NinaJohnson

Opening on May 15th and on view through July 24th, Vibrant features works from seventeen of Creative Growth’s artists working across drawings, paintings, and sculpture: Juan Aguilera, Joseph Alef, Terri Bowden, Maureen Clay, Kim Clark, Lauren Dare, John Martin, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, Latefa Noorzai, Carrie Oyama, Tony Pedemonte, Carlos Perez, Aurie Ramirez, Ron Veasey, George Wilson, and Ying Ge Zhou.

Despite their work often being compared to “outsider art,” the self-taught artists at Creative Growth and beyond have always been an integral part of historical and contemporary art. “It’s important to remember that these artists are part of the contemporary art world, and not relegated to a limiting category such as outsider art or disability art,” says Creative Growth Director of External Relations Tom di Maria.

As Nina Johnson Gallery’s second exhibition with Creative Growth, Vibrant represents a dedication to showcasing the vibrant and important work of these artists. “Creative Growth is delighted to be partnering with Nina Johnson again,” says di Maria, “and we’re excited by her commitment to integrating our artist into the contemporary art dialogue.”

About Creative Growth
Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is a non-profit based in Oakland, CA that provides a professional studio environment and gallery representation to artists with developmental disabilities. The Creative Growth Studio is home to over 140 artists who work in a variety of media. Facilitated by professional artists, the studio provides artistic support, high-quality materials, and space for painting, drawing, ceramics, wood working, fiber arts, printmaking, and digital media. The studio is an open space, converted 12,000 square foot former auto repair shop.

About the artists

Juan Aguilera
Juan Aguilera (b. 1966) emigrated to the United States from Mexico at the age of eight. Often paying homage to his homeland, Aguilera fuses female imagery with flowering plants and other organic content – a gesture that the artist describes as a symbolic nod to the matriarch. He plays out this devotion to female forms and their undergarments in a variety of media – painting, printmaking, ceramic, and wood. His interest in the subject isn’t sensational. Rather, the rendered garments become a profound and multifaceted vessel for feminine energy. Something of an alchemist, Aguilera’s most recent practice combines his established drawing and painting style with assemblage by pouring thick layers of gel medium onto pages laden with real bras and panties. Aguilera has practiced at Creative Growth since 1998.

Terri Bowden
Terri Bowden’s (b. 1962, California) early work consisted primarily of albino animals and people–an interest she developed while attending summer camp with other legally blind people. Using rich applications of pastel, her work on paper plays with the lack of pigment in the figures and the vibrant saturation of colors that surround them. Either anonymous rockers or icons like Michael Jackson and Rod Stewart, Bowden enforces a sublime aesthetic that transcends conventionality she describes as ‘dented.’ Bowden’s recent practice has shifted almost exclusively to digital work, using an iPad to alter photographs and create AR architecture. There is a through line from her earlier work to the digital ‘makeovers’ of historical figures, celebrities, and rock stars that imbue her subjects with bold new meanings. Bowden’s work is included in the permanent collection at the MADmusée in Liege.

Maureen Clay
Maureen Clay (b. 1947, California) paints with thickly brushed impasto, layering colors repeatedly until the entire composition has been covered several times. She has an intricate sense of color and design, and while her work appears abstract, Clay describes her images as distorted versions of fish, birds, and food. Her work holds multitudes, appearing as a deep seascape, starry night sky, or a view through a microscope. Also a proficient textile artist, Clay, similarly to her painting practice, covers the surface of her clothing with pompoms, sequins, or dense layers of thread. Clay has practiced at Creative Growth since 1991.

John Martin
John Martin (b. 1963 in Marks, Mississippi) creates drawings from memories of time spent with his family on their Mississippi farm. John’s signature imagery makes his work instantly recognizable: trucks, snakes, pocket knives, cell phones as well as an occasional item from his collection of discarded valuables found on the street. Through his extraordinary imagination, John transforms everyday objects into talismans of sharp-toothed animals and goofy characters. John’s style has recently become more refined and minimal, often depicting just the outlines of objects. Working easily with wood and ceramic, Martin’s pieces both mimic functionality in their form, while subverting practicality through his outrageous animal mash-ups, larger-than-life Leatherman tools, and mysterious signifiers. In 2014, John was invited by Facebook to create a site-specific artwork as part of the inaugural Artist In Residence program at the new Frank Gehry-designed Facebook campus.

Donald Mitchell
Donald Mitchell, a San Francisco native, has practiced at Creative Growth Art Center since 1986. Mitchell’s work began with dense abstract and cross-hatched fields of black lines or brush strokes that obliterated the paper and hid any trace of underlying image which, overtime, uncovered faces and forms buried in the darkness that populated his works.  Mitchell’s most recent work maintains the foundation of these anonymous figures, but has returned to large scale abstraction with late-career artist’s skill. Mitchell’s work has been exhibited at Collection de l’Art Brut; Switzerland, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Cavin Morris and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum; Jennifer Lauren Gallery in London; and is included in the permanent collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Carrie Oyama
Carrie Oyama’s (b.1948 in New York, NY) drawings dance across the page as a multi-layered visual performance. Her work is inherently expressive in its line quality, which effectively communicates a complex understanding of the human body as it moves through space. Oyama’s figures are taken either from photographs or the depths of her imagination and memory, and are often executed with her non-dominant hand. The artist possesses a rich artistic background, having majored in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the late 1960 and having participated in the Pedestrian Art Movement and in performances at the Whitney Museum and Judson Church before moving to Berkeley in 1979. Oyama arrived at Creative Growth in the 1980s, a tenure in which she largely experimented with soft sculpture and ceramics. Since 2014, Carrie has concentrated on drawing delicate and refined compositions that connect to her past experiences and subconscious mind.

Carlos Perez
Carlos Perez (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) is a master storyteller, weaving the struggle between good and evil through his drawings and mixed media sculptures. Be it drawing, clay, or textile, each piece is a narration that continues to evolve as the story unfolds. The majority of his work is based on a fascination with monsters (he has profound appreciation for films like Ghostbusters and Batman). As Perez’s story develops, so too does his drawing, yielding a densely layered sheath ink and intricate textures showcasing indentations of “ghost dogs” or “owls” hiding beneath his dark abstract worlds.

Ron Veasey
Ron Veasy was born in 1957, Las Vegas, NE and is an early participant in Creative Growth’s programming. His work has evolved in technique and scale in his four decades in the Studio, but his fundamental interest in the human form as a vehicle for color and line remains central to his practice. Whether a sloping neck or a glancing eye, Veasey’s carefully considered portraits are completed methodically and with great intention. Veasey moves slowly, quietly, and steadily through the stages of image selection, outline, color choice, and then painting. His inspiration comes from source material, fashion magazines or books of photograph, and he can take hours or days to identify the perfect muse. The result is an image that is at once graphic and sculptural, a distillation of color and form that allows the viewer to focus on the gesture of a stare – the gaze of the portrait becomes the fundamental subject of the work, unflinching in its connection with the viewer.

Ying Ge Zhou
Ying Ge Zhou (b. 1978) was born in Guangdong, China and came to Creative Growth in 2010 with a strong aptitude for drawing and painting. Working with either fashion magazines or her imagination, Ying Ge creates enigmatic portraits rendered in simple lines, and suffused with watercolor. Ying Ge has an ability to translate static advertisements into images that can be bold and vibrant or elegant and streamlined. Ying Ge sometimes plucks lines of text from these advertisements lending an element of unexpected humor and irony to her graceful compositions. More recently, Ying Ge has been combining paint and embroidery on fabric to bring texture and dimensionality to her signature style.