Sam Whiting January 25, 2021Updated: January 26, 2021, 7:10 am
Dimitri Grachis in the doorway of Spatsa Gallery. Photo: John Natsoulas Press
Spatsa Gallery lasted only four years in San Francisco, but they were four crucial years, 1957-1961, as the assemblage art associated with the Beats bridged into the abstract expressionism and cubism of the 1960s. Never a commercial gallery, Spatsa was artist-run by its owner, Dimitri Grachis, who lived in the office behind the storefront on Filbert Street at Fillmore.
Grachis, who closed Spatsa to concentrate on his own career as a minimal geometric abstract painter, died Jan. 9 at the VA hospital in Palo Alto. He was 88. Cause of death was deteriorating lung disease, according to his nephew, George Metropulos of Belmont. Grachis had been living in an apartment in downtown San Mateo for the past 25 years.
Tear Gas and Protests Erupt at Van Gogh Museum – Anti-lockdown protests took place over the weekend in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The demonstrators were pushing back against a new emergency 9 p.m. curfew intended to curtail the spread of the coronavirus. The rally ended with tear gas and water canons shot into the crowd, which had gathered outside of the Van Gogh Museum. More than 100 people were arrested. (
Paris Artists Struggle Amid Lockdowns – The historic Place du Tertre in Paris is normally bustling with 250 artists who rent in the square to paint portraits of visitors, but the lack of tourism this past year has brought extremely hard times on these painters, portraitists, and caricaturists, and the square is virtually empty. Belle époque artists like Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso all once lived and worked in the area, the so-called “artists square.” (
The San Francisco Art Institute nearly closed for good in 2020 Courtesy of bart.gov
The San Francisco Art Institute announced on Friday that Pam Rorke Levy, who has served as the board chair since 2018, will be resigning her post and is to be replaced by photographer and SFAI-alum Lonnie Graham. Levy’s resignation follows a tumultuous year for the 150-year-old art school, which nearly closed for good in 2020 as a result of mounting debt made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, and the more recent controversy around the proposed sale of the university’s historic Diego Rivera mural, which is valued around $50m.
WILLIAMSTOWN â Erin Sherriff s work is art that requires and rewards close looking.
It requires forensic attention to detail as things often arenât quite what they seem, says Robert Wiesenberger, associate curator of contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute.
Working across mediums, Sherriff uses photography, sculpture and video to shape and reshape two-dimensional and three-dimensional works of art as she explores what happens to an artwork once it enters the public record and is interpreted and re-interpreted by society and art historians.
Her work is the subject of a yearlong exhibition, Erin Shirreff: Remainders, in public spaces at The Clark â the Reading Room of the Clarkâs Manton Research Center and the lower Clark Center â which are accessible when the museum is open without an admission fee. The exhibit is the second yearlong installation in the Clarkâs public spaces that Wiesenberger has organized as part of an ongoing seri
A Blazing Suburban Gothic Imagines the American West on the Brink
In the 1970s, Mimi Plumb began photographing adolescent life and the bleached-out landscapes of California. Her suspenseful new book foretells the disasters of the present and the future.
Mimi Plumb,
The first time I moved to California was in late summer 1998, when I was young and romantic enough to refer to the place by its nickname, “the Golden State,” and to believe that this was what people there called it. (They didn’t, it turns out.) Then fall began, ushering in the ban on the use of affirmative action in admissions at all campuses of the University of California; the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and the tule fog, which engulfed the Oakland Hills like a fuzzy grey mold. I left within the year, but not before I experienced my first earthquake and learned that the empty white skies in nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite were casualties of overexposure reminders of information lost more t