The Blue Marble:
Art for the Environment
The Blue Marble: Art for the Environment | September 6 - 25, 2019
Opening Reception is Friday, September 6 (5:30-8pm)
Artists: Barbara Boissevain, Sukey Bryan, Steve Curl, Joe Decker, Michele Guieu, QT Luong and Hannah Rothstein.
In partnership with:
Click HERE to read about Karla Kane’s review of the exhibition for the Palo Alto Weekly
PALO ALTO, California - The Pacific Art League is pleased to announce a major exhibit, “The Blue Marble: Art for the Environment”, opening in our gallery space on September 6, 2019. This exhibition features seven prominent Bay Area artists, including Barbara Boissevain, Sukey Bryan, Steve Curl, Joe Decker, Michele Guieu, QT Luong, and Hannah Rothstein.
The natural environment is under pressure across the globe, and the changes in weather patterns are becoming more acutely evident, with each successive year of record-breaking temperatures. Yet against this troubling background, our show seeks to find those rays of light through the power of art, telling stories of progress and hope, and celebrating the unique beauty of the planet we all call home.
Famously, astronauts from the Apollo missions captured iconic color images of the earth in the early 70s. Their Hasselblad cameras recorded for the first time the astounding beauty of the earth in exquisite detail from a new perspective - space.
“These images showing us the earth in its entirety for the first time, had such a profound impact on the human psyche, that they are credited with giving birth to many environmental organizations and a broader appreciation for the importance of our role as custodians of this unique and quite delicate planet”, said Jon Graves, CEO and executive director of the Pacific Art League.
Honoring this point in time, our show references the name given to these famous NASA images, with the title “The Blue Marble: Art for the Environment”.
As awareness of the fragility of our planet has grown over the intervening decades and many grass roots organizations have sprung up, adhering to the mantra of thinking globally but acting locally. For this exhibition PAL proudly partners with NASA, The Sierra Club - Loma Prieta and Environmental Volunteers and will honor that tradition by highlighting important art created by local Bay Area artists focusing their creativity on environmental issues. The show will serve to encourage our community to take a more active participation towards solving local issues.
Pacific Art League’s Gallery Manager, Donny Foley curated arresting and beautiful images from seven artists, allowing each to exhibit several pieces, and therefore creating their own show, within a show.
Goal for the Exhibit - to launch Art Hikes for Kids
Our goal with the show is to use it as the launch pad for a new art and the environment program PAL will announce this fall, Art Hikes for Kids, for underserved communities. “So often kids don’t get the chance to experience the beautiful natural environment so close to the urban sprawl of Silicon Valley. The Santa Cruz Mountains offer an exceptional diversity of hiking trails and views across the stunning landscape rolling to the Pacific, and we want to give kids who have never been into this magical environment the chance to hike and breath and also to capture their reactions to the experience, through art” said Graves.
This exhibit will be PAL’s second annual cause-based exhibit. You can review the success of our African Wildlife photography – “The Struggle of Beauty” - PAL’s website, www.pacificartleague.org. The “Struggle of Beauty” was produced in partnership with the prominent San Francisco wildlife advocacy group, WildAid.
About the Aritist
Barbara Boissevain
Photographer Barbara Boissevain recontextualizes urban and natural landscapes into abstract photographs. A Silicon Valley native, she uses photography to highlight environmental issues in the region. Her South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project documents the epic transformation of salt ponds in the San Francisco Bay back to their natural state, which will take up to 60 years to complete. Boissevain uses a vivid, yet abstract visual language to cultivate awareness and provoke meaningful discourse about environmental stewardship. In her latest work, she creates formal grids of aerial salt pond images based on the year they were photographed and a common color palette. As the dramatic changes in the Bay continue, she will add to this series and create more grids documenting the increasing biodiversity over the coming decades.
This series is from a larger body of work titled “Big Dirty Secrets,” in which she brings environmental issues into focus. The San Francisco Bay Area leads the nation in environmental awareness, yet it is among the most polluted regions in the United States. Currently, there are four chapters in the “Big Dirty Secrets” series: “Ghost Hangar” 2013; “The Oracle’s of Richmond Oil Barrel Installation” 2015; “Cupertino Cement Factory” 2016 and “Salt Pond Restoration 2010-2019.” This is an ongoing series to which she will be adding new chapters photographing from a helicopter on a continuing basis.
Sukey Bryan
Sukey Bryan is an environmental artist who often creates large work concerning the cycles and elements of nature. Bryan graduated from Yale College with a B.A. in Art and English and with an MFA from The Maryland Institute of Art. She received a fellowship from National Endowment of the Arts and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. As artist-in-residence through the National Park Service in Denali, Alaska, Bryan created a series of over 100 paintings and prints concerning threatened Alaskan glaciers. This work was exhibited by many galleries, academic and non-profit spaces including the Palo Alto Art Center, the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery and American Embassies in Russia, Finland, and permanently in the embassy in Oslo, Norway. Bryan was the artist- in-residence at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco in 2018 making large-scale installations on and around the cathedral as well as many community projects concerning climate change culminated in artworks that were part of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. Bryan has also created travelling installations that have been in many local churches, including “The Fire Within” which is presently installed at Christ Church, Los Altos. Bryan created large outdoor pop-up environmental installations for Stanford’s “Claw” Fountain, the Clark Center/Bio-x, the circumference of the Brower Environmental Center building, Berkeley and inside and out of St. Bart’s Church in New York City. Two large-scale installations of sky are presently on the front façade of the Palo Alto Art Center and the wall of its courtyard. Bryan lives and works in Stanford, California.
Steve Curl
Steve Curl is an award-winning fine artist and teacher who resides in Palo Alto, California.
His fine art focus is the natural landscape in the medium of Watercolor. Most of his paintings are inspired from his travels and hiking trips to Yosemite & the High Sierra, the Colorado Rockies, and the local Bay Area foothills near Palo Alto. His paintings have been accepted into the prestigious yearly Yosemite Renaissance Exhibition. Currently he shows his work at the Portola Art Gallery at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, CA. (www.PortolaArtGallery.com)
Steve has been teaching Watercolor Painting since 1990 at the Pacific Art League of Palo Alto where he has a regular following of enthusiastic students and has earned a "Teacher of the Year" award several times. Steve also teaches yearly at the Yosemite Art & Education Center as part of the Yosemite Conservancy Visiting Artist program. In 2018, Steve was selected to be the Artist-in-Residence for the month of February in Zion National Park, Utah.
Following graduation from Ohio’s Denison University with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Steve furthered his fine art education at the San Francisco Academy of Art College. He continues to develop his watercolor skills in workshops with Charles Reid, Ron Ranson, Alvaro Castagnet, Tom Lynch, and other long-established masters of the medium.
Joe Decker
Joe Decker is a nature photographer, author and educator living in Northern California. His work has been exhibited across the country from the Smithsonian to LACDA in Los Angeles, and he has been awarded artist residencies in Petrified Forest National Park, Iceland, Svalbard, Antarctica and Greenland. For fifteen years Joe has been traveling through the profoundly powerful polar and near-polar environments of our world, hoping to share their wonder. He is the author of The Tuesday Composition, published by Flatbooks Publishing
Michele Guieu
Michele Guieu is an environmental artist, maker, and art educator. She creates art installations and presents workshops which engage people to reflect on our interdependence with the natural world. Her practice focuses on sustainability, the importance of water, and the consequences of human activity, especially on our watershed and the ocean.
While her training is in graphic design, she was raised in a family of scientists. Her work is inspired by science and by the infinite variety of shapes, colors, and patterns found in nature. She typically uses scientific documentation to start a project. Formally she plays with scale and representation to create the simplified shapes and elements she uses in her installations. Materially she uses recyclable, recycled, or sustainable materials whenever possible. Her tool of choice is the laser cutter machine. It allows her to iterate and explore, and offers a large array of possibilities.
A challenge of teaching people about global issues such as water, climate change, and sea level rise is that they are often so abstract for individuals to grasp and understand. Because global issues are community issues, Michele believes they are best taught at the level of communities, in the form of community activities. Participatory art installations integrating elements of science empower people through creative expression and hands-on experiences. As people in the public participate, create and play, they learn about sensitive environmental issues that are part of our region’s present and near future.
Michele created several installations about plankton, some of them participatory, making visible these stunningly beautiful and essential marine species.
Originally from Marseille, France, she lived in Senegal, Africa, and Paris, where she received a MA in graphic design from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD). She was an artistic director, a creative director at Landor France, and an independent graphic designer for many years in Paris. She moved to the US in 2000.
QT Luong
QT Luong celebrates the natural and human heritage with his photography. He has been privileged to travel through an immense geographic range, from the top of the coldest mountain on earth to under tropical seas. He was the first to photograph all 61 U.S. national parks - in large format, and his best-selling book Treasured Lands received critical acclaim and six national book awards.
Born to Vietnamese parents in Paris, France, Luong was trained as a scientist (PhD U. Paris). The revelation of the high Alps led him to become a mountain climber and wilderness guide. When he came to the US to conduct research in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing for what was to be a short stay, he chose UC Berkeley, because of the proximity to Yosemite--a world class rock climbing destination.
There, he fell in love with the national parks and decided to photograph all of them with a 5x7 large format camera , a single-handed, self-financed, monumental project that had not been completed before. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and started crisscrossing this country to capture its diverse beauty. Luong's in-depth explorations often dictated long hikes into the backcountry, with a 75 lb backpack, and only his passion and dedication to keep him company. By 2002, he had visited each of the then 58 national parks. He subsequently left his distinguished career as a scientist to work as a full-time photographer. In 2009, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan featured him as one of the few living characters in their film The National Parks: America's Best Idea.
Luong's photographs have been the subject of four large-format books. They have appeared in publications from National Geographic, Time, Life, Outside, Scientific American, GEO, and hundreds others worldwide. His work, profiled or reviewed in magazines (Outdoor Photographer, National Geographic Explorer, Parks...) and newspapers (New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News...), has been exhibited solo in galleries and museums nationwide and abroad. He also reached a large audience through terragalleria.com, one of the most visited of all individual photographers websites.
Hannah Rothstein
Each generation has artists that speak for it. The Baby Boomers had Koons. The Silent Generation had Warhol. And the Millennials? Hannah Rothstein.
Published in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, and more, Rothstein is redefining art in the eyes of the Millennial Generation. Bridging both millennials' taste for irony-clad humor and their concerns regarding the world around them,
Rothstein’s work spans a wide variety of topics, sentiments, and media. Rothstein’s early works embrace Millennials’ pithy, playful approach to our cultural lexicon.
Hors d'oeuvre Thanksgiving Special, Dr. Dreidel, The Cocktail Hour Coloring Book, and Broga (now a book published with Sterling, Yoga for Bros) turn iconic and beloved aspects of pop culture on their heads. The works captured Millennials' lighthearted mindsets at the time, and went viral in the press and on social media. But as sentiments have changed, so has Rothstein’s work. Rothstein’s more recent work reflects her generation’s anxiety about a future that feels increasingly unstable. Beginning with Mr. and Mrs. Politico Head, a project that questions if politicians are all the same underneath, and followed by the immensely popular National Parks 2050, which depicts a post-apocalyptic future brought on by climate change, Rothstein’s newest work gives voice to her generation’s concerns about keeping the fabric of society from fraying in the face of a rapidly changing world. Rothstein has also observed how this all-encompassing change is affecting the world of art. Increasingly, people want to see art they can easily understand. They also eschew the alienating elitism of ivory-tower institutions. This in mind, Rothstein makes art that’s poignant, yet easy to relate to, and releases her work where people feel comfortable approaching it: online and via social media.
From its widespread success on the internet, Rothstein’s work also has made its way into more traditional art establishments, including numerous museums and galleries, thus changing the world of art from the bottom up.