Book Party for Malaquias Montoya
Friday, December 9, 2011, 6pm
EastSide Cultural Center, 2277 International Blvd, Oakland

Cultural scholar and activist Terezita Romo has authored the first extended monograph of the life and work of Malaquias Montoya, the revolutionary printmaker and painter who was one of the great influences of the Chicano Arts Movement of the 60’s and 70’s. In 2000, Malaquias spent a semester as Visiting Professor in the Art Department at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and he currently holds the title of Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame.

Come meet the artist and author at our public reception and book party where we will host a dialogue between Montoya and Romo. The artist will also have prints on display and for sale, as well as the book.

An auburn-haired songstress holds a fawn. Shocking magenta hair falls to the shoulders of a blue nude strapped with artillery. A 1950s-model cop car rests peacefully at the bottom of the sea, washed in blues and purples revealing a silent white angel. Each outstanding print on display represents a prominent rock band. Each was created by Chuck Sperry.

In early 2011, Chuck Sperry, San Francisco artist and co-owner of Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company, made an unprecedented donation to the Library’s Art, Music and Recreation Department of over one hundred limited edition, hand-printed rock art posters. Officially entitled, The Chuck Sperry Archive, this collection comprehensively documents the Goldenvoice Music Series (at the Regency and Warfield Theaters) from 2008 to present, as well as selected Firehouse productivity related to the cultural-life of San Francisco.

This collection is exciting in both use of color and variety of content. Each silkscreen print is comprised of up to sixteen colors, applied as individual layers. The pieces reference styles ranging from Japanese nishiki-e, Austrian Expressionism, 1960s psychedelia, to the provocative punk poster tradition of Sperry’s youth.  Musicians such as Neko Case, Danzig, Bad Religion, Nick Cave, Soundgarden and The Black Keys are represented, as are a talented group of Bay Area graphic artists (Ron Donovan, Alex Fischer, Gregg Gordon, John Howard, Dave Hunter, Alan Hynes, Scott Johnson, Dennis Loren, Chris Shaw, Frank Zio, & Zoltron) who contributed to the Firehouse Goldenvoice Poster series under the art direction of Chuck Sperry.

High Volume Opening Reception

Thursday, October 20th from 6–7 pm
Latino/Hispanic Room A & B

High Volume will be on display at the San Francisco Public Library
October 7^th, 2011 – January 6^th, 2012 on the 4th floor.

Chuck Sperry installed 11 foot by 9 foot acrylic painting, “Saint Everyone,” at the SFMOMA’s Artists Gallery Windows on Minna Street. The painting will be on view from June 2011 through January 2012. There are florescent lights which are timed to go on at dusk until 2 am.

What Chuck says about his painting:

My large scale painting, “Saint Everyone” is figurative, a postmodern pastiche of Pop, Op and Rock Art. Its theme is inspired from the very recent spontaneous popular movements which have swept the world since January 2011. My iconic figure holds a lotus, it’s unfolding petals suggest the expansion of the soul. The growth of its pure beauty springs from the fertile mud of its origin and grows into a benign spiritual promise. The figure is a loose appropriation and is re-imagined by the artist from a rock poster created by The Big Five (Mouse, Wilson, Griffin, Kelley, and Moscoso) for the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love in 1987. The Summer of Love in 1967 is the San Francisco analog of the change that is sweeping the world in 2011. This image was originally used on a poster I designed and printed for “American Artifact, The Rise of American Rock Art,” directed by Merle Becker. Appliqué disks employ elements of Op Art, inspired as they are from the work of Martin Sharpe, the British psychedelic artist. They are produced via silkscreen and applied – like a poster would on the street – in rhythmic patternization. The disks suggest decentralization or cell structure. I wanted to combine acrylic painting and silkscreen techniques in a seamless composition, and “Saint Everyone” is the result.

This painting was a year in planning and six weeks in execution. Renée de Cossio curated the project which involves me, Chris Shaw and Ron Donovan. Renee has been a constant source of support and inspiration and I thank her and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for making this show happen.

Make sure to check the websites of my collaborating artist friends Chris Shaw andRon Donovan to see their paintings and art work.

Here is a video taken showing the process of the painting:

via SFMOMA Artists Gallery: “St. Everyone” Chuck Sperry Painting at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery Windows.

Sunday, June 12 from 4:00pm - 7:00pm at
2959 St Helena Highway North
St. Helena, California.

Stop by for a low key afternoon filled with art, fun & coolness!

More information is available on facebook

June 11, 2011 — January 12, 2012

Bay Area rock poster art contemporaries Chris Shaw, Chuck Sperry, and Ron Donovan stand out amongst their predecessors in the Bay Area tradition of poster making that spans nearly 50 years. Through their prolific bodies of work, the masterful artists have brought innovation, invention, and new meaning to this art form. Each distinctively fuses propaganda, imagery, text, and historical art references with Pop and rock-poster art sensibilities to create accessible, relatable imagery that is at once empowering and undeniably populist.

Minna Street windows

A collaborative art work involving three individually created window installations, Donovan, Shaw, and Sperry layer silkscreen, painting, collage, and mixed media to transform two-dimensional imagery into three-dimensional expression. Showing reverence for man’s communicative nature, they reference the renewal of the idea that art has a purpose.

Natoma Street windows - Temporally Bound

Temporally Bound is a “visual improvisation” between Sperry and Shaw. Its form is drawn from the Asian accordion-style bound scroll to recognize the Pacific Rim as the gathering center of the art world and to emphasize postmodern appropriated multiculturalism. Sperry and Shaw express a realization of the temporal, time-punctuated nature of street and poster art. By binding the panels together in monumental book form, the artists create a visual record of events through a modality of time. Additionally, through binding invention, the contextualization of visual imagery, and a reassigning of representational meaning, the artists transform ephemeral events and experiences by creating a lexicon of a shared cultural visual memory.

The “Windows Program” uses the SFMOMA Garage’s street-level windows located at 150 Natoma and 147 Minna Street (between Third and New Montgomery Streets) to showcase artwork. The program, organized  by Renée de Cossio of the Artists Gallery, invites some of the area’s most ambitious artists to transform these everyday spaces into compelling exhibitions that the passerby can view round the clock.