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SiteWorks: San Francisco performance 1969-85

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Artist Interviews

Read the interview with Richard Alpert

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 5 February 2015.

I was born in New York City in 1947. I received a graduate degree in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in sculpture in 1979. My work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and the Far East. From 1999 -2009 I was involved in competitive downhill snow ski racing while also pursuing sculpture, performance art, photography and video work. Currently I'm working on large scale steel sculpture and photography.

Richard Alpert's website is available at: richardalpertartist.com

Read the interview with Janet Delaney

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, Berkeley 30 April 2015.

Janet Delaney is a fine art photographer who focuses her attention on urban issues. She is currently documenting the rapid transformation of the SoMa district of San Francisco. This area was the focus of her earlier project, South of Market 1978-1986.

Delaney has received three National Endowment for the Arts Grants and the Phelan Award. Her photographs are in collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, and the Pilara Foundation among others. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally. In late 2013 She published South of Market with Mack of London. This series was exhibited in a one-person show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, in 2015.

She held the position of adjunct lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley for over 15 years and has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the San Francisco Art Institute. Janet currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Janret Delaney's website is available at: janetdelaney.com

Read the interview with Doug Hall

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 25 October 2012.

Doug Hall received his B.A. in 1966 from Harvard College where he studied Anthropology. In 1969 he received his MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture of The Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. In that same year he moved to San Francisco where he formed the media art collective, T.R. Uthco (1970-79), in collaboration with Jody Procter and Diane Andrews Hall. The group produced numerous works during the 1970's. [...] Following the dissolution of the group in 1979, Hall continued to work in video, performance, and installation. In the late 1980's his primary focus shifted from time based media to include large format photography. His work in diverse media has been exhibited in museums in the United States and Europe and is included in numerous private and public collections. [...] With Sally Jo Fifer, he edited Illuminating Video, a collection of writings on video by artists, critics, and scholars, and with Ms. Fifer co-authored the introduction (1991, Aperture Books, New York). He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute where he taught until his retirement in 2008. Currently he is Visiting Artist at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco/Oakland where he works primarily with graduate students. (Hall 2014)

Doug Hall's website is available at: doughallstudio.com

Read the interview with Paul Kos

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, by email 19 October 2015.

Born in 1942 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, Paul Kos studied at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. before relocating to the Bay Area to attend the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where he received a B.F.A. (1965) and an M.F.A. (1967), both in painting. A highly influential educator, Kos taught conceptual art at the University of Santa Clara (1969-1977) and taught performance and video (now New Genres department) at SFAI (1978-2008). Kos has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective (2003), organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Grey Art Gallery, New York University; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has been featured in group exhibitions at such venues as the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; among many others. Kos lives and works in San Francisco and the Sierras.

Biography of Paul Kos by Amy Owen, Curator at diRosa, and Tanya Zimbardo, Curator at SFMOMA.

Paul Kos' website is available at: paulkos.net

Read the interview with Tony Labat

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 20 May 2016.

Since the late seventies, Cuban-born Tony Labat has developed a body of work in performance, video, sculpture, and installation dealing with the body, popular culture, identity, urban relations, politics, and the media. Labat has exhibited internationally over the last 35 years, received numerous awards and grants, and his work is in many private and public collections. Recent exhibitions include the 11th Havana Biennial; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, ASU Art Museum, Phoenix, and The Basque Museum, Spain. PAC, Milan, Italy, Figurtoa/Vives Studio, Havana, Cuba. Labat is currently the Chair of the MFA Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Read the interview with Tom Marioni

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 24 October 2012.

Marioni was born in 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended the Cincinnati Art Academy, and in 1959 moved to San Francisco, where he still lives. His first sound work, One Second Sculpture, 1969, was celebrated in the 2005 Lyon Biennial as presaging the work of many artists today who use sound and duration as subjects. His first museum show was in 1970 at the Oakland Museum of California. Titled The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, it was an early example of social activity as art. Over the years, Marioni has been invited to repeat the work in various contexts around the world.

In 1970 Marioni founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), which he described at the time as "a large-scale social work of art." Until the museum closed in 1984, he organized many groundbreaking shows, including "Sound Sculpture As" in 1970. MOCA has entered history as the first alternative art space in the United States. Marioni had one-person shows in several significant venues for early conceptual art, among them the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh in 1972 and Gallery Foksal in Warsaw in 1975. [...]

In 2006 the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati presented a survey exhibition of his work since 1968. Marioni was included in The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in 2009 in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, and other museums. He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and the Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York. (Brown 2015)

Tom Marioni's website is available at: tommarioni.com

Read the interview with Darryl Sapien

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 25 August 2015.

Darryl Sapien was born in Los Angeles, California in 1950. He studied painting and sculpture at Fullerton Junior College, Fullerton, CA and transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971 where he received his BFA in Sculpture in 1972. In 1974 he was accepted into the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA program. During this two-year span he created large-scale site specific performance art works at The Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As this was before a new genres department existed at the Art Institute he received his MFA in sculpture in 1976. Since then he has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Jose State University, City College of San Francisco, and the Bonnafont Gallery, San Francisco. He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, The National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., the M.H. DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA, the Everson Art Museum, Syracuse University, New York, and the Bronx Museum, New York, NY. In 1983 he premiered Pixellage, a collaboration with choreographer Betsy Erickson of the San Francisco Ballet at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. He has exhibited internationally at The Arte Fiere di Bologna, Italy, The Sculpture Center, Sydney, Australia, The Kanagawa Prefectural Hall, Tokyo, Japan, and the American Center, Paris, France. He is represented in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, and the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA. He has been the recipient of three individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and he has held teaching positions at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University. Additionally, he continues to create performance art with Son of War Games, 2013,at the Bronx Museum, New York, NY and The Sapiad, 2014, which was performed on the Aegean Sea and at the ruins of ancient Troy. Video of his performances can be viewed at his website.

Darryl Sapien's website is available at: sapienfinearts.com.

Read the interview with Bonnie Ora Sherk

Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 6 May 2015.

Bonnie Ora Sherk, has been planning, designing, and building place-based, content-rich, ecological and multicultural, learning landscapes with integrated community programs, hands-on, interdisciplinary curricula, and green skills job training for youth and adults, in San Francisco New York City, and other cities, nationally and internationally, for over 40 years. She is a professional artist whose legendary early performances, installations, and work with live animals brought nature to the city in unexpected ways beginning in the early seventies. Her work today offers practical processes and imaginative solutions resulting in ecological land-use planning, landscape architecture, participatory design with multiple, systemically linked, interactive, community and school programs, which also function as community and economic development for the area, resulting in transformation of the community. Each is called a Life Frame or A Living Library.

She founded and directs Life Frames, Inc., the non-profit sponsor of A Living Library with Branches in diverse communities. As named, the Life Frame literally frames and incorporates life and local resources, so we can see, understand, learn from, appreciate, and experience more profoundly - our community, our world, each other, and ourselves. The Life Frame as A Living Libraryis Cultivating the Human & Ecological Garden.

Bonnie Ora Sherk's website is available at: alivinglibrary.org/blog