Hangar 18

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Ron Dono­van, Chris Shaw, & Chuck Sperry

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.

Artist and Mas­ter Printer Ron Dono­van designed the poster for the sec­ond part Eric Clapton’s 2011 World Tour. Dates for this poster include: Con­tinue reading