A look at the decidedly unstuffy North Oakland galleries and studios.

By Obi Kaufmann (Photo by Obi Kaufmann)

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The Compound Gallery & Studios (1167 65th St., Oakland) has long been a noble outpost on the northern frontier of the Oakland art scene — happy in its own world, far from Art Murmur’s gravitational sway. Started four years ago (a long run in the volatile world of the gallery business) by powerhouse couple Lena and Matt Reynoso, The Compound has significantly diversified its offerings over the years, and they’re worthy of examination: In addition to the main gallery and more than twenty artist studios, it’s also home to a gallery featuring works made by its studio artists, a special collections room with flat files, the art subscription service Art in a Box, and The Admiral Dot Miniature Gallery, which proclaims to be the smallest gallery in the West. Yet the Reynosos say that their vision is only now being realized.

Given all the amenities offered there, The Compound aims to provide a full-service operation for the working artist. “So you have an artistic epiphany at 2 a.m., and you are suddenly hit by a moment of inspiration,” Matt Reynoso gave as an example. “You need to hand-forge and weld a steel sculpture, make a wood box for it with hand-printed silkscreen graphics, photograph it, put it on your website, print 1,000 letterpress posters commemorating it, and make a celebratory ceramic stein — this can all be achieved here.”

There is something so very right and strange about The Compound: an unapologetic welcome-ness where the spirit of creativity is fostered so communally that it becomes a purple, happy cloud that hangs in the air, intoxicating all. It’s decidedly unstuffy — a posture that promotes both a dizzying array of beautiful work and, sometimes, an overwhelming salon where the uninitiated eye is never able to appreciate any singular presentation.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Among the exhibits right now at The Compound are Buy American by Clare Szydlowski, in which she explores the American dream with new genre, including packaging in a pseudo-retail experience; Things Fall Apart, a group show curated by Oakland painter Alison OK Frost in the Studio Gallery; the imaginative works of Masako Miki at The Art in the Box headquarters; the paintings of Jeanne Lorenz in the special collection; and, lastly, Rex Waters in Admiral Dot. All shows run through May 6.

By: Monica Cruz-Rosas | February 23, 2012 – 8:38 am

The silhouettes of hundreds of Occupy Oakland protesters are encased in the belly of an angry matryoshka doll. The outline of the Russian figurine is printed with burnt-red oil ink on beige cardboard. Above and below the strange depiction reads the text “Oakland Onward” written in cyan and gray bold sans-serif font.

Dozens of these matryoska posters appeared on the trees of Canyon—a small community located between Oakland and Moraga—one morning in November 2011. A few hours later, most of them were gone. “We thought the neighbors were angry at the message,” says Jeanne Lorenz, the fine art and letterpress printer who had made the posters, “but it turned out they liked it too much. They asked us to print more copies.”

Lorenz, 43, says her 8-year-old daughter came up with the idea after joining the Occupy Oakland protests with her father last year. “She wanted to do something in Canyon,” Lorenz says. “But it’s hard to do an Occupy camp in a town of 200 people.” Instead, mother and daughter designed the posters inspired by drawings of Russian dolls the girl had sketched earlier. The images were printed on beige cardboard on Lorenz’s old manual press. Each poster depicts a doll with a distinctive picture on her belly accompanied with a message, such as “Occupy Past,” “Occupy Future,” “Occupy Canyon” and “Oakland Onward.”

The seven posters that once praised the 99% on the woodland roads of Canyon are now part of the newest exhibit at The Compound Gallery in Oakland. The exhibit, “The Art of Letterpress,” showcases the work of more than 15 print artists from the Bay Area and other letterpress meccas in the U.S. These new wave of printers combine up-to-date design software and materials with printing techniques as old as the Gutenberg press. “Those who say letterpress is dying don’t live in the Bay Area,” says exhibit co-curator Rebecca Peters. “People who live here are drawn to the tactile element and the quality of letterpress work that other forms of print don’t have.”

The exhibit, which opened on February 11, 2012, features a variegated collection of printed art, from vintage banners of bluegrass music festivals and illustrations of fairy tales to portraits of Bruce Lee and posters of gay rights protests. The Art of Letterpress also includes displays of materials and tools used in traditional printing.

Peters, 34, an etchings and print artist and San Francisco Art Institute alumna, bought a 1925 Chandler & Price platen press—her first letterpress—in 2009, not only to expand her artwork, but also to make ends meet. “I bought it during the economic downfall,” she says. “I wanted to print for other people as way to support myself.” That year, Peters started her own business, Reb Peters Press in West Oakland, where she creates customized business cards, wedding invitations, postcards and posters. She works on her own art in between orders.

Letterpress artists transform text into displayable art, Peters says. Poetry broadsides are examples of this literary visual mix. “Poems are tucked away and you only see them when you open a book,” she says. “It’s really great to have a poem that really means a lot to you have it on your wall where it’s easily accessible.”

Peters has printed broadsides of some of her poems. One of them, displayed at the exhibition, is entitled “Lies and Fries.” The first verse reads:

Linus likes legumes like Lucy likes linguini

Ernesto eats edamame till Ed puts on his bikini

The blue small rounded letters pressed on a thick white paper create a 3-D effect on the seven stanzas, placed unevenly (but with calculated spacing) throughout the sheet. The poem is illustrated by the outline of an electric pink sailboat floating on sea waves formed with curved tracings in shades of green and blue.

Peters uses the “Lies and Fries” broadside to exemplify her process of letterpress printing. She designed the poem layout using Abode Illustrator. Then she had the layout printed on a photo polymer plate, a plastic surface on which the text is in relief. The sailboat and the waves were also printed on a polymer plate. Peters says drawings can also be carved on linoleum blocks. The artist must carve the white spaces—or the un-inked parts—of the illustration. “In letterpress you have to think backwards and in reverse a little bit,” she says while holding a linoleum block in which she drew the cartoon of a big-headed boy.

Once the plates are ready, they are placed on the press, tightened by chase blocks, a wooden frame that keeps the plates from moving during the printing. The paper must go through several printing sessions, one for each color. The ink is placed on a circular metallic plate and then it’s “grabbed” by two rollers attached to the bottom of the press. The rollers ink the relief surfaces of the plate. Once inked, the plates are pressed onto the paper sheets one by one with a handle-pedal mechanism. Peters says the process, from designing to cutting out the paper, requires time and precision. “A lot of printers are very fussy so they usually take a lot of time do this,” she says. “I’m not as bad as some of them, but it’s very important to make sure all the elements fit.” She says great quality is usually the result of fussiness. “When you do this, you come to appreciate other people’s work and the care they’ve taken doing it. I have a lot of respect for good printers.”

Letterpress printing is not a new to the Bay Area. Printers Adrian Wilson and Jack Stauffacher made San Francisco—their hometown—one of the epicenters of innovative and state of the art book and letterpress printing since the post-WWII era. Wilson and Stauffacher’s work is praised among national and international artists and print connoisseurs. They are also know for leading the way for a group of printers who continued the tradition of letterpress in the San Francisco Bay Area. Peters says The Art of Letterpress presents the work of a new wave of letterpress artists, who might not share the same ideas as their predecessors. “Some of the older printers don’t see letterpress as a way to make art,” she says. “There are definitely those who do, but most of them are just more traditional.” Peters says the old and new wave of printers clash on their ideas on the use of technology, especially the use of software to design layouts. “Some of them frown upon even having a plate made,” she says. “They want everything hand set.”

Although Peters uses both digital prints and traditional type, she says using new technology is necessary to run her business. “I like the romanticism of hand-setting the type, but it doesn’t really make sense from the economy stand point,” she says. “It takes 20 times more to set everything by hand. My time is valuable to me.” Despite this debate, Peters says new and old printers have one thing in common. “Nobody is getting rich from letterpress printing,” she says. “People who do this, for business or for art, do it because they love it.” Claire Kessler-Bradner, 31, an Oakland print artist and an art teacher at the San Francisco Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory, fell in love with letterpress as a child. Her mother ran a printing studio in her home in San Francisco. “The print shop was also my house. The art space and my domestic space were overlapped and that had a great influence in my upbringing,” she says. Kessler-Bradner says she enjoys the “hands-on experience” of letterpress over other forms of art, but that’s not the only reason printing became her favorite activity. “Even working on your own thing, there’s a sense of comradely in letterpress printing,” she says. “Everybody works, creates and solve technical problems together.” Kessler-Bradner describes her experience growing up among printers in her poem “Ode to Printmaking,” which she printed on a sand-colored paper with a Vandercook letterpress.

The broadside is displayed on the exhibit. The Oakland artist says letterpress printing is becoming increasingly popular in the Bay Area. “People crave letterpress because it’s something they can touch and feel,” she says. “I think always a return to what’s more tactile and handmade because our culture is so focused on what we see on a screen.” Not all the artists showcased in the exhibit come from the Bay Area. One of the highlights of the exhibit is a collection of posters by Alabama printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Kennedy is known among letterpress lovers for his use of bold and large fonts, bright colors and provocative messages, like “You are going to hell and the devil is my bitch.” The phrase is printed in glossy black ink on a natural cardboard with strokes of bright red, orange and fluorescent yellow on the background. Below this poster another reads, “Life,” in a big bold font. Right below these word a message was printed on tiny rounded typography: “You’re not gonna get rich, so you might as well be happy.”

Kennedy is the subject of the 2008 documentary “Proceed and be Bold!” (a message on of his posters) directed by Chicago filmmaker Laura Zinger. The film describes his transition from a corporate man to a “humble negro printer,” as he describes himself in the documentary, who uses letterpress as a means to convey his thought on gender, racial and social issues. Some of Kennedy’s posters, as well as work from other artists in the exhibit, are available for sale. Prints for sale also include mini posters, postcards and gift cards created by Bay Area print artists. As part of the exhibit, Peters will have a letterpress workshop at the gallery on March 18, 2012, using the gallery’s Chandler and Price platen press, also displayed in the exhibit. The workshop is limited to seven people. Peters also offers workshops at her studio in the American Steel Warehouse in West Oakland. “Couples come and print their own weeding invitations. It’s kind of fun,” Peters says. “People really like to work on their own projects. It’s really exciting.” The Art of Letterpress will run through March 25, 2012.

If ink pressed to paper sets your heart aflutter, kick-start your Valentine’s Day celebrations with a little letterpress love this weekend. Opening Feb. 11, Oakland’s The Compound Gallery presents The Art of Letterpress - an exhibition dedicated to that oh-so-tactile and antiquated art of hand-crafted printing.

SF letterpress fave Rebecca Peters co-curates the show featuring top-notch letterpress artists from the Bay Area and beyond. Expect an array of playful, bold, boundary-pushing prints, books, ephemera, and vintage machines. Plus, renowned Alabama-based letterpress printer, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. (subject of the recent documentary Proceed and Be Bold! and now designer for Crate and Barrel’s trendy CB2 sister store) will exhibit his edgy, proverb-infused limited-edition prints.

The show runs through March 25. Here’s a peek:

Image courtesy Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.

And if you really want to swoon over letters and typography, don’t miss The Compound Gallery’s Art Movie Night screening of Typeface on Feb. 23:

As part of her ongoing work at the Yelling Clinic – a collective that explores the area where art, medicine and disability intersect – Katherine Sherwood combines ancient painting techniques with medical images, from Renaissance drawings to computer scans. In this series of mixed-media paintings, she accentuates the masculine.

Through Dec. 5. Noon-6 p.m. Thurs.-Sun., also 7-10 p.m first Fri. The Compound Gallery, 1167 65th St., Oakland. (510) 601-1702. www.thecompoundgallery.com.

- Mary Eisenhart, 96hours@sfchronicle.com

Katherine Sherwood’s new collection He-Charmers opened last week at the Compound Gallery in Oakland. Her newest work features mixed media paintings that incorporate brain imagery from her personal medical history.

A pair of eyes, the color and shape of almonds, stares out from under the brim of Stevie’s strange hat.  The hat looks like it is made out of a material that is almost like a photograph, but not quite. Snaking through it are tunnels of different sizes, winding and curling their way haphazardly from top to bottom. But this is not a hat, it’s is a cerebral angiogram—a picture of the cardiovascular structure inside a brain. The tunnels are the tiny enclosed highways that carry blood to different regions of the brain. And this angiogram is not of just any brain, but that of the artist’s whose work is watching you from the white walls of this Oakland gallery.

Katherine Sherwood, whose show He-Charmers opened last week at The Compound Gallery, located in the Golden Gate arts district in North Oakland, has included a number of her own angiograms in the mixed media pieces that comprise her collection. Fourteen years ago, Sherwood, a professor of art and disabilities studies at UC Berkeley, had a massive cerebral hemorrhage in the left side of her brain—a stroke—that almost took her life and left her mostly paralyzed on the right side of her body. She had to learn how to walk, talk, think and paint all over again.

Sherwood, an arts practice and disabilities professor at UC Berkeley, suffered a near-fatal stroke 14 years ago that left her without the use of her right arm or hand

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She had been a right-handed painter before the stroke, but it cost her the use of her right arm and hand. In adapting to her disability she found that her lack of fine motor skills actually had a freeing effect on her work, her process becoming more intuitive and less calculated.  After having been propelled toward the same images and ideas for years, it was almost as if the stroke had somehow freed her to finally create the painting that had always been in her head. “It took a while for my life to catch up to my art,” she said, half-chuckling at the irony.

He-Charmers, her most recent work, is the second in her series Healers from the Yelling Clinic.  The first collection in the series debuted a year ago at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, and depicted distinctly female healers.  Each piece represented the female form through vividly painted torsos on canvases attached to hanging textile skirts.

In her new collection Sherwood decided to paint male healers. According to Sherwood, theHealers from the Yelling Clinic series is an open enough work that that could mean healers of many types—spiritual healing, emotional healing or the healing by a nurse or doctor.  “I sort of see them as clinicians of the Yelling Clinic,” she said of the male healers in this work and of the female healers from her first collection of the series.  “The men turned out in the end to be more abstract, different palettes, less regal, different tactile sensation offered by their fabric.”

She used a mix of her own brain scans and images from neuro-anatomy texts dating back to the 16^th Century, along with bold and deftly shaped swirls of paint to construct the faces, jewelry, and hats of her healers. Some of the pieces more directly illustrate the male figure, like Green Jeans,which portrays a man with an MRI image of a brain instead of a head. Others stray into more abstract representations, like Landscape which depicts an enmeshed tangle of individual neurons. But all of them share a commonality of form and pattern that elicit either directly or indirectly the circuitry of the human mind.

Sherwood chose to include both forms of brain imagery—her own, and those from neuro-anatomy texts—because of her interest in how the brain was represented throughout medical history.  Sherwood said the MRI is a form of imaging that is radically different from the technology that came before it, and the juxtaposition of these images is testimony to that. “I wanted to place my brain between it [the earlier medical text representations of the brain] and the fMRI technology of the 21^st Century.”

Sherwood said she also wanted to comment on how the brain images of the past were made by artists, not anatomists. “In today’s medical imaging the artist is left out,” Sherwood said. “What happens when the artist comes at the end of the process not the beginning?”

Including her own medical documents was also important to Sherwood on a more personal level. “They were symbols for me that I would live,” she said.

A visitor to the Compound Gallery looks at one of Sherwood's pieces entitled "Landscape".

Lena Reynoso, who co-directs the Compound Gallery with her husband Matt, said that this is one of the things that drew them to Sherwood’s new work.  “For us, Katherine is really a true artist,” Reynoso said.  “Her process was transformed by her stroke and her art is really reflective of that—there’s a feeling and a meaning behind each piece.”

The Yelling Clinic that Sherwood’s Healersseries refers to is the name of an arts and disabilities collective, comprised of six professional working artists—five of whom live in the Bay Area—that Sherwood co-founded in the spring of 2008.  Its members seek to use art as a way to connect and engage artists with either cognitive or physical handicaps.  They are particularly interested in disabilities caused by war and military-related pollution, such as radioactive contamination in Japan after the drop of the atomic bomb or chemical weaponry, like the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.  “War is the biggest creator of disabled people,” Sherwood said.  “We’re really interested in its effects on global disability populations.”

The Yelling Clinic is currently organizing activities for survivors of war in the Bay Area. In September the group sponsored a Berkeley stop on the Combat Paper Project, which is a nationwide campaign of workshops for US veterans to transform their military uniforms into pieces of art by cutting them up and turning them into paper, which serve as the base for their works of art.

This coming December, the six members of the Yelling Clinic have plans to travel to Vietnam to meet with communities of disabled artists and artisans, many of whom are survivors of Agent Orange. Agent Orange, used by the US military as a defoliating agent during the Vietnam War, is a powerfully toxic herbicide that is still in the soil and the food chain in parts of Vietnam, and still causing birth defects more than 30 years after the war’s end.

Before Sherwood leaves for Vietnam with the other Yelling Clinic artists she will be giving an artist’s talk, on December 4^th at The Compound Gallery where she will discuss her work and her process.

“When you almost die that changes everything,” Sherwood said.  “Death is nearer, not forced away.  It naturally changes your art practice.”

From OaklandNorth.net

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Travel underlies the work of two painters in this exhibition. Recently returned from coastal towns in Senegal, Martin Webb is fascinated with themes of the need for work, the need to move from place to place, the appeal of water, and the people and animals who find themselves caught up in it all. Thomas Haag, meanwhile, uses discarded books and reclaimed paint to create collages of newly discovered worlds.

- Mary Eisenhart, 96hours@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page G – 16 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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