Art in Action

Annual AIDS fundraiser becomes landmark art event

By Paula Harris

FLASH BACK 14 years ago to the first Art for Life exhibit and auction, an annual fundraiser that benefits Face to Face/Sonoma County AIDS Network. That year, a small group of artists propped their donated works up against cardboard boxes in a room in Santa Rosa’s Flamingo Hotel.

Nothing fancy–not a pedestal in sight. The event lasted one day and raised $11,000.

Flash forward to recent years, and the changes are astounding. Art for Life now spreads out over four days, offering a landmark North Bay art event that attracts artwork and attendees from across the Bay Area and beyond.

Oh, and last year it raised more than $150,000. Indeed, thus far Art for Life has raised more than $1 million for AIDS services in Sonoma County.

“This is the Face to Face fundraiser of the year. It generates money that helps us run throughout the year for items not covered by grants and federal stipulated funds,” explains Ina Chun, Face to Face’s events coordinator, who has organized Art for Life for the past five years. “This fundraiser is critical for us. It’s our lifeblood.”

The event –which this year runs Sept. 6-9–relies on the generosity of artists. Each year 250 local artists from Sonoma County and beyond donate pieces in all media for the silent auction. “The most heartfelt part for me is to see how people with relatively little give so much,” Chun says.

And even high-profile artists are getting in on the act. This year’s auction will include a three-piece set donated by internationally renowned artist Christo: “Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76,” consisting of one lithograph and two heliogravures.

“The art is getting better,” Chun says. “We’ve had artists come in with pieces to deliver on the day, and they’ll take a look around and say, ‘You know, I think I’ll take this back and bring in a different piece!'”

Santa Rosa pastel and watercolor artist Tamra Sanchez has participated in Art for Life for six years. Before that, she worked for several years as a volunteer for Face to Face, cooking, cleaning, and “just being a friend” to AIDS victims–until she could no longer cope with the loss of lives.

“Donating my paintings helps me to feel I’m still contributing even though I’m not there for the people,” Sanchez explains, adding that she and other artists often even bid on each other’s work. “Every year I buy a piece of local art at the event,” she says.

According to Chun, Face to Face’s biggest enemy is the fact that many people believe that AIDS is no longer a crisis.

“AIDS is not going away, and infection rates are on the rise and alarmingly so in young people,” she says. “And all the complications of AIDS victims now living longer make our job much bigger and more costly and more complicated.

“The issues are still there,” she continues. “They’re just different, and there’s still lots of work to be done.”

The Art for Life exhibit runs Sept. 6-8, from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Saturday, and noon to 6 p.m. on Friday; the auction takes place Sunday, Sept. 9, from 2 to 6 p.m., at the Friedman Center, 4676 Mayette Ave., Santa Rosa. Exhibit admission is free; auction admission is $50 (includes food, wine, and music). 707/544-1581.

From the August 30-September 5, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Ages of Man

Printmaker Shane Weare etches time

By Gretchen Giles

NURSED BY the Jazz Age and moved by the beat, outgoing Sonoma State University art professor Shane Weare was among those Englishmen of a certain age who were impassioned by the myth that was America.

While Weare attended London’s Royal College of Art as a printmaking student, Jets fought the Sharks, teenagers were fresh-branded cultural icons, and American vistas stretched in the imagination for limitless arid miles, unclouded by village parish steeples, endless cups of tea, or cold July rains. Free, raw, new–America appeared a story whose plot anyone could write for himself.

And so, like many of his countrymen, Weare came to the United States and made it his own.

Traveling to the States in 1962 with a group of students, Weare drew his America state by state, producing terse inward prints that were so deeply personal as to be an intimate diary of the nation. He briefly returned home, but found himself the next year as a postgraduate student at the University of Iowa.

The rest, of course, is history. In the ensuing 38 years Weare married American artist Sally Weare and became a U.S. citizen and a professor at SSU. He retired from teaching last spring, and the University Art Gallery honors him with “Then and Now,” an exhibit opening Sept. 6.

“It’s not a retrospective,” Weare explains, standing in the hangar-like living room of the Bennett Valley home he and his wife share. “That would have been too confusing. The work that I did in the late ’60s and early ’70s is really relevant to what I’m doing now, and I wanted to show something cohesive.”

A love for the old-fashioned marvel of drawing led him to study printmaking, since, as he says, “unfortunately, drawing is not taken seriously.” The Library of Congress took Weare’s printmaking seriously enough to purchase his early study of Nevada for its archives, an artifact of one artist’s experience of the West.

When he and Sally began their family–their son and daughter are now grown–the cheery demands of domestic life drove him inward, resulting in fantastical mindscapes of surreal worlds that he nonetheless says “are about America.” Inner seeking led to an appreciation of the natural beauty of the Bay Area. Large prints of the Bolinas shore caused former San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Thomas Albright to proclaim him “a brilliant etcher and one of the Bay Region’s most inventive imagists.”

But Weare doesn’t do landscapes anymore. “I think that it’s extraordinarily difficult to talk about this world,” he says. “Nature upstages everything, thank goodness, and I’m not really interested in saying much about it. The human condition is what I’m interested in.”

And so his work has changed, moving from a reflection of an exotic newness to subliminal portraits of the natural world and out to mankind as a whole. “Then and Now” centers on Weare’s relentless fascination with man’s relationship to his world, replete with his own handmade mythos. Birdlike women, carnivorous fish, and black-inked figures often inhabit his pages; mortality looms.

“They’re more about being in life in this world,” Weare says. “I don’t believe in God, yet I believe in the wonder of the universe and how amazing people are. This is about fear, religion, good, and evil.” This, in fact, is about life itself.

‘Shane Weare: Now and Then’ opens Sept. 6 with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. and continues through Oct. 21 at the University Art Gallery, SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. 707/664-2295.

From the August 30-September 5, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Second Wind

‘Running Fence’ runs again

By Gretchen Giles

THIS IS the story of how more than 2 million square feet of silky, white air-bag fabric ran into the ocean. A tale of how a whole generation of residents came together to argue and then agree about art. A vision that took five years to erect, yet was seen for only 14 days. Divisive, lengthy, and exhausting–it’s curiously mimicking itself through a new tale of community.

Formally known as Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, 1972-1976, this sinuous run of shimmering white nylon snaked from Cotati to the Pacific, caught the sun, gave music to the wind, and defined the land.

It also dramatically changed many lives. The well-documented instance of Freestone resident and informal town mayor Tom Golden springs naturally to mind.

Then in his mid-50s, Golden became an ardent supporter of and manual laborer on Running Fence and provided his home as ad hoc headquarters to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the globe-trotting husband-and-wife artistic team that created Fence.

Little did Golden know then that he was to gain a new family in the controversial couple, become the single largest private collector of their work in the United States, start a new career as project director and liaison on several of their projects, and make a major contribution to a new life for the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa.

“I’ve had such a wonderful life,” Golden says with unfeigned satisfaction in the well-filled home he shares with partner, Jim Kidder. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude often say that they do these projects for themselves and their friends. They’re free for everyone to see, and their work is of joy and beauty; they have no purpose whatsoever. And I think that it’s quite a privilege to be able to assist in any of [their] projects.”

A Highway Runs Through It: The history of the ‘Running Fence’ project.

A Guided Tour: Complete schedule of upcoming Christo-related arts events.

Born on Jan. 8, 1921, Golden now possesses many lithographs and other works from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s studio numbered 8 for his day of birth. His collection began when he refused payment for his work hooking the Fence (there are no volunteers on these projects), requesting studio credit instead. Now 80 and establishing a legacy, he has donated his collection of more than 70 pieces to the Sonoma County Museum; his home and its entire contents will follow posthumously.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Running Fence project, the SCM has made the ambitious decision to exhibit Golden’s collection in four different venues this autumn. The project also features a musical tribute from the Santa Rosa Symphony, a traveling display for middle-school students and educators, and a staged reading of an original play from Sonoma County Repertory Theatre, commissioned just for the occasion.

And just maybe, if Christo and Jeanne-Claude could bring together as many disparate factions as clashed on Running Fence, so can the SCM.

“Very little of our Running Fence–only three pieces–is in Tom Golden’s collection,” says Jeanne-Claude by phone. “It has little to do with the Running Fence.”

“Even if Sonoma County residents know only about the Fence,” unknowingly counters Satri Pencak, visual arts program manager for the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, one of the participating venues, “it will be exciting to see the projects that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did before and after it.”

Titled “Running Fence @ 25,” this far-reaching interdisciplinary exhibit is the “kick start,” according to SCM board president Kevin Konicek, to the “envisioning” process that the SCM will do to envision, for example, sprawling down a full city block and growing well beyond its current means as a small historical repository. And all of this without a museum director.

Outgoing SCM acting director Marlene Ballaine says, “We’re a county museum, not the Santa Rosa museum. Having the [Tom Golden collection] come to us when it did was perfect because it was an opportunity for the museum to put this “envisioning” process together. This is a great start.”

“It’s like we’re a $35 million start-up,” explains Konicek, who is leading the search to fill the director’s chair. “And we’re in the business of experience.” Konicek hopes that the Golden collection will underscore the SCM’s new commitment to “every form of human experience, as long as we tell the story of our culture.”

Sonoma Museum of Visual Art director Gay Shelton is curating the multivenue exhibit, and she’s well in tune. “I wanted to approach this as a cultural anthropologist,” she says, preparing to rhetorically ask, “How did [Running Fence] enter the culture of Sonoma County?”

To that end, Shelton has taken “70 pieces that [she] wanted to put 100 different places,” and instead confined herself to a sober four: her own museum, the new University Library Art Gallery in the Schulz Information Center at Sonoma State, the Sonoma County Museum, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

With area arts groups often scrambling after the same cash or working with fierce independence from one another, “Running Fence @ 25” is a unique undertaking with enormous challenges, owing to scheduling, funding, and orchestration. In fact, no one’s ever tried to do anything like this here before.

“I love the whole idea of collaborative projects in the county,” Shelton says. “One of the great joys has been getting to know other spaces in the county. I’m going to learn from them and they’re going to learn from us. It’s like being a spy with good intentions.

“This,” she stresses of the collective exhibit, “is an initial sign of innovation and life, and we should all watch.”

From the August 23-29, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.