"Collaborating with Bruce Conner" at SJICA, Thursday Feb. 26

Bruce Conner - ANGEL WALL, CANYON DE CHELLEY, 2003/1976
Archival pigmented inkjet on Rives BFK white
17.75 x 23.5 in. Edition of 10
This Thursday evening in San Jose, Magnolia director Donald Farnsworth and Arion Press director Andrew Hoyem will participate in a public discussion of the brilliant and iconoclastic Bruce Conner, moderated by Conner Family Trust director Bob Conway.

The discussion, "Collaborating with Bruce Conner," will take place from 7 pm - 9 pm at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art. Tickets are $5 for ICA members, $10 for Non-members and free for students.

Conner at Magnolia Editions in the early 2000s.
SJICA describes the concurrent show, "Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints" as follows:
A fixture in the San Francisco Beat-era art scene in the 1950s 
and 1960s, Conner was renowned for his groundbreaking work
 in assemblage, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and experimental film. The Wichita, Kansas native never worked with
 one medium for long, and infamously shifted personas, often attributing his artwork to celebrities, such as actor and friend Dennis Hopper, and fake personas alike.

Printmaking is one medium that spans Conner's entire career. "Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints" will feature around 100 works, from the first etchings and lithographs the artist made while still a young student in Kansas in 1944 to his last prints made at Magnolia Editions, Oakland, California, in 2003.

All of his important series of prints will be featured: the work with Tamarind Lithography Workshop in the mid-1960s; a selection from his disorienting series of maze-like lithographs; and all three volumes of “The Dennis Hopper One Man Show,” a series of etchings based on engraving collages.

In addition, the exhibition will feature rare ephemera from the archives of the Conner Family Trust. For example, photographic slides (strikingly similar to the black and white lithographs that he started making in the 1960s) that Conner used when he was part of a group that performed experimental light shows for bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.

For more information, please visit the SJICA website. We hope to see you there!

Conner in 1954.