Women Artists of Northern California
Skip to: Lucy Puls, Robin Hill, Helen Mirra
San Francisco, California. Beautiful landscape, plenty of art schools, and some great museums. But San Francisco is also the most expensive city in America, where a study showed that to achieve the American Dream of owning a house, you must have an average income of $200,000 to qualify for a mortgage (a rate double that required in New York City). With space to live and make art so out of reach for many, it is no wonder that the art scene doesn’t thrive here the way it does in other rich, populated areas of the United States.
But there is a solid group of artists in and around the Bay Area—many of them professors—who call this part of Northern California their home. One of those women is Sandra Ono, whose studio is in the Minnesota Street Project, in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, which hosts artists studios and galleries.
Sandra ONO
San Francisco, California
The artist Sandra Ono. Photo credit: Klea McKenna.
The artist Sandra Ono chooses to address issues of political sensitivity through abstraction, not to shy away from difficult subject matter, but as a means of acknowledging the myriad ways in which our lives—our backgrounds, our personalities, our experiences—can determine our angle of approach. The orientation of more literal depictions risks misaligning itself with that of those looking. Abstraction is not didactic, but rather, as the artist says, a “thoughtful and respectful” approach to representation that transfers agency from the maker to the viewer.
Ono’s abstraction, however, comes with some clues, as the materials she uses are far from neutral. Her sources are as diverse as the items populating the shelves of a drug store. They include acrylic nails, Q-tips, rubber bands, eye shadow, ACE bandages, and glue, which she uses in large quantities in order to construct her biomorphic sculptures.
Untitled (1603)
Sand, glue, resin and earrings
62 in. x 12 in. x 6 in.
2016
Other clues lie in the gesture and attitude of her finished pieces. The repetition of a single item could easily result in work whose meaning is derived from its simplicity, the way Minimalism reduced art to spare aesthetics. Far from the anestitism of a Judd or a LeWitt, however, Ono’s works have personality, almost as if life inhabited them. “When I can’t figure out how to install a piece, I read about body language,” the artist explains. Whether a piece is “slumped or leaning” has a massive effect on the way in which our own bodies interact with it.
Detail of Untitled (1603)
This is certainly true of Untitled (1603), which leans against a wall and is roughly the artist’s height and of a weight that is at the edge of what she is able to physically lift. The rectangle of sand has been mixed with resin to keep its shape. “I like that transformation, [taking] something that can be blown away with the wind and giving it physical presence,” she explains.
Transformation for Ono does not only reside in alchemizing sand to solid, however, but is also the key to making her sculptures, which use one object—in excess—as the building blocks necessary to mimic another form. What appears to be a twisted log, for example, at closer inspection is a mass of rubber bands, snipped and glued on top of each other. Acrylic nails nestled together look like coral, and black deflated party balloons become a monstrous snake coiled on top of itself.
The artist also enjoys this transformation because it makes something “utilitarian into something non-functioning,” breaking the form apart from its use value. While any possibility of using acrylic nails is eliminated by including it in a sculpture, its usefulness is also destroyed by its proliferation. (With only ten fingers, who has a use for a thousand acrylic nails?) The almost laughable impracticality of these numbers destroys all possibility of its original function, focusing us instead on the implications of the material and highlighting its symbolic presence in our culture. (That is, why do women use acrylic nails in the first place?)
Untitled
Rubber bands and glue
21 in. x 8 in. x 7 in.
2011
By using objects “so present that we start to tune [them] out,” Ono is able to turn up the volume to such a degree that we can no longer ignore them. In these works is a metaphor for those unseemly things which populate our lives, which we’d much rather tune out: microaggressions, misogyny, and violence—turn up the volume on any of these things and not only do they become impossible to ignore, but they reveal themselves to be what they truly are: utterly useless.
More on Sandra here.
LUCY PULS
Berkeley, California
The artist Lucy Puls was, fittingly, Sandra Ono’s professor at U.C. Davis, where she taught a course called “Material.” In this course, students had to choose one material—some chose plastic easter eggs, others coffee grounds—and work exclusively with it throughout the semester. Over the course of a stimulating three hours, we spoke of the meaning of the material we leave behind.
The artist Lucy Puls
Lucy Puls’ career reads like a shadow history of the United States, an account of thirty years told with objects forgotten, cast off, or given away. Trailing just behind the present moment, her work centers on what was discarded today as a means of narrating the story of what was valued yesterday. Shag carpeting, shoulder pads, and disco inspire a visceral reaction, a brand of disgust reserved only for fads. “The problem with being very popular is when you go out of style you can’t exist because you remind everybody of that time,” the artist points out. “What is it about these things” that is so evocative? She asked herself. Whatever “it” is Puls has made the center of her work.
The artist’s exploration of cast offs began in thrift shops—in the bargain bin to be precise, the place where the least desirable of the undesirables end up, crocheted blankets and Melamine tableware among them. After collecting objects from thrift shops, she moved on to old vinyl record stores, which told of changing tastes of music. With piles of old albums in tow, from there she took to the streets fascinated by what people put out on their stoops for passers-by to take. (The rise of the chichi coffee craze, for example, meant Mr. Coffee machines were easy to come by.) All these found objects she cast in resin, like a specimen from the Natural History Museum. They all bear Latin names, as if to insist on their remove.
Dominus (Mr. Coffee x 4), 25 1/4” x 15 1/4” x 9”, coffeemakers, resin, 1999
Until the housing crisis hit, “there was so much stuff [on the streets] I would carry a camera with me at all times,” the artist remembers. But with the Great Recession came paranoia and the feeling of instability. “Everything disappeared from the street,” she says, forcing her to find new ways to document human activity.
Geometria Concretus (12-13), pigment print mounted on aluminum, gouache, cast polyurethane, hardware, 2012 panel: 22 x17”, shelf: 3 x 18.5 x 3”, 2012
Her latest two bodies of work center not on objects, but on the foreclosed homes that have been left behind. California was particularly hard hit by the recession, as it bore a disproportionate percentage of subprime loans. Always keenly aware of the changing human landscape, Puls turned her attention to these shells, what once contained lives living out what they thought—erroneously—was the American Dream.
The series of photographs Geometria Concretus, which documents the inside of these homes, sought to metaphorically “right the wrong” perpetuated by the greedy and powerful by restoring aesthetic balance to their interiors while capturing the “head spinning” feeling of losing everything. They are photographed from intimate angles, the way you might see your own home as you lean down to pick something off the floor and are often displayed upside down or sideways, leaving their viewer on unstable footing, a trace of the emotional terrain of the house’s last occupants.
Lodix (Green, Red, and White), 14 1/4” x 9 1/2” x 5 1/4”, blanket, resin, 1999
“I don’t believe art can change the world,” Puls says, but rather she insists that “art has always left behind evidence of what people were thinking about.” In the end, it’s not the objects that matter at all. It is that je-ne-sais-quoi, that aura imbued in even the most mundane of things that is there because anonymous people have put emotional value in it. Puls’ work is a topography of feeling across time, an account of how a nation rises and falls.
The thing is, history has a way of repeating itself, looping across its own timeline. The meanings in Puls’ work, though they tell of a past moment—like the housing crisis, for example—might find themselves bubbling to the surface again in the coming months as similar evictions and foreclosures happen. In such a moment of upheaval, I trust Puls to find what it is that maps our current mood, those objects that capture the fear, instability, and—ultimately—hope of this frightening American moment.
More on Lucy here.
Robin Hill
Woodland, California
I first met Robin in person last summer, when she generously invited me over for a chat over rosé and a dinner of watermelon salad, pasta with fresh pesto, and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery (I remember the dairy because 1) it was delicious and 2) it came from Point Reyes Station, not far from Robin’s home). If I have done my job right, the open spirit that inspires a person like Robin to invite an almost stranger over for dinner will shine through in this piece.
“The only place to go right now is in,” Robin Hill says from her studio in Woodland, California. Luckily for Hill that studio contains thirty years of work, some of which she has been revisiting during quarantine. “It’s not busy work,” she insists, but rather I get the feeling that this prolonged period of isolation has given Hill a much-needed moment of self-reflection. “ I’m spending time pulling things out of deep storage and seeing the relationships between them,” she tells me.
The artist Robin Hill
There’s only one sky., 2020
450 inkjet prints
installation view artspace1616
photo: Richard Gilles
Living and working just outside Davis, where she is a professor of art at the University of California, Hill has the luxury of space. At the entrance to her ample studio she shows me a gallery room, a small white cube furnished with plinths, where the artist is able to combine and recombine works from her oeuvre, whether they were just made or are decades old. In curating these small-scale exhibitions, Hill is able to see her trajectory as an artist more clearly.
In a recent combination, a tall Eva Hesse-like cylindrical wax form made with an armature of balsa wood stood beside a cone made of coiled string and a bronze cast of a slide carousel, all clustered beneath a large cyanotype. Though these works each come from different chapters of Hill’s career, a consistent sensibility of “lines and circles” is obvious, and they share a similar preoccupation with a hands-on, multi-step process. (On the other side of the gallery, however, sit works that are quite the opposite, objects Hill refers to as having “made themselves.” Whether bricks made smooth by the tides or an image of a house collapsing under the weight of age, Hill steps into their timelines and elevates them to art.)
Though the artist meant “circles” as in the shape, I also see a tendency in Hill’s work to circle back on itself across time, the feedback loop of her own influence sometimes finding its closure as soon as her next body of work, or else in a project restaged multiple times across a number of years. Sometimes this closure comes in the form of upcycling leftover material. In several works from her 2011 exhibition, Case Discussions, Hill repurposed cotton batting from a now-defunct should pad manufacturing company in Brooklyn. In these works, she constructed “interventions in analog systems to create other narratives about their use.” By overloading a vertical filing rack, you might see in an office, for example, I saw an amusing commentary or her own fixation with cotton—this haphazard overflow of stuff in an object with bureaucratic purpose overwhelms the system and insists on the supremacy of material over function.
There’s only one sky., 2020
450 inkjet prints
installation view artspace1616
photo: Muzi Rowe
Hill’s last show, on the other hand, overwhelmed psychologically. There’s only one sky, a floor-to-ceiling installation, which the artist exhibited at artspace1616 in Sacramento, featured snippets cut from the New York Times. Phrases like “unravel the circumstances” and “one is, frankly, in a hall of mirrors” were enlarged and printed on 32 inch square sheets. She papered the gallery with these squares, tacking the top two corners to the wall but letting the bottom half billow in the wind.
To some, like the U.S. Postal worker moving through his busy day, the space was so starkly empty he wondered if it was still an art gallery, while others who came with the express purpose of art viewing found it “claustrophobic,” overloaded with the task of reading everything. “People were having to figure out how to look at this,” Hill said, pleased at the way the piece was received.
“It had that interesting pulse between there being nothing there and too much,” the artist told me. The thinness of this work, the way it exists on the membrane of art, is what is provocative. “How something can be teetering on the edge of almost being nothing” and yet have a hold on someone—even just for a minute—is something that fascinates Hill.
Sorting System, 2010
vertical file, cotton, wax, plaster
48 1/4” X 13 1/4” X 25 1/4”
If standing there and craning your neck to read each phrase was too much for you, however, Hill “brought the newsprint extractions back to newsprint,” by producing an exhibition catalogue in the same format as the Sunday paper (there she is circling back again!). The translation to this format, however, does not lose the particularity of its larger display. A newspaper, too, is not meant to be read fully, but rather can be skipped around and left “unfinished.”
When, in this installation, the conventions of art viewing (like reading all the wall labels) meet the everyday motions of reading the paper (like focusing on articles of interest), the “art” seems to supersede all else. They’re “having a very perceptual experience” as they are forced to grapple with the “weird limitations they put on themselves,” Hill explains of her visitors. In some ways, this work too “made itself,” in that so much of its impact is viewer-determined. “I’m intervening with something in the world,” the artist says, “I’m not making something from scratch.”
But these days, what is that “something”? When the world out there feels contaminated, even dangerous to engage in, Hill has no choice but to do what she has always done, build off what is readily available, and to make the most of the situation. I expect more recycling of material, more small-scale exhibitions, and more cotton. I can’t wait to see how she closes these circles.
More on Robin here.
Helen Mirra
Muir Beach, California
I met Helen Mirra on top of a mountain. It was one of those days on Mt. Tam—the peak just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco—where the fog hugs so tightly to the mountainside as you wind your way to the trailhead that you can barely see beyond the road’s edge. We agreed to meet at an amphitheater off the trail—deserted in April, plants peeking from between the stones—which was the midpoint on a walk Mirra had started that morning.
The artist Helen Mirra
As I spoke with the artist Helen Mirra I was reminded of a quotation from William Faulkner: “Don’t be a writer. Be writing,” an exhortation which reflects the artist’s penchant for avoiding labels, as her work is as much about action as it is about what results from it. Whether weaving or walking (which she considers a part of her practice), what she is doing is what she is. This way, “it’s easier to find legitimacy,” she says, “because you are nothing.” Sitting beneath the evergreens, I was shocked by this egolessness, and then dismayed by my shock, wondering if I have spent a little too much time in New York’s cauldron of shameless self-promotion and drive.
I’d like to avoid using the word “minimalist” to describe Mirra’s work (tempting as it is given the artist’s limited color palette and subtle attention to detail), as the term has been corrupted and commodified. Ironic (but utterly American) to see a stance rooted against materialism be made marketable, used to describe everything from skincare routines to tattoos. Instead I'll use the term “spare”— “spare” I think not only bypasses the unfortunate associations Minimalism now bares, but is an even more apt descriptor for what Mirra does, as Minimalism (the 20th century kind) never did shy away from calling attention to itself.
Blue tying bale edging, 2016
linen, wool
10 1/4 x 13 3/8"
Mirra’s woven works, on the other hand, are small scale, magnetically attached directly to the wall, and express little until they are approached. Using a tapestry loom, the artist weaves with linen and wool fibers. Weaving is fundamentally about the grid—the “rectangular interlacing of thread” that produces a “pliable plane,” as Anni Albers defined it. The mechanism of the loom is so predictable that Joseph Jacquard was able to “program” it to make intricate patterns (IBM has credited Jacquard in the development of its early computing systems) and so orderly that any deviation from its pattern is immediately apparent. And indeed, it is in small departures from this rigid form that Mirra finds her expression. “I can see my breathing in it,” the artist says of her fibers, suggesting that even the slightest of movements has the ability to affect the weave. In Blue tying bale edging (2016), for example, I think I see an exhalation in between powder stripes, while in Green tying bale edging (2016) I see a sharp intake of breath in the merging mossy green lines. Mirra clarifies that these “warbles are a kind of weaver's joke,” an exaggeration of what happens naturally in her process and a demonstration of the control of which she is capable.
Bale edging carbon copy, 2016
linen, wool
10 1/2 x 12 1/4"
On a tapestry loom, it must be said, things are more free–-threads can meander in ways they are less inclined to do on a heddle loom. This type of loom is much more amenable to multiple threads operating independently of each other (think the way a plaid tartan’s colors are continuous across the cloth (thus producing its checked pattern) versus the way the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters look more like paintings). This control allows for extremely subtle fluctuations––what you see when looking at Mirra’s August (2018), whose undyed white plane seems to be a patchwork of squares of the same color, the variation between threads just barely differentiable.
In describing weaving with two threads, Mirra uses language which seems to give each a mind of its own. The threads can be “out of sync,” or they can “keep pace” with one another and “keep each other in check.” This language suggests the piece’s outcome is up to the thread’s relationship rather than her own artistic agency. In referencing her breathing Mirra also invokes this sense of the involuntary.
August, 2018
linen, silk
32 1/4 x 18 7/8"
The artist’s use of two threads maps beautifully on to the metaphor of walking, which often accompanies the exhibition of Mirra’s work. (In conjunction with her 2018 solo show at Peter Freeman Gallery, for example, the artist led a series of 'backwards walkings' around New York City.) “There is always a relationship between the front foot and the back foot,” she says, between “thinking and non-thinking.” The active stance is always accompanied by the passive, the dominant thread always has a relationship with the secondary one.
Mirra’s art is tricky— it’s hard to know what to make of it, not in what it is and represents, but in that it is at all. The artist often questions whether art making is a “viable” way to pass the time. To answer this question she has to ask herself, “are you doing any harm?” Non-thinking, however, is distinct from thoughtlessness, which is the cause of harm: wasted resources, slighted feelings, and carelessness can often result from lacking foresight, from neglecting to think.
While I cannot answer the artist’s question for her, for those of us wondering the same thing of ourselves and our actions, all I can say is the best we can do is to take that first step deliberately, with good intention, the way Mirra does when she stands at her loom. The rest will follow.
More on Helen here.