Saturday, May 10th | 4PM
RSVP to info@pamelawalshgallery.com
Pamela Walsh Gallery is pleased to invite you to join us for a panel talk discussing our exhibition, Concentric Circles.
Meet the panelists:
Ted Barrow is an art historian, writer, curator, lecturer, and skateboarder whose work bridges academic scholarship and contemporary culture. He holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he completed his dissertation about the Floridian paintings of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent through an ecocritical lens and has taught at Barnard, Baruch, City College, and the University of San Francisco. As a writer, he has written for Artforum, Variable West, Alta Journal, and Pin-UP Magazine. He has contributed to galleries such as Pace, providing critical essays and exhibition texts. In addition to his academic work, he co-curates exhibitions with his partner under their company, The Place. Barrow is also well known in the skateboarding world for his cultural commentary and historical insights, most notably through This Old Ledge, a video series for Thrasher Magazine that passionately advocates for the architectural and cultural significance of skateboarding.
Matt Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist, lawyer, and former politician with deep roots in the Bay Area art scene. A represented artist known for his intricate collage work, he is also an avid collector of Bay Area Figurative art and has longstanding personal connections with many of the movement’s key figures. Gonzalez’s political career includes serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where he was elected President, running for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, and serving as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School and, as of February 2024, serves as the Chief Attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office.
Emilio Villalba is a San Francisco-based painter represented by Dolby Chadwick Gallery. He serves as both a Professor and the Director of the Art Department at Cañada College. His work explores design elements through paint, drawing inspiration from the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Expressionism. Villalba's paintings range from dense compositions filled with painted objects to single portraits and still life works that convey mood and domesticity, often featuring his wife and friends. He holds an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Art University and a BFA in Animation from the Art Institute of California. His works are included in permanent collections such as the Crocker Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Colleción Solo in Madrid. Recent accomplishments include a solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, participation in the De Young Museum's "Our Peaceable Kingdom" exhibition curated by Lee Mingwei, and a collaboration with Valentino on their iconic V-Sling bags during Art Basel Miami.
About the Exhibition:
Concentric Circles: Tracing the Radiance of Bay Area Figuration revisits the fertile artistic period of 1950-1965, when a group of San Francisco Bay Area painters, led by David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, dared to pursue figurative art at the height of Abstract Expressionism, as well as the successive generations of contemporary artists who continue to explore the intersection of abstraction and representation. Contemporary artists working across diverse media have drawn inspiration from the Bay Area Figurative Movement fusion of loose, expressive brushwork with deeply human themes, ensuring that its legacy remains a vital force in contemporary art.
