Donald & Era Farnsworth at Port Angeles Fine Art Center

Donald & Era Farnsworth - In the Moonlight (I Forget I'm Human), 2017
cotton Jacquard tapestry with acrylic paint, 96 1/2 x 64 1/2 inches
Please join us at Port Angeles Fine Art Center in Port Angeles, WA for the opening of "I Forget I'm Human," an exhibition of tapestries and works on paper by Donald and Era Farnsworth on view from September 22 through November 18, 2018. An opening reception with the artists will be held Saturday, September 22 from 5-7 pm.

Additionally, the Farnsworths will give a public presentation in the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library on Sunday, September 23, 3-5 pm; this event is free and open to the public.

Donald & Era Farnsworth - Bulwark, 2017
mixed media on linen canvas, 70 x 46 inches
In "I Forget I’m Human," the Farnsworths address the relationship between humanity and the environment, investigating how myth and science have shaped human values from ancient times to the present day. Nearly all of the compositions in "I Forget I’m Human" include multiple layers of both hand-painted and digitally generated elements, creating a palimpsest-like effect that echoes the layers, patinas, and weathered wabi-sabi of works that have survived from ancient times while also incorporating contemporary digital processes.

The exhibition includes tapestries which use a medium older than oil on canvas – weaving, albeit updated by 19th-century Jacquard and 21st-century digital color matching technologies. Meanwhile, the Farnsworths' Art Notes series ‘recycles’ and re-imagines one dollar bill notes, re-envisioning the “Almighty Dollar” as a site wherein to celebrate heroes of creativity and conservation and to light-heartedly castigate polluters and oligarchs. A series of works depicting therianthropic (animal-human hybrid) deities harkens back to those appearing in the earliest surviving human artworks while also incorporating elements from Buddhist, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Islamic and Jungian iconographies.

Donald & Era Farnsworth - Aulos Echo, 2017
mixed media, 42 x 31 inches
From ancient gods with the heads of animals to living, breathing endangered species; from the capitalistic fever for accumulated wealth to precious natural resources like clean air and water, what we value is evident in the symbolic and visual output of our species: our myths and sacred images. In "I Forget I’m Human," the Farnsworths trace this output, offering a glimpse of the hubris of humanity matched with an optimistic appeal for spiritual and ecological balance.

Donald Farnsworth this Thurs. Jan 28 at the Art Museum of Sonoma County

Donald Farnsworth and Chuck Close at Close's New York studio, 2011.
Please join Magnolia director Donald Farnsworth this Thursday, January 28, 2016 at 6:30 pm for a special talk at the Art Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, CA on the occasion of the museum's "Magnolia Editions: Innovation and Collaboration" exhibition.

The Art Museum of Sonoma County is located at 505 B St, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 (click for directions). Please note that this museum is in Santa Rosa – not to be confused with the similarly named museum at 551 Broadway in Sonoma.

Donald Farnsworth and Rupert Garcia at Magnolia Editions with Garcia's 2010 print Obama From Douglass, on view now at the Art Museum of Sonoma County.
"The Magician Behind Magnolia Editions" will detail thirty years of collaboration and experimentation at Magnolia Editions and Farnsworth's work to introduce new techniques and technologies to some of the art world's biggest names.

Kiki Smith and Donald Farnsworth at Magnolia Editions, 2012.

The St. Petersburg Travelers (Donald & Era Farnsworth, Inez Storer & Andrew Romanoff) - Banquet at Gatchina, 2013
Acrylic and modeling paste on heavy linen. Image 47 x 71 inches; linen 56.6 x 82.5 inches. Edition of 3
(on view now at the Art Museum of Sonoma County)
Curated by Randy Rosenberg, "Magnolia Editions: Innovation and Collaboration" includes work from the last three decades by artists such as Robert Arneson, Squeak Carnwath, Don Ed Hardy, Enrique Chagoya, Chuck Close, Guy Diehl, Aziz + Cucher, Mildred Howard, William T. Wiley, Mary Hull Webster, Hung Liu, Richard Wagener, Doug Hall, Faisal Abdu'Allah, Kiki Smith, Donald and Era Farnsworth, Inez Storer and Andrew Romanoff, and more, representing a host of media ranging from etchings, collographs, and other more traditional printmaking technologies to Jacquard tapestries, UV-cured acrylic prints on handmade paper fabricated from clothing, and electronic mixed-media sculpture.

We hope you'll join us at the museum on Thursday evening!

Donald Farnsworth and Deborah Oropallo at Magnolia Editions, 2011.
Art Museum of Sonoma County website

SCGI Awards Exhibition at Worth Ryder Gallery

Donald and Era Farnsworth with their collaborative 2004 tapestry Dharmakaya in Tokyo in 2008.
Dharmakaya is included in the Awards Exhibition at Worth Ryder Gallery, opening this Wednesday, March 19th.
The Southern Graphics Council International conference is right around the corner! The SCGI is hosting its 42nd annual conference, Bridges: Spanning Tradition, Innovation, and Activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area this year; it will be the first West Coast conference in the organization’s history.

The SGCI will present a variety of awards to distinguished print artists and UC Berkeley Continuing Lecturer Randy Hussong has organized an exhibition at the university's Worth Ryder Art Gallery for the recipients of these awards, including the Innovation award winner, Magnolia director Donald Farnsworth.

The Grand Opening Reception for this exhibition is this Wednesday, March 19th from 4 to 7 pm.

Rather than exhibiting only his own work, Farnsworth has chosen to highlight a variety of projects published by Magnolia Editions in the last thirty years. The show will include works representing a host of proprietary and unorthodox processes by a veritable who's-who of Bay Area artists including Joan Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Hung Liu, Ray Saunders, Squeak Carnwath, Bruce Conner, and Rupert Garcia, plus a collaborative print by William Wiley, Robert Hudson, and Richard Shaw; recent tapestries by Chuck Close and Kiki Smith round out the exhibition.

Kiki Smith - Cathedral, 2013
Jacquard tapestry - 113 x 75 in. Edition of 10
The gallery will also host a special Memorial Retrospective Exhibition for UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice Professor Emeritus George Miyasaki (1935 – 2013).

Additionally, work will be exhibited by award winners Juan Fuentes and Sylvia Solochek Walters, and by Professor Emeritus Richard Shaw, whose award is in the appropriately titled Breaking The Mold category. There will also be installations by Ehren Tool -- a ceramicist who Magnolia blog readers may recall from the Combat Paper Project -- as well as the UC Berkeley Advanced Printmaking Class.

If you can't make the Grand Opening Reception on Wednesday, March 19th, there will be a special Conference Tour event on Friday, March 28th from 10 to 5 pm.

For more information on the show and associated events, please visit the Exhibition's home page.