New Langton Arts
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| New Langton Arts | |
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| Established | 1975 |
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| Location | 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, California USA |
| Website | newlangtonarts.org/ |
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[edit] About
New Langton Arts is not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the US, New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art, and involving artists in the decision making process. Its first director Renny Pritikin has been a central figure in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene for 30 years. Subsequent directors include Susan Miller and the current director, Sandra Percival.
Currently New Langton Arts focuses on collaborating with artists on the "production and presentation of new work, exhibitions and events, that challenge the boundaries of conventional art practice, while encouraging broad public appreciation and access to the art of our times."[1]
[edit] History
In 1975 San Francisco’s art scene reached a turning point. A substantial enough number of younger artists working in the new mediums of performance, installation, video, and interdisciplinary projects was reached, and they identified themselves as a community. Local commercial galleries and museums were not showing these art forms, and artists and their supporters were organizing various opportunities for each other on an ad hoc basis. For example, a series of performance events were held in 1974 in a vacant industrial space on Bluxome Street. When artist Jock Reynolds purchased and renovated a former coffin factory at 80 Langton Street, he made the ground floor available for a new organization to support new work.
Inspired by models in New York and elsewhere (Artists Space, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) that were committed to artist control, artist financial support, and support of artists by other artists, the not for profit 80 Langton Street Corporation was created in 1975 and opened its doors in July of 1975 with a one person video installation by artist Peter D’Agostino. Signers of the corporate documents included Judith Dunham, then editor of Artweek, David Robinson, architect, and gallerists Ruth Braunstein and Diana Fuller. A Board of Directors made up of artists and arts professionals took control.
New Langton Arts emerged into a local ecology that already or soon would contain peers such as Site/Cite/Sight (run by artist Alan Scarritt), La Mamelle (run by Carl Loeffler), Galeria de la Raza (run by Rene Yañez and Ralph Maradiaga), San Francisco Camerawork, Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art among others. All these organizations shared some of the ideals mentioned above. These emerging arts organizations were an extension into the fine arts realm of alternative organizations of the era that sought to inplicate themselves between producers and consumers in ways that bypassed traditional distribution methods, whether in education, food, or information distribution. Furthermore these New Left ideals extended to giving artists power over their fate using a participatory democracy model. [2]
[edit] Artist and Exhibitions
Artists that have exhibited at New Langton Arts include Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Charles Ray, and more recently: Harrell Fletcher, Tony Labat, Rigo 23, Kota Ezawa, Frances Stark, Mads Lynnerup, Felipe Dulzaides, Tim Sullivan, and others. [3]
New Langton Arts has presented retrospective exhibitions of seminal SF Bay Area artists: Jim Pomeroy (1999) and Tony Labat (2005). Also in 2005 they hosted Downtime: Constructing Leisure the first exhibition of the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts.
[edit] Public Programs
The Performance Writing series brings multi-disciplinary literary artists to Langton to present works that explore language in the context of live performance. The series, curated by Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brandon Brown, earned a 2005 “Best of the Bay” award in the San Francisco Bay Guardian for “Best New Reading Series to Catapult Language Off the Page." [4]
[edit] References
- ^ New Langton Arts Mission Statement. Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
- ^ [[Renny Pritikin|Pritikin, Renny]]. LACE Tenure document. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
- ^ Event Archives. Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
- ^ Event Archive quotation. Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
