Please join us as we kick off our 40th Anniversary Year by visiting new exhibitions and installations in all five galleries!
Gallery Hours:
Friday 1 - 5 pm
Saturday - Sunday 12 - 5 pm
And by appointment
Admission is always free.
MAIN GALLERY
Miya Ando: Waiting for the Moon
Curated by Louisa Gloger and Terry Donohue
Miya Ando’s artworks are a visual meditation on the cycles of nature and the passage of time; concept, image, and material are inextricably linked. The layered, refractive surfaces of Ando’s sculptures and paintings on metal or wood are a physical articulation of contemplation of the impermanent, temporal nature of their subjects, including seasons, tides, skyscapes, and elements rendered in ink, pigment, micronized silver, gold, mica, or resin. Her frequent choice of multilingual titles for her artworks—a Japanese word and its approximate English translation—reveals the variations in thought and perception between the two cultures that inform her identity and experience; the Japanese literary words naming and describing the varied qualities of the natural world express a philosophy of existence not often present in Western cultures.
A series of drawings recording the night sky during the Covid lockdowns were the genesis of the title of this exhibition. The project, named Nanayo, was inspired by an esoteric Japanese Buddhist ritual which translates to “waiting for seven nights,” wherein the faithful await moonrise and offer prayers during the 17th through the 23rd lunar evenings of each month. Many pieces in this exhibition across mediums link directly to Ando’s deep relationship with Bolinas and coastal northern California environments.
COASTAL MARIN ARTISTS GALLERY
Oona Ratcliffe: Life Lines
Curated by Louisa Gloger
Oona Ratcliffe is an artist born and raised in Bolinas and now residing in New York. This exhibition of botanical line drawings features a body of recent works on paper, all made during the past few years while Ratcliffe was living in Bolinas. The drawings served as a deep revisiting of the inspiration for the large-scale abstractions the artist has made over the last two decades. Ratcliffe gathered her direct observations of plants mainly from her mother’s Bolinas garden, the gardens of close friends, and through a generous collaboration with Mary Nesbit’s California Orchids. These drawings primarily reflect Ratcliffe’s relationship with line, shape, and form and her curiosity about the spaces between abstraction and representation. The exhibition includes a few small oil paintings that connect through color and composition to her large-scale abstractions. Ratcliffe earned a BA at UC Santa Cruz and an MFA at Hunter College in New York.
HELENE STURDIVANT MAYNE PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY
Lewis Watts: Comfortable in Their Own Skin
Curated by Louisa Gloger and Elia Haworth
Lewis Watts is an internationally exhibited documentary photographer, archivist, curator, and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. He focuses much of his art and research on the cultural landscape of the African Diaspora of the Bay Area and the nation. In this exhibition, Watts catches the spirit and individuality of his subjects in photographs taken over five years in many regions of the United States and around the world. Watts has co-authored books, including Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, (Heyday Books, 2020). A former Bolinas resident, he is affiliated with the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. His photographs are in many collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
THE FLOYD RUSSELL FAMILY HISTORY ROOM
Selected Objects from the History Collection
Curated by Elia Haworth
Bolinas Museum collects and preserves various items that tell the fascinating history of the community of Bolinas, beginning with the Coast Miwok and the Spanish Colonials to the current era. This special exhibit in the History Room features items ranging from historical photographs and documents to surprising artifacts such as Ramona Briones’ silk shawl, a woven horsehair hat, stage driver’s leather gloves from the Wild West days, a gentleman’s pocket watch, hand forged tools, and ladies’ dancing shoes.
The Permanent Collection Gallery presents a new selection of fourteen artworks from the collection, ten of which are by coastal Marin artists – including a historical painting by Thaddeus Welch, and works by Ido Yoshimoto, Peter de Swart, Clare Rojas, Sha Sha Higby, Charles Eckart and more.