Opposition/Composition

Creative Growth welcomes award winning San Francisco based architect Anne Fougeron as guest curator for the upcoming exhibition, Opposition/Composition, in conjunction with the release of her new monograph.

August 9, 2011 — OAKLAND, CA — Creative Growth Art Center announces its upcoming exhibition, Opposition/Composition, September 2 through September 30, 2011. Opening event on Friday September 2, 5:00 to 8:00 pm. Artwork made by artists in the Creative Growth studio and curated by Anne Fougeron, principal of the award-winning architectural firm Fougeron Architecture and also a board member at Creative Growth.

The title of this exhibition takes its name from Fougeron’s first monograph, titled Opposition/Composition, featuring fourteen of the firm’s projects with foreword by Hitoshi Abe.

The “opposing forces that shape a composition,” as Fougeron notes, are key players in the aesthetic decisions she makes as an architect. It is the push-pull relationship that Fougeron looks for in three-dimensional space that has come together as the foundation for this exhibition of Creative Growth artist work.

Through contradiction the idea of space, both physical and abstract, gets defined. For the artists at Creative Growth, these visual arguments—complimentary colors or fully-rendered shapes next to unfinished outlines—are always at play, though often subconsciously; By highlighting these juxtapositions the viewer can observe how naturally the eye gravitates to opposites, while inviting a new context and parallel in which to view the work made in the Creative Growth studio.

Including the utopic skyscrapers of William Scott, vibrant color studies by Erin Punzel, technical blueprints by Jacob Sockness, the visual labyrinths of Merritt Wallace, and much more.

ALSO ON VIEW: Artwork on view from the students of Summer Scholarship 2011. Check out and collect the visionary work made by high school aged artists with disabilities working in the Creative Growth studio this summer.

EXHIBITION OPENS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2011

PRESS PREVIEW: EMAIL FOR APPOINTMENT jennifer@www.creativegrowth.org

MEMBERS PREVIEW: 11AM - 2PM

MAIN EVENT: 5PM - 8PM, WITH LIVE MUSIC AND FOOD TRUCK

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 11AM - 4PM

RUNS SEPTEMBER 2 TO SEPTEMBER 30, 2011

Contacts:

Jennifer O’Neal, PR + Projects Manager: jennifer@www.creativegrowth.org

Tom di Maria, Director: tom@www.creativegrowth.org

About Creative Growth Art Center http://www.www.creativegrowth.org/

Gallery Hours: M-F, 10AM to 4:30PM

TEXTile

TEXTile OPEN LATE FOR OAKLAND ART MURMUR--FRIDAY AUGUST 5, 6:00 TO 9:00 PM

July 14 - August 26, 2011

Creative Growth invites you to experience a new exhibition of inspired text based drawing and painting alongside a quality of textile production so distinct and spectacular, we can’t keep it to ourselves!

Join us to collect quilts, rugs, weaving, hand-made garments and upholstered furniture. Don’t miss typed works by Dan Miller, hand lettering by William Scott and an introduction to emerging work by Creative Growth artists.

WHAT: TEXTile

WHEN: Exhibition and opening event on Thursday July 14th from 5:00 to 8:00pm. Gallery event is free and open to the public. Music by The Bayonettes, and treats by Cranky Boots cold confections!

MEMBERS PREVIEW: Thursday July 14th, 11:00am to 2:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY July 16th from 11:00am to 4:00pm

WHERE: Creative Growth Art Center Gallery at 355 24th Street, Oakland CA 94612 (near 19th Street BART).

PUBLIC INFO: For more information call 510/836-2340 ext.15

Artwork: Laura Jo Pierce

Aurie Ramirez at White Columns, New York

White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition in the gallery's Project space by the Oakland-based artist Aurie Ramirez. This is Ramirez’s second exhibition at White Columns – following her widely celebrated debut in 2005. For her current exhibition Ramirez is presenting a discrete group of watercolor on paper works from c. 2001 that mostly focus on food stuffs and their consumption. Writing in 2005 on the occasion of Ramirez’s original show at White Columns, critic Roberta Smith wrote: “Ms. Ramirez makes extraordinary watercolors that delineate a stage-set universe … There are signs of violence, frequent indications of romance, sex and family dysfunction.” Critic David Valesco, writing in Art Papers, suggested that: “Aurie Ramirez has created a world as layered as the faces she conjures, as inscrutable as the expressions beneath her masks.”

Over the past twenty five years Ramirez has created one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary bodies of work – invariably watercolor drawings on paper – that echoes the visionary production of Henry Darger. (Both artists have created psychologically complex imaginary realms inhabited by a recurring cast of characters, scenarios, and narratives). Aurie's earliest work was inspired by her interest in manifestations of the popular gothic, e.g. the Addams Family, or the rock band Kiss; more recently her work has evolved to describe a paradoxical late–nineteenth century, quasi-Victorian, suburban milieu populated by androgynous, mask-wearing dandies or rainbow-hued waifs.

Project Aurie Ramirez at White Columns

May 26 through July 16, 2011

White Columns 2330 West 13th Street New York NY 10014 www.WhiteColumns.org

John Hiltunen at White Columns, New York

White Columns is pleased to present a display of recent collages in the gallery’s reception area by the Oakland-based artist John Hiltunen. This is Hiltunen’s first exhibition. “Earlier this month ago I was visiting the Bay Area for the opening of ‘Create’, an exhibition that I co-curated with Larry Rinder for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. ‘Create’ includes works by twenty artists affiliated with three visionary Bay Area organizations that support artists with mental and developmental disabilities: Creative Growth (Oakland), Creativity Explored (San Francisco), and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (Richmond, CA). During my trip I visited the Creative Growth Art Center – an organization that I have collaborated with on many projects over the past eight years – where I encountered John Hiltunen’s extraordinary collages for the first time. Deceptively straightforward Hiltunen’s collages, which typically collide animal and human subjects, mostly derived from fashion and natural history magazines, invoke a historical lineage that includes Hannah Hoch’s Dada provocations and Linder’s more recent, but equally sardonic juxtapositions. If all collage work invokes a sense of violence – via the physical acts of cutting and dismemberment – Hiltunen tempers this dynamic through his uncanny deployment of humor, creating works that ultimately maintain a tension between their evident likeability and a palpable sense of something being amiss. Seeing the works I felt that it was important for them to be seen be a wider audience, hence their presentation – three weeks later - at White Columns.” – Matthew Higgs, May 2011.

EXTRA Project John Hiltunen at White Columns

May 26 through July 16, 2011

White Columns 2330 West 13th Street New York NY 10014 www.WhiteColumns.org

Luis Aguilera at Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Creative Growth artist Luis Aguilera’s vibrant drawings of figures and animals are multi-layered, personal narratives that include icons of popular culture, buses and trains, fantasy creatures, musical instruments, and portraits of his friends from the Creative Growth studio. WE LOVE OUR MEMBERS! - Thursday May 26, 5:30 to 7:30pm

To prove our love Creative Growth invites you to a private member's reception at Rena Bransten Gallery featuring the work of Creative Growth artist, Luis Aguilera + drinks and live music!

Luis Aguilera: New Drawings

April 28 through June 4, 2011 - Opening Reception Thursday May 5, 5:30-7:30pm

Rena Bransten Gallery 77 Geary Street San Francisco CA 94108 www.renabranstengallery.com

Outside In

May 12 through June 30, 2011 - Opening party Thursday May 12, 5:00-8:00pm We're turning things around for a rare and exciting look at new work by Creative Growth Staff artists. Working together in our studio, but rarely seen together in our Gallery, OUTSIDE IN presents a stunning array of Staff work along with inspiring work by Creative Growth artists.

Also featured: An evolving hands on workshop where Staff artists and Creative Growth artists work collaboratively. Join us for a daily look into the Studio during this exhibition and watch what unfolds.

WHAT: OUTSIDE IN

WHEN: Exhibition opening and event on Thursday May 12th from 5:00 to 8:00pm, with music by Alex Kelly.

MEMBERS PREVIEW Thursday May 12th from 11:00am to 2:00pm ALSO OPEN SATURDAY May 14th from 11:00am to 4:00pm

WHERE: Creative Growth Art Center Gallery at 355 24th Street, Oakland CA 94612 (near 19th Street BART)

Home

Our annual HOME show is a celebration! Join us to admire art and architecture as we celebrate the completed upgrade of the Creative Growth building project. Creative Growth artists' blend function with fashion during our annual spring event, featuring a home-grown runway show styled by local Oakland shops: Cougar Horse, Mercy Vintage and Maribel.

Don't miss: Music by L.A.'s Intru-Metal trio, Bärnacle - featuring Creative Growth performance artist Nick Pagan, minstreling by the Oakland Soft-Rock Choir and sets by DJs Whitemare and Pinche Rojas.

April 1 through May 4, 2011 - Opening Party Friday April 1, 5:00-9:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY April 2nd from 11:00am to 4:00pm

CreateRelate: A Creative Growth/Museum of Craft and Folk Art Collaboration

A unique collaboration with the Museum of Craft and Folk Art and the Limits of Fun: Limited edition Art Boxes employing Sister Corita Kent's educational techniques as well as her original iconic serigraph images from the 1960s. E is for Everyone: Celebrating Sister Corita Kent February 4 through June 5, 2011

Musuem of Craft and Folk Art 51 Yerba Buena Lane San Francisco CA 94103 www.mocfa.org

Only Make

"Nothing is a mistake, there's no win and no fail, there's only make." -Sister Corita Kent Creative Growth has long felt a kinship with legendary artist and teacher Corita Kent. ONLY MAKE takes its inspiration from Kent's words and the medium she is known for, printmaking. Join us for an exhibition of Creative Growth artist prints and limited edition hand made rugs--with a nod to an artistic process rooted in the insatiable desire to make.

Also on display: CreateRelate: A Creative Growth Art Center / Museum of Craft and Folk Art Collaboration. Our artist team up with MoCFA, San Francisco and visiting artist Adam Katz to produce a limited edition series of art boxes using Sister Corita Kent's serigraph silkscreen images.

January 27 through March 24, 2011 - Opening Party Thursday January 27, 5:00-8:00pm

MEMBERS PREVIEW Thursday January 27th from 11:00am to 2:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY January 29th from 11:00am to 4:00pm

Circus Season

Join us as we create our own enchanting big top and turn Holiday shopping into FUN! Our studio and gallery are filled with original artwork and thoughtfully made goods that give back to the program at Creative Growth with every purchase. Including textiles, furniture, ceramics, rugs, mosaic work, wood, drawings and paintings, prints and more!

December 3 through January 14, 2011 - Opening Party Friday December 3, 5:00-9:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAYS FOR HOLIDAY SHOPPING: December 4, 11 and 18 from 11am to 4:00pm

Judith Scott at Museum Gugging, Austria

This exhibition presents works side by side that could not be more different from each other: `feminine´ wool in the hands of a woman who created contemporary art without ever having taken an interest in the art of her time, much less having been part of its world during her lifetime; and `masculine´ objects, hailing from a culture that’s removed from today by millennia and primarily serving a military and ritual purpose. Both of them have one thing in common: their originality – their production was uninfluenced by the norms and tendencies of the twentieth century, yet the receptive development of Western culture was necessary to appreciate them as art. A seeming paradox, which meets the onlooker’s wish for the Unknown, the New and the Foreign.

-Johann FEILACHER is the curator of the exhibition and artistic director of the Museum Gugging.

October 7 through March 20, 2011 - 
Opening Reception October 6, 7:00pm

Museum Gugging Am Campus 2 A-3400 Maria Gugging – Austria www.gugging.org

Strangerous

Creative Growth Art Center announces Strangerous, an exhibition in collaboration with Rob Reger, Bay area Artist and the creative force behind illustrated heroine, Emily the Strange. Strangerous features artwork by Creative Growth artists Cedric Johnson, David Albertsen, Dinah Shapiro, Donald Mitchell, Franna Lusson, Gail Lewis, George Wilson, Jade Saren, John Martin, Juan Aguilera, Merritt Wallace, Nick Pagan and Rodney Ridge. Also featuring Rob Reger's own 'rotating paintings.' With an opening party, that will take place during Oakland’s monthly Art Murmur event, Strangerous is a marriage of the strange and the dangerous, a fitting Halloween-season- exhibition.  Curator, Rob Reger comes from a pop culture-neo-surrealist aesthetic in his personal artwork, and naturally gravitated toward the more abstract and peculiar side of Creative Growth artist’s work. Reger says about working with Creative Growth, “I'm blown away by what the artists here in the Studio do, how they approach art making, and their unique visions and explanations, (or not!) for their work. There is an absolute contagious creative spirit living at Creative Growth."

About Rob Reger: Reger’s design house, Cosmic Debris—grew from a tangle of roots joining the DIY punk scene of the ‘eighties with guerilla art, surrealism, and the psychedelic explosion of the ‘sixties. Reger introduced the world to Emily the Strange—an icon of empowerment for young alternative girls and outsiders of all ages.

Featuring music by the all girl, middle-school-rock-band: Poison Apple Pie and Bar by ERA, Oakland

Also on view: Artwork from the students of Summer Scholarship Program 2010. Check out and collect the visionary work made by high school aged artists with disabilities who have participated in the Creative Growth studio during Summer 2010.

October 1 through November 12, 2010 - Opening Party Friday October 1, 6:00-9:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY October 2nd from 11:00am to 4:00pm

In The House at MadMusée, Belgium

Featuring work by Creative Growth artists Dan Miller, Dwight Mackintosh, Gerone Spruill, Terri Bowden, Donald Mitchell, Aurie Ramirez and Kerry Damianakes. September 11 through November 20, 2010 - Opening reception on Friday September 10th at 6:30pm

Talk with Creative Growth Director Tom diMaria on Friday October 22nd

MadMusée Parc d'Avroy 4000 Liége - Belgium www.madmusee.be

Love is a Stranger

Creative Growth Art Center announces its upcoming exhibition Love is A Stranger, a project conceived by writer and curator Leigh Markopoulos. Love is A Stranger features artwork that explores sublimated desire by an international group of artists including many currently working in the Creative Growth studio. Love is A Stranger features works by an international group of renowned outsider artists, many of whom are being seen on the West Coast for the first time—Margit Madsen, Johann Korec, Malcolm Mckesson, Karl Vondal, and Anna Zemankova. Including Creative Growth artists: Juan Aguilera, Sherrie Aradanas, Cedric Johnson, Dwight Mackintosh, Charles Nagle, Aurie Ramirez, Kartika Reddy, and Ron Veasey.

The exhibition focuses on graphic and sculptural expressions of sublimated or suppressed desire and the artworks range from the delicately erotic fantasy-blooms of Czech artist Anna Zemankova (1908–1988), to the cool, haunting, bondage-related scenarios of Malcolm McKesson (New York, 1909–1999), and the exuberant mint-green and pink pop-couplings of Creative Growth’s Aurie Ramirez.

More often coded rather than explicit, and suggestive rather than documentary, even overt representations of sexuality, such as in the work of Karl Vondal (b. 1953, Austria), retain a certain wistful naivety. Often ambiguous images are paired with hand-written texts, as in the works of both Johann Korec (Austria, 1937–2008) and Dwight McKintosh (Creative Growth artist, 1906–1999), sometimes the narratives dictate how the images are to be perceived at others they are more poetic or rhythmic, adding dynamism to the compositions. The human body is celebrated and explored in the fairly realistic figures in the work of Danish artist Margit “Gitte” Madsen whose work pays tribute to renowned Danish artist Michael Kvium. Interestingly, the sculptural works included are more abstract in their intentions, deriving their eroticism often from the repetitive, tactile nature of their construction and their forms, as is evident in Charles Nagle’s coil pots.

Guest curator Markopoulos notes, “the subject of eroticism in outsider art has remained largely unexplored, which while not surprising does feel like something of a missed opportunity given the wealth of material and imagery. My thinking about this exhibition began with Malcolm McKesson’s extraordinarily beautiful and melancholy drawings, and quickly expanded to encompass a range of expression and media. Made as expressions of intensely personal fantasies or yearnings, the point is not to shock, but rather to show the diverse forms that love can take.”

Also: The launch of new clothing from the Fall/Winter 2010 line of Creative Growth for Everybody, available on site, in the Creative Growth shop.

July 15 through September 23, 2010 - Opening party August 12, 5:00-8:00pm

ALSO OPEN SATURDAY August 15th from 11:00am to 4:00pm

Dan Miller: Large Drawings at Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York

"Diagnosed with autism, and a few conventional verbal communication skills, Miller has developed an intensive body of work that employs language as its fundamental subject and departure-point. His extraordinary drawings take the form of accumulations of descriptive texts, alphabets, and numerical sequences. (The texts often have strong biographical references, e.g. acknowledging specific Bay Area locales, and aspects of his immediate day-to-day life and family history.) Typically superimposed on top of one another, these individual words, numbers, and phrases start to merge, creating all-over fields of partially obscured and often illegible texts. Juxtaposing formal methodologies (e.g. the use of indexical language and alphabetical and numerical systems, and repeated motifs such as light bulbs and books) with dynamic, yet highly disciplined drawing and mark-making, Miller's drawings intuitively combine both conceptual and expressive approaches, to create a truly idiosyncratic hybrid form."

-Matthew Higgs, Director, White Columns

Dan Miller: Large Drawings at Ricco Maresca Gallery

June 17 through August 20, 2010 – Opening Reception Thursday June 17, 6:00-8:00pm

Ricco Maresca Gallery 529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY, 10011 www.RiccoMaresca.com