Art excursion: Wesley Tongson show at BAMPFA

 Today's walk took me to BAMPFA for two new exhibitions: Spiritual Mountaints: The Art of Wesley Tongson and Lines of Thought: Gestural Abstraction in the BAMPFA Collection. The Gestural Abstraction exhibition is one gallery but with some choice pieces by artists such as Hans Hoffman, Gerhard Richter, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollack, and others. I especially liked a piece by Esteban Vicente because of the color palette that juxtaposed colors I associate with '80s jewel tone fashions. I will have to go back to see the Tongson show again. I was captivated by his work, both the black ink pieces inspired by Chinese artistic traditions of ink painting and calligraphy, and his pieces that explored color. Some works on paper done in Toronto combined colored inks that looked like watercolor with a Chinese technique of black ink line work. Some of the paintings use color wash next to highly textured resist techniques that evoke mountains and vegetation. 

You can get a sense of his work from this short video produced in conjunction with a show of his work in SF:

Pompeii

 Today I went with my family to an exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum in SF: Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave. The show included considerations of architecture and city life but was focused on the commerce, storage, preparation and consumption of food. On display were objects that were used in all these aspects--made of glass, metal, terracotta--- as well as fresco fragments, mosaics, statuary, even carbonised grains and fruits for sale, The god Bacchus, with his panther sidekick, was a particular favorite of the folks of Pompeii because it was a wine-producing region. 

Further Pompeii follow-up: this BBC documentary "Pompeii:The Last Day" gave a lot of work to re-enactors!

Artist Jennifer Marie Keller is generous with her walk-through of the show. She raises the issue of how we displayy human remains in such an exhibition; she would not have chosen to do so, whereas the musuem does display a resin cast of a woman's body as she was found in death. 

 

Here is scholar Mary Beard showing us life in Pompeii before the eruption:

And here is a guided tour of the site of Pompeii itself: