New program
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
California College of the Arts
Kent and Vicki Logan Galleries
360 Kansas Street
San Francisco CA 94103-5130
T +1 415 355 9673
CCA Wattis Institute is in San Francisco, a few blocks from California College of the Arts. This is an announcement of its new program, new website, and new identity.Markus Schinwald is in the gallery, Nairy Baghramian is in the apartment, and Joan Jonas is on our mind.
Markus Schinwald is showing a site-specific installation of new and recent work. He gives inanimate objects personalities of their own: They have good moods, bad moods, nervous tics, and psychological baggage. His paintings, sculptures, and installations have “issues” in the way most relationships do. Conversely, he also imagines a world where a state of mind could give rise to an object. “What if,” the work asks, “a moment of anxiety could generate a neck brace?”
For the next six months, Nairy Baghramian is here in San Francisco—coming in and out—for a project she is calling OFF BROADWAY. She is using this opportunity to explore some of her interests, and to involve and invite other artists and peers to contribute to a cumulative exhibition in January 2015.
For the next year, Joan Jonas is on our mind and the subject of a monthly series of events. “De-synchronization, usually in conjunction with fragmentation and repetition” is Douglas Crimp’s crisp and eloquent summary of her work. Jonas cuts up and displaces elements from dance, theater, myth, landscape, and media to tell abstract stories. The parts of the whole are the parts of the piece—the projection, the performer, the set, the sound, the ritual. “I explore the place of women in history as outsiders, healers, witches, storytellers,” she says.
Oscar Tuazon has made a bar. It is the central feature of a new event space for thinking and talking about art.
David Reinfurt has made a new website: wattis.org.
Markus Schinwald is jointly organized by CCA Wattis Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is part of SFMOMA’s New Work series, which is generously supported by the museum’s Collectors Forum, the founding patron of the series. Markus Schinwald is also made possible by Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz, Carlie Wilmans, Patricia W. Fitzpatrick, Nancy and R. Patrick Forster, Station to Station, and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, with special thanks to Giò Marconi. Nairy Baghramian is made possible by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco, with special thanks to Galerie Daniel Buchholz.
The CCA Wattis Institute program is generously supported by Patricia W. Fitzpatrick, Judy and Bill Timken, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Robin Wright and Ian Reeves, and CCA’s Curator’s Forum. Phyllis C. Wattis was the generous founding patron.
About the CCA Wattis Institute
Founded in 1998, the CCA Wattis Institute is an internationally recognized exhibition venue and research institute. An artist-centered institution, it supports and presents the newest and most relevant contemporary artists working today via exhibitions and events. Operating under the umbrella of an educational institution, it is also committed to longer-term initiatives such as research forums, residencies, reading groups, and publications. As the city’s “Kunsthalle,” the CCA Wattis Institute is a central hub and gathering place for the contemporary art community in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
