ArtBeat/June 2023

By Ed Goldman

While the word “triptych” is usually a descriptor for paintings, panels or carvings, the luminous, already-iconic sculpture “Tributary” is a triptych. 

A Fiberglas, resin and steel piece that stands 14 feet high with a 10×10′ footprint, this “pro-am” artwork—which looks like three dolphins, three teardrops or three symbols denoting the region’s confluence of waterways—greets visitors at Sacramento State’s Welcome Center just as you enter the campus on J Street and veer a little to the left (no politics intended). 

It was created over a three-year period by students, then a few former students (they’d graduated to professional-artist status) under the direction of Sac State art Professor Andrew Connelly. 

Recently, I sat down with two of the pros who started out as students on the project to create the piece, Zala Mahshour and Andrew Rosas. They’d been brought to my attention by award-winning arts educator, children’s entertainer and Sac State professor Francie Dillon, herself an artist and the mother of one (Lindsey M. Dillon, a ceramist and sculptor). Dillon had met the two young artists at their day job, University Art in midtown Sacramento, and rushed to tell me about them and their work. A journalist ignores an enthusiast like Dillon at his own peril—and, of course, a lifelong FOMO (fear of missing out, for those just joining the 2020s).

“I love doing pieces on a large scale,”  says Mahshour, who makes ends meet working for an optometrist as well as the aforementioned University Art. “I started out as a painter but 2-D [two-dimensional] work just didn’t satisfy me.”

Rosas also likes the grandeur of doing larger works but both artists lament that art collectors, at least in this region, are less inclined to buy sculptures than paintings. “Sculptures don’t have to be large,” he says. 

Mahshour agrees, adding, “One of the things I like about doing sculpture is that it’s art you can see the back of, not just the front. It’s meant to be enjoyed at all angles.”

The original “Tributary” team included Rosas, Isabella Flanagan and Janelle Marcione on the concept/design team, while Mahshour (and Rosas) were part of the fabricator group, which included April Arnold, Denise Benitez, Julie Crumb and Matthew Pugh.

Both artists, who are in their 20s, say that art is considered “more of a hobby” (Mahshour) than “a real career” (Rosas) by their families, but Rosas says, “This is probably a cultural thing. Nobody has been discouraging.” The eldest of five children, Rosas is a first-generation U.S. citizen, his family hailing from Aguascalientes, which is roughly 300 miles from Mexico City. Mahshour, a native of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was raised in Seattle. Like Rosas, she has four siblings—but she’s the youngest.

The two artists say they enjoy working together on public art projects. “We know how to do things that are beautiful and stay within a budget,” says Mahshour. Sounds like a good way to sculpt a career.

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In addition to seeing images of the piece with this column, you can go to the Sac State arts website: csus.edu/college/arts-letters/art-collection/public-sculpture/tributary-sculpture.html

By Ed Goldman

AT 87, MARCY FRIEDMAN PRESENTS A STUNNING SHOW OF NEW WORKS AT B. SAKATA GARO GALLERY 

We’re standing in Marcy Friedman’s backyard, above the American River. The water is flowing this afternoon at 30,000 feet per second, she says, wondering how much fiercer it will be when the winter snow melt really takes hold and the cascading from the river’s North Fork gets treacherous. 

“Well, my studio is in the basement,” she says, factually but seemingly unperturbed. “We had to sandbag one year. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Friedman excels at that. She interrupted her intended painting career for 42 years to raise her family, simultaneously plunging deep into philanthropy and community, which included leading with her late husband—attorney and business visionary Mort Friedman—the massive fundraising campaign to expand and modernize the Crocker Art Museum. She also worked with Mort on his various development projects, including Arden Fair Mall. 

After Mort passed away more than a decade ago, Marcy resumed her art career—and more than three years ago, even remarried: her husband, businessman Paul Kaufmann, was her boyfriend when the two were teenagers in Hawaii, where Marcy lived most of her young life.

Her third solo show—more than two dozen new and brightly evocative paintings, including portraits, landscapes and the dazzling denizens of her at-home koi pond— is at the b. sakata garo gallery in midtown Sacramento April 4-29.

Friedman is allegedly 87 years old. But her posture, energy, voice and outlook seem to have been frozen and waiting for her to reawaken them after that four-decade painting hiatus.

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that her work was that of a young, but far from callow, artist. Vibrant colors, energetic brush strokes and a sense of composition that usually eliminates any background distractions from the people she’s portraying. While her painter’s voice is all her own, her placement of the images—right there, right in front of you, like it or not—reminds me of photographer Richard Avedon’s celebrity portraits (though his best work was in black-and-white) and summons up such iconic portraiture as Don Bachardy’s infamous (and truly terrific) painting of Governor Jerry Brown. 

Meanwhile, her landscapes are as distinctive as David Hockney’s experiment in that discipline but echo only the confidence of his color palette and imagery. And her piece “Sunbathing,” above, may be reminiscent of Roland Petersen’s sand-and-sea epoch but to me—and I collected Petersen for a time—Friedman’s work is more compelling for simply being close-in and close-up.

“All artists refer to drawing from life or otherwise as tapping into their muscle memory,” she says as we sit in her light-filled office. “What I like to do when I paint someone is keep a close eye on skin tone and contours—but more to the point, that glint in someone’s eye, the way people might twist their heads to express curiosity or confusion. 

“I look for a person’s characteristics,” she continues, “something they may not share with anyone else.” In other words, she sees everyone as unique. As is Marcy Friedman.

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(The b. sakata garo gallery, is at 923 20th Street. Its phone number is 916.447.4276 and its website is http://www.bsakatagaro.com. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday, from noon to 6pm.)

By Ed Goldman

WHEN A BIG “MACC” MEANS BIG ART

History and art make companionable bedfellows for the next few weeks at the Mills Station Arts & Culture Center  (MACC) in Rancho Cordova, about 15 minutes from downtown Sacramento.

Curated by Cheryl Gleason, two shows are on separate floors of the long-ago grocery store, which was transplanted years ago and now neighbors the city’s Park & Ride Station. The genial and knowledgable Gleason, an artist herself, has been with the center since what she calls its “soft opening” in November 2018, and is its only paid employee. Eager volunteers fill out the roster.

The exhibit on the MACC’s spacious first floor is  “Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans & WWII,” a Smithsonian traveling exhibit that shows— through evocatively revealing photography, books and documents—the faces, storefronts and memorabilia of one of this country’s most racist, politically haphazard periods. Included is President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter authorizing the establishment of the Japanese internment camps; in it, he seems to deliberately omit any mention of the targeted soon-to-be prisoner population: Japanese Americans, whether Asia- or America-born.

(You probably know that current Sacramento-area Congresswoman Doris Matsui and her late husband, Congressman Robert Matsui, were among those who were incarcerated in plain sight as children. They met and married years later.}

An especially heart-rending photo is in the window of a Japanese-American-owned store advertising an “evacuation sale”—and also defiantly asserting the owner’s statement, “I Am An American.” 

One flight up at the MACC,  the work of artist Joyce Campbell is spotlighted (and for sale) in her show, “The Amazing Gourd,” a delightful ensemble of painted and themed gourds (cucurbitaceae, if you’re a horticulturist or simply showing off for your date). Gourds are among our oldest cultivated plants. As Robin Sweetser writes for almanac.com, they were “the early water bottles of the Egyptians (2200 or 2400 B.C.), and were traditionally used as utensils, storage containers, and dippers by indigenous peoples in North America.

“Today,” she continues, “these garden novelties can be used for many reasons from ornamental displays in autumn … to birdhouses to luffa sponges in the bath (yes, luffas are gourds!). Gourds can also be used as musical instruments (shakes, maracas, drums), vases, and bowls.”

In Campbell’s show, the gourds are simply beautiful objets d’art (see the pix), brightened with alcohol oil, cold wax and other media, and given lighthearted names by the artist, who’s been working in the field for 30 years and teaches art in her home in nearby El Dorado Hills. 

The Mills Station Building was built 112 years ago as a gathering-place for farmers and a way station place for travelers.  The MACC is open Thursdays and Fridays from 2-7 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m.-4 p.m., and by appointment (call or text Gleason at 916-225-7800). The facility also hosts community events, lectures and art workshops. 

For the center’s schedule, visit its website (rcmacc.org)—and by all means, check out its newest art show before it runs out of its gourds.

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By Ed Goldman

The Works Progress Administration—that eight-year bonanza of art and industry created in 1935 under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to employ the unemployed (the precursor of “Build Back Better,” only real)— is alive and in temporary residence at the Crocker Art Museum.

If you want to see the kind of heroic, impressionist, expressionist, neo-Gothic and timelessly compelling art this country produced in the first third of the prior century, this is a must-see exhibit—one of the finest I’ve seen at the Crocker (since its last must-see exhibit). It’s here until June.

The show is particularly moving for me, for two reasons. 

First, I spent the first eight years of my life in Parkchester, a one-square-mile community of more than 100 brick apartment houses in Bronx, New York, whose sculptures and monumental touches were designed and executed by artists funded by the selfsame WPA. 

Second, many of those artists had pedigrees similar to those of my own grandparents, coming to America in the early 1900s from Russia, Ukraine and Romania; some, like my grandparents and at least one aunt and uncle, were genuine Communists, owing to the oppression they were leaving behind and their immediate adoption of this country’s labor union movement. Yes, some disillusionment would set in. But that’s another story.

Many think of the WPA, which put nearly nine million people to work, as having funded mainly public works projects— such as roads and schools and hospitals (and, not far from California’s capital, the splendid Coit Tower in San Francisco)—but are surprised to discover how much art depicting immigrants, the working-class and an in-hindsight gold-tinted twinkling of American life came out of the era. I’d spoil this by calling it a history lesson or art class, so jist think of it as hugely entertaining, evocative and, yeah, emotional.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for Valentine’s Day and a country drive, you can check out photographer/artist Maggie McGurk’s polymer-clay Valentine’s hearts in person at the Art League of Lincoln’s gift shop: 580 Sixth Street, Lincoln, open Thursdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 pm. The phone number is 916.209.3499 and the email is artleaguelincoln@gmail.com.

I wrote about Maggie the other day. She’s a longtime friend who used to be as ubiquitous a presence at public events as cash bars. My column about her new work may be found at the website for my thrice-weekly column, The Goldman State: 

Closer to home, Archival Gallery has a clever new show (actually, they’re all pretty damn clever) called “Wallpapers and Vinyl Dreams,” celebrating (and selling) the work of Carol Mott-Binkley, along with Debra Kreck-Harnish Valentines. That show runs from February 1-25, with a 5-8 p.m. reception on the 11th. Archival is at 3223 Folsom Boulevard. And that’s my vinyl word on the subject.

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By Ed Goldman

If you collect art because you hope it appreciates as time passes, congratulations: Everything you collect is now officially a year older. 

On the other hand, if you buy art because it adds fuel to the furnace of your soul, 2023 will absolutely warm and energize you.

At Archival Gallery, for example, upcoming shows include:

– Jim Marxen, who specializes in landscape, contemporary art and urban art, and the Laureen Landau Legacy Collection, January 5-31;

– Carol Mott-Binkley and Don Yost, February 1-25;  

– In March, which is Women’s History Month, featured artists will include Maureen Hood, Erin Martinelli, Linda Nunes, Mariellen Layne, and others to be announced; 

– April will bring “Gone Fishin’”, a group show in memory of Ron Wagner. This will be a fundraiser in support of the Parkinson Association of Northern California;

-– Recent works of Leslie McCarron and Gary Dinnen will dominate the walls from May – 4-27 ; and  

– Topping off the first half of what promises to be an exciting year, in June, an architecture-themed show will feature William Peterson and Kiny McCarrick. 

Archival Gallery—which celebrates its 40th anniversary during a month-long celebration in August—can be reached at 916.923.6204 or by visiting online: archivalgallery.com

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Meanwhile, in the literary arts corner, check out “Churchill: A Drinking Life/Champagne, Cognac and Cocktails,” the newest book from Gin Sander, collaborating with Roxanne Langer. “Gin Sander” is the appropriate pen name of longtime arts patron, author and editor Jennifer Basye Sander whenever her topic includes adult beverages (she used it for her popular book “The Martini Diet”). Langer, a sommelier and international wine judge, served as not only co-author but also, as Sander told me in a recent interview for my column The Goldman State, “our technical consultant when it came to what went into certain drinks favored by Churchill.”

The book, which includes classic drink recipes, debunks some of the myths surrounding the habits and drink preferences of the greatest British prime minister. 

For example, he did not, Sander and Langer report, covet gin-and-tonics; instead, he went through the day nursing weakish (but  continual) whiskey-and-sodas, yet also enjoyed brandy or Cognac nightly and adored Champagne. In fact, it was estimated that in the course of his adulthood, he consumed 42,000 “imperial pint” bottles of Champagne.

Lest you think the smallish serving showed some restraint on the PM’s intake, bear in mind that the British imperial pint is roughly 20% larger than the American one. Since Churchill was larger than life, that seems only fitting. 

You can find “Churchill: A Drinking Life” wherever books are sold or damn well ought to be.

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