research before seeing the exhibition, it is difficult to parse the scope or significance of her installations from the cryptic fragments on display.” This article was originally published on October 28, 2014.

Sarah Oppenheimer, 2014; installation view, Mills College Art Museum. Courtesy of the Artist and Mills College Art Museum.

Do your homework before you see this show. Sarah Oppenheimer is a much-heralded artist whose scrupulous work crosses the borders between architecture and sculpture and is grounded in theories of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, particularly perception. To create her mind-bending work, she has pierced and reconfigured walls, corners, floors, and entryways in galleries, universities, and art museums. Like periscopes and kaleidoscopes, her interventions probe the bodies of buildings and employ transparent and mirrored surfaces to create new and disorienting ways of experiencing familiar spaces.

But none of these aspects are in the current exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. What is there are Oppenheimer’s sketches, studies, ideas for interventions, and maquettes: carefully milled, drilled, and fabricated samples of glass and aluminum that play a part in recent commissions in New York, Switzerland, and in other locations in the United States and Europe—studio shots, so to speak.

The assembled array of white-painted steel tables with sketches and drawings under glass is tantalizing but not revealing. It offers the initiate only hints of Oppenheimer’s process, her extreme concern with perfection; pieces are milled to within 1/32 inch of her requirements. The titles of her works (33-D, D-33, OE-15) provide few clues except the inclusion of her fabricators’ names and their locations, suggesting she considers them artistic collaborators in this work.

Read the full article here.