AmesNews: No. 21, Fall 2004
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GALLERY NOTES
We’ve just returned from an intensive buying trip and we’re excited by our finds. We’ve added some exceptional pieces to our inventory of tramp art, canes, tintypes, and articulated figures. We’re looking forward to sharing them with you.
These next few months are so full of activity for us that we’ve been eager to get this Newsletter out in time to alert you to the many events. October starts with the 2nd annual show and sale at Intuit in Chicago, continues with the visit of the Folk Art Society of America members to the Bay Area, with a splendid conference organized by Creative Growth in Oakland, the LA Art Show, followed by the SF Fall Antiques Show. Our Calendar gives details of events, so get out your calendars and pencils to see if you can join us for some of them. When a show will be bringing us your way, let us know in advance about your special requests or interests. When time allows, we’ll do our best to bring things you want. As always, we look forward to seeing each of you and hearing what you have to say. Both your compliments and your criticisms are always valued.
--Bonnie Grossman, Director
GALLERY NEWS
Alex Maldonado was a quiet and gentle man who came into my life in the spring of 1973. His arrival was heralded by his younger sister, Carmen, who called me at the local public television station to say that her brother should be chosen for a proposed TV special.
At the time, I was the art coordinator for the annual KQED fundraising auction. By way of encouraging donations, I had instituted a policy of having noted art writers and museum curators review all the donations and choose three artists for special recognition as the subjects of a TV program. Carmen Maldonado was convinced that Alex should be a recipient of this honor, and she wanted me to listen while she recounted Alex’s life story with great enthusiasm, devotion, and exquisite detail. The choice was not mine, I explained. But as it turned out, Charles Shere, Art Critic for the Oakland Tribune, Cecile McCann, Publisher and Editor of Artweek, and Thomas Albright, Art Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle all selected Alex Maldonado to be a featured artist in the newly created TV show.
As co-producer of the shows, I got to meet and spend time with Alex. Carmen was at his side. She was his staunchest alley and, at the same time, his severest critic. Brother and sister shared a small Bernal Heights home. Their nephew, Julian (called Quitungui), the abandoned son of older sister Concha, completed the household.Carmen was the boss. It was she who had bought him the oils and canvases and had encouraged Alex to paint when he reached 60. She wanted to be certain that he would not idle his retirement away by sitting on a park bench doing nothing.
Alexander Aramburo Maldonado was born on December 17, 1901 in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. Son of Romula and Guzman Maldonado, he was the youngest boy in a family of 7 children. When he was 10 years old, he emigrated to the United States with his mother and siblings. He had to learn English in order to hold the odd jobs (delivering newspapers, cleaning up after the milkman’s horse) to help support his family. He became a shipyard worker at the age of 16. From 1917 to1922 he was an undefeated professional boxer, fighting under the name of “Frankie Baker,” after a home-run-hitting baseball player. Finally, he was a production worker for a can company.
Alex Maldonado became a painter of fantastic, utopian worlds. He was inspired by egalitarian politics, science, and technology. His sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1910 had made an indelible impression, one that would inform many of his future paintings. Alex produced most of his work between 1967 and 1987, but his dedication to the themes of peace, ecology, and euthanasia still remain fresh today. His colorful paintings include inventive portrayals of a society dedicated to recycling and the preservation of resources; images of Planet Maldonado, where all the inhabitants are blue, so there is no racial strife or wars; Halley’s Comet and outer space; and convocations for world peace.“I paint the impossible,” Alex once remarked.
Alex Maldonado painted in oil on canvas. His naive style has pointillistic elements reminiscent of Mexican mosaics. The frames are often integral to the composition; some are covered front and back with multicolored stripes and tiny dots painstakingly applied. Sometimes the sky extends onto the frame top, and in some of the paintings, the packs of spectators’ heads appear on the bottom of the frame, looking up at the picture: Maldonado provided his own audience.
Alex Maldonado had great reverence for museums. In accordance with his wishes, as stated in his last will and testament, a percentage of the income from the sale of each of his works is donated to the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
His death at 88 came as he wished, in a “mercy” hospital that kept him warm and comfortable until he slipped away. The San Francisco City Council adjourned in his memory.
Ned Young was born in a small town in Vermont in 1873. As a young boy he drew cartoons and also took up woodworking as a hobby. He played cornet in the town band, but abandoned the horn after rupturing his lung. Young was considered a musical prodigy; at the age of seventeen he went to Boston as a professional violinist.
While playing in orchestras at resort hotels in northern New England, he met his future wife, Effie. Ned taught Effie to play the cello and they soon formed their own string ensemble. The couple eventually took up residence in St. Johnsbury, VT, where Ned taught music. All the while he continued woodworking, producing accomplished and elaborate pieces. At some point he gave up the violin and became an antiques dealer; he was an expert at restoring pieces with missing or broken parts. From 1898 to 1917, Young produced a set of carvings from roots and burls that he found on the bank of a nearby river. These form the collection shown by The Ames Gallery. The work is delicate, finely wrought and finished, but with the strength of the original material showing through. Young’s choice of wood is thoughtful and evokes images of his process… fondling the root, eyeing it from all angles, and waiting for the image to emerge. The imagination and
creativity that he showed throughout his life is seen in each beautiful piece. This unusual talent prompted us to override our usual focus on California artists and include Ned Young’s carvings in our collection.
AMES NOTES
The Folk Art Society of America (FASA) is a national organization devoted to the appreciation, collection, and promotion of folk, outsider, visionary and self-taught art (see their website, www.folkart.org.) In addition to publishing an informative quarterly magazine the Folk Art Messenger, it visits various American locales for its annual meeting. This year its meeting will be held here in the Bay Area in October. A dinner and benefit auction in the Oakland Marriott Ballroom will feature music by Sy Grossman, and we are pleased to be hosting the group at a reception at The Gallery.
One highlight of the conference is open to the public: a symposium presented by Creative Growth Art Center. A distinguished group of panelists will include local, national, and international scholars in the fields of art and disabilities. I am proud to be included, along with Frank Maresca, director of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, and Phyllis Kind, director of Phyllis Kind Gallery, on the panel “Commercial Criteria: The Past and Future Role of the Dealer & Collector.”
For more information on the 2-day event, entitled Margins and Mainstream: Disability Art Today, contact info@creativegrowth.org or visit www.creativegrowth.org.
We welcome FASA and look forward to an informative and exciting week-end.
There is a wonderful group of outsider art lovers in Chicago, who several years ago formed an organization called Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. They are worth knowing about, whether one lives in Chicago or not. There is a quarterly magazine The Outsider, a gallery space in Chicago with a growing permanent collection, and an annual fund-raiser that is turning into an important event. Last year the Intuit Show was a huge success; we’ll be there again with many of our favorite pieces. We think you’d like it, too... come to Chicago for the weekend of Oct. 1–3 (see their website www.art.org for details).
On the Road in California
Work from The Ames Gallery is being exhibited in various venues around the state this fall.
At the San Francisco International Airport Museum, curators Timothy Taylor and Tim O’Brien have chosen a group of tintypes from our collection for their show Capturing Memories.* The exhibition will show the role of tintypes in the history and development of modern photography. If you are flying in or out of SFO in September, through Terminal 1, you’ll see this show near Gate 36.
At the urging of Jane Dillenberger, Nicolas Ukrainiec has organized A.G. Rizzoli—Transfigurations* in cooperation with Peter Selz. The show will be on display in Berkeley at the Graduate Theological Union. The reception and lecture, November 4 at 5:30 pm, are open to the public.
In Southern California, a show entitled Radiant Spaces: Private Domains* has been assembled by curator Elena Mary Siff; it includes pieces by Donald Walker and Willie Harris. Large enough to require two galleries, the exhibition presents a good opportunity to see work by California artists with developmental disabilities.
