Artist Conversation: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon + Nellie King Solomon

[Music] to think outside the box is to approach a problem or a question in a creative way in the case of a true artist nellie king solomon and barbara stauffick or solomon they take a critical yet playful eye to their chosen fields both trained as architects but were never licensed which might explain the way they established the rules grids or frameworks only to challenge their very existence at the heart of each unique artistic practice lies a confident ability to think and explore beyond the frame perhaps best known for her super graphics graphics that are oversized to the scale of architecture produced in the 1960s artist barbara stotheker solomon has worked in graphic design architecture landscape drawing writing and more around the walls of the gallery the exhibition features utopian drawings from her green architecture series large ping pong paintings and a recent series of alphabet drawings there's also a super graphics intervention in the middle of the gallery is a recreation from the 1990 exhibition visionary san francisco at san francisco museum of modern art that features pong tables for play nelly king solomon approaches painting with equal parts irreverence and admiration the exhibition features recent and never-before-seen large-scale works that use abstraction and realism to tell stories resulting in experiential paintings in lieu of canvas and brushes king solomon paints on the sharp industrial material of mylar using custom wood and glass tools for pulling paint around and sweeping gestural marks bold colors and unusual materials like asphalt swirl about captivating the senses and revealing the tension between spontaneity and rigor that are at work in her practice for the exhibition at smoka and for the first time the work of mother and daughter artists is shown in close proximity while both artists explore the physicality of the space they're also interested in the potential performance of constructing art and although their formal approaches are quite different both are engaged in moving beyond established expectations of art design and architecture as we look to new ways of doing just about everything now is the right moment to encourage the out of the box thinking that these artists so readily exemplify [Music] so thank you so much for being here nelly and bobby and i wanted to start by just acknowledging where we are in space and time so i'm i'm in scottsdale arizona bobby's in san francisco and nellie's in los angeles and i wanted to know how you are surviving the pandemic so maybe we can start with you bobby i'm just working i had so much work to do that i'm happy for that i have to stay health that's awesome and nelly um a little bit of the same i have to say i'm really grateful for things that are happening during the pandemic that i mean i guess they might have they would have still been happening but i think that working with you jennifer and smoka and the energy from christian bruno the filmmaker my fabricator like they've had a lot of really devoted energy that if it wasn't a pandemic maybe we wouldn't concentrate as much as we are right now so i'm pretty grateful for i have a dealer a museum show and a fabricator i don't think i would have had those things we're all propelled by our by our work keeping us moving forward it's so important right now we have to we we can't pause in creating content and and other things we need to be moving forward okay so i wanted to start um just it generally to talk about the fact that i we've placed your work i guess i have in close proximity to to one another for the first time and so in in thinking about how you both approach art i i guess i recognize that you question authority that you are not afraid right to break these boundaries so i wondered bobby where where that comes from for you it's like is it a family trait for example or is it something that you learned along the way is it self-confidence i don't know what do you have an idea well one could say it's a family trade and that my i remember my mother would hold me up when i was voting i was three or four or five and say pull any lever they're all crooks and my father was a lawyer and he said don't believe anything anybody says but i don't know who you mean by authority i mean i certainly when it comes to lettering or my work believe well i listened to armand hoffman but i and it's interesting and i listened to him i'm doing a new book on the forms of letterings more more crazy but playing with the form of lettering and it totally armin would love it but he never discussed what the words meant i mean you just did the words you didn't read them and then until i went that you learned in the university which involved was across the street nobody went to the university they went to the kunskaver versus if they were wanted to be a designer whereas when i went back to san francisco i went to berkeley and studied philosophy and history and learned what the words meant and so now i'm trying to put them together but i listen to different authorities not not not any no not husbands or presidents yeah that's good well and and maybe authority isn't the right word but it's it's working against the norm right so if there's a norm you're not afraid to i don't understand what a norm would be that so well like the way things have always been done no i don't understand that no i don't believe okay so for nelly um now that you're working on mylar so you're making paintings that aren't on canvas so i would say that's a way of of challenging that norm of painting in a in a direct way um what do you think nelly i mean i would corroborate with bobby that it's not that we don't listen to any authority but we have specific authorities that stay with us in our histories and i think merge those voices in ourselves and maybe those are what we're answering to as opposed to any authority of the given moment that's being given to us as an outside parameter my relationship to mylar comes to my relationship to architecture which i have a relationship i really had a relationship to canvas and brush i started in graduate school as a painter as an architect so my answer yeah i i do pull from cooper union i pull from bobby's relationship to armin hoffman like i pull from hoffman's principles like innately without knowing it um not that they're ignored but that they're synthesized simultaneously so there's something higher listening to that may not be the question asked of the moment but makes sense within the work bobby we're showing nine of your ping pong table paintings of a few of which are behind me now and i wondered because so much of your work is at a smaller scale at that eight and a half by 11 size what was it like to create such a such large works at the same as time i did that i was doing super graphics which is larger so i mean i i either do the small scale at home so i don't dirty the house or when i get a wall or home whole building you have walls of walls or wall to do it's bigger than that so i mean that doesn't bother me and nellie your works uh that we're including in the show are eight foot by eight foot and some are seven by seven foot so how did you start working at that large scale well i've always been attracted to paintings that are place as opposed to a thing and [Music] when i went to go work when i was in cca in graduate school they had just built this enormous building that was still kind of empty the san francisco campus was this nave and the back of it i started collaborating with a friend huge and there was this bus washer and he was washing the buses with such authority and simplicity these like three foot wide brushes on a stick that i wanted to paint like the bus washer what made wash the buses and sort of this confidence and clarity of the way that he hadn't you know an urgent clear message about how he did each one and i think the combination of the size of that space and coming out of dance and coming out of architecture because i crawl on the work as i make it so and i treat it more like a kitchen floor like i work flat i don't work up like it's art i work down like i'm cleaning so that it's not intimidating and correct for parallax by climbing on ladders [Laughter] it's very humble in what you can actually do and i think painting is very related to like the body and action that's most efficient the way that is so bobby you were talking about the scale of the super graphics and we will have um some super graphics in the gallery which is the lols um and when you described to me what the lol referred to you understood it as little old lady um not laughs out loud so here we have these opposing walls right like little old lady laughs out loud so i'm wondering um what does make you laugh bobby what does make me laugh yeah i don't know not super graphics i mean if that were real super graphics i mean the the building had had limitations and there are also limitations if i were there i might have done something more daring or i would have done letters that were from floor to ceiling or much more something but the fact that i'm not going to be there i had to i have to trust some painted side painter in the in the in scottsdale to do it i i made something very simple and i i'm also i'm writing about how words are getting um simpler and simpler to the point where they're all just acronyms now you can almost talk in that right and you think it's your um do you think it's your training in design that is why you come back to the written word so much is that the relationship there or i know you also do lots of writing um design it was just how they looked and i did learn to to letter i mean i have these skills that nobody seems to have anymore like i know how to letter it's that type but i i enjoy lettering and um i enjoy thinking about how the look of the word goes with the meaning of the word or doesn't or that's why i like making books where i can go the new book is crazy from the kind of expanding this subject and it's a subject that the painters i guess have thought about i know that a lot of philosophers have thought about how words would be how look you know and even tried to um think about it and i could but it's now at this point in my life i've had so much of reading words and so much of making drawing words that putting them together kind of just comes to be and i like the idea that it's somewhat of a self-portrait well little little old lady laughing out loud that's a self-portrait yeah um and and nelly the new narrative series that we're including which are these highly detailed very colorful works are in my opinion much like a self-portrait i don't know if you think of them that way as a self-portrait yeah they are self-portraits but they're also a portrait of the self in the times so they're a portrait of the times and i think i did them in a moment when we weren't ready to look at ourselves yet and what's happened in 2020 like forces us to take a good look at ourselves so it's i think it's great that you want to show them i'm really happy because they are um works that scare some dealers or others get excited but it's what they do is they violate the sublime abstraction with all the content of everything of daily life that we're not allowed to talk about everything that's in the art world more than daily life but like one of them's about the art world one of them's about our relationship to gas and oil another one's about our relationships to money and regrets and friendships and navigation systems and everything we're not supposed to be that the painting is supposed to transcend as a sublime object so i wanted to violate them with that which is totally a self-portrait well in the works on the other side of the gallery i'm thinking that are much more gestural without the without letters or references to other painters or all the things that are in the new narrative series um those are still really interrogating the the materials and our life and our reliance on like you like you mentioned gas and oil and yeah obsession with the road and all of these things but they're but they're in that very sublime way where you you don't get hit over the head with it yeah i mean they're not dogmatic those don't spell it out but i mean the two that you've chosen to curate of this time of 2020 are matchstick and rattling the pipes which i painted during the riots during the fireworks for brianna teller all around my studio they're very much during this mismanaged pandemic and of this time of being oh you can go this way oh no you can't oh oh block and they are portraits of the time and the portraits of how we are not able to process it at the time so yeah they fall into the sublime abstraction where they can be received without any of that but they're fueled by it i wouldn't know i wouldn't set out to make those paintings without that going on also another thing that i see is important in both of your works is the negative space so maybe best understood through the the series the alphabet series in your work bobby um but also the super graphics and the way they work within the space um the negative space is holds its own with the with the positive right the the foreground the background or the negative and the positive and so i wondered if you would tell me just a little bit about the importance of the negative space that's from switzerland that's from emil reuter and armand hoffman the negative space is more important than the than the stuff that you make in black then you the the the candidates the plain white canvas the plain white piece of paper that's the essence of the painting or the or the or the drawing or of and so whatever you do you do it it's somehow the white is more important than the than the what you do to it and that that that was just beaten into me and i beat it into nelly and i think it's just true even when i'm working with letter forms i mean especially when i work the the inside of the of the lowercase a or all the different the relationship from one letter to the next and every little shape is totally important there's nothing that's done by chance whereas nellie's stuff is done by chance we're very carefully calculated to be beautiful and also the negative space is obviously important in your works you leave and a lot of negative space in these large works yeah i would argue that the marks are an excuse for choreographing the negative space like i come from the inheritance of hoffman and reuter and the marks often i'm like i want to hold this space or i want to charge this space and the first big painting that i made that was of this sort of huge series that i've gone on to keep chasing these ideas i'd come out of a double doors with larry sultan out of the old de young museum from their like archives in the basement and there was this giant um kind of sublime romantic painting of niagara falls and it was separated more than you would think that a museum would have the guts to separate it i mean there was like 10 15 feet between the two panels and there seemed to be an infinite amount of water falling in the space in between those two paintings and when i saw that i was like that's it that's what i want to do i want to charge the empty space and that i mean of course harkens back to what hoffman does what bobby does um so yeah i do listen to authority and then i've inherited those kind of principles and every set of marks is also a way of just capturing empty space which is why i work so large because i want to catch the empty space i want to cut it off and actually i want to borrow the whole white of the wall which is why they're not on canvas or framed i never want to frame on the edge because i want the white of the wall beyond the painting to operate into the negative space so the painting sometimes have a deckled edge like the one you'll be showing um breaking up the concrete cloud i'm having the fabricator reinforce it right now with aluminum and it sticks off and the whole idea is that then you are engaging the whole rest of the white sheet rock that the rest of the museum's engaged in the painting as opposed to having hard edge it's borrowing negative space from around it too definitely i mean i've always wanted to make a painting that's a disruption in an architectural wall so the idea like i grew up in this sort of piece of ba house modernism that my dad designed and i always imagined this big wall erupting and i think the paintings are like revealing the eruptions that i feel are going on in the walls anyway and it's just revealing what's actually happening it's you know that's my relationship my uncertain relationship to modernism i [Laughter] guess yeah yeah and it's also underneath our culture right now i mean what we're seeing is the revealed rattling of our pipes and they weren't not rattling before we're just getting a glimpse into it which is what i was showing in the new narrative series that people weren't ready to see at the time but now we cannot look away so that painting just reveals what's already happening well nellie i know you grew up in art in an artistic household um but bobby i'm wondering about you were you i know you were a dancer early on were you encouraged in the arts as a child were your parents artistic no no i mean the only reason i danced was my mother to make money the only thing she knew how she was a spoiled rich girl all she knew how to do was play the piano so she got a job playing at the san francisco ballet so they put me in all the classes free you know and then she played for elisa cancino who was rita how was that and so i i learned to be a spanish dancer when i needed money i could do that in nightclubs um that was just what happened i wasn't nobody did it on purpose and my father thought he didn't certainly did he was a lawyer he certainly thought art was unnecessary and he thought i should marry a rich lawyer no i wasn't encouraged but then no in school i did make a sketch and i there was a one class of art they still had art classes when i went to school and i made a charcoal drawing and everyone thought oh that's pretty good and my mother did we walked again the high school was a couple of blocks over russian hill to the art school we walked over with the drawings and we showed it to that was before jerry mccabe i mean uh douglas mckegey took over the the art institute and william gaul was the director then and he he took one look at them and gave me a scholarship so i mean time i was about 14 15 16 17 18 i had scholarships there and with david park and all of that stuff so your mom at least supported oh yeah she she your artistic inclination well yeah they just assumed i was a you know she was a rich girl that married a lawyer that i would do the same that's what you did and used to tell me it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is a poor man yeah yeah i mean that's kind of the way our grandmother's all fraught i guess yeah yeah oh well no and that's why um when i when my first husband died and i needed to make money the only thing i knew was dating because and so then i turned it i went and studied with arm and hoffman then learned design so i could make money of course yeah it's a real thing well in those days artists didn't make money you know but architects did and i was paid as an architect as long as i was a designer when you had a daughter to take care of and i'm wondering you're both mothers to daughters and so i'm wondering if you have any what does it take to be a mother of a strong daughter bobby you were raising nelly uh in the 70s and now you're raising a daughter now i'm curious because i have boys myself so what does it take to raise a strong daughter that is an independent thinker um would you which you've done are you asking me or nelly yeah bobby let's start with you i don't know i had two daughters i you you just that i think i think i just always treated them as if they were my best friends instead of like a daughter and i think i never said no i think i think mostly it was let them do whatever they want to do i didn't i didn't have there were no rules and there were no authoritative fathers around and and nelly um i think it's to get out of the way i mean i have a daughter who sings and she like used to change her clothes five times a day and i think also when i used to teach i think that the job of a good teacher is to see who somebody wants to become and instead of trying to railroad them into what your dogma is as a teacher in terms of your own work is to see who they want to become and then try to give them a lattice to get there so i think that that's what i do both for my daughter and also it seems like i have like a flock of rotating preteen girls who are always hanging out at my house and i think that i'm like kind of their other mother and like there were a bunch of them in sausalito and now here in la one you know a few of them are evolving into the game and i think it's a chance to give them the room to be who they are and trust them and give them some structure and take them surfing and listen and yeah because i think that little girls kind of know who they are already and they're really pissed that nobody hears it and as soon as you listen there's a lot of content there and then you get your infinite trust from them once you've listened to them then those girls help me raise my daughter recently i i watched the documentary on joan didion and i had no idea but her her family came west with the donner family did you know that um but they obviously took a different turn and so i wondered how long i mean you're both born and raised in california so i feel like we can't not say something about california um but i don't know bobby how how many generations back in california or what brought your family to california originally my my grandparents on both sides came about 1870s from europe and they never talked about europe they loved california so i know very little about and my especially my mother lied so much i had no idea where my gran her mother came from and my my grandfather was he was marvelous he was an inventor he was a russian and he went i know he went up to the yukon to the gold rush and they just loved it here um what was the question that how many generations back you know but they loved it here i mean we used to and my father i remember we used to pick up my grandfather at work he was at the american can company he was inventing the machines that canned peaches and apricots and we'd walk along the embarcadero now which is so fancy and he they just love to walk along the embarcadero and look at the boats and my father would just take me fishing in sausalito and sit on the pier they loved being here and they never talked about the past what came before but bobby's family and my father's family go back in california so i joke that it's like five generations california which is impossible because you have to add them together but i think that what bobby was speaking to is that they're really the first modernists where you really completely scrubbed off history i mean levy became le vay became we're not jewish there's a lot of rewriting of history in the family and when you asked this question while i was filming with christian bruno about artistic influences in my family i mean it made me sit down and start doing this slow bubble diagram drawing that christian came back and labored wanted to film that goes into all the different makers in my family and they're actually despite whatever my mom says there are quite a lot of them and a lot of them each were reinventing what was needed at the time be it fiction or dresses or hats or just survival in particular circumstances in california that are based on what was needed that was their wits and their creative powers and whether it's i think i realized in you giving that question about family background and artistic influences the two strongest influences to each of my parents were their earliest influences were each filmmakers so my mother's first husband was frank stotheker and he was early art in cinema he had these magical experimental films and i think those went into her hugely and then in turn those went into me and then my father's first big role model in his life was leonard freeman his uncle and he was hawaii five-o hang him high route 66 so like heroism and like machismo and violence and i think that when i was thinking about like why do i make these paintings the way they are like sometimes i don't get it and it's like yeah it's that magical experimental heroic and violent like it all comes together from their earliest sources for each of them so i kind of see a lot of it back there and yeah i pull from them even if i don't know it sometimes i think that's it's just a really lovely thought for the moment that there's something beautiful in all of those influences the things that are are difficult or that um are not or the heroic and the and the violent right that they're then you can you can find the beauty in in there well you're allowed to address that in film and i like to address it in painting so maybe one thing uh to discuss would be the title of the show which it started as outside the frame um which which for me goes back to that idea of question authority or go away from norms or not be afraid being bold really um is part of that and as we were developing the show and it and it moved in time and space due to you know all the circumstances of the world uh i guess nellie really you started thinking about um a different title for the moment because the moment had changed yeah from where we were thinking about a show in december last year to where we were thinking about a show in april may this year do you want to say something about the about the title sure yeah i had been i was thinking about your title i think it was beyond the phrase no outside the frame and we i started bringing up in conversation with my mom and then we had a three-way phone call and i think i started pushing for beyond the frame no just beyond because i feel like in this pandemic and at the times of this summer that was so intense and so felt laterally across all different parts of the world in our society nobody can see beyond what's coming and also that each one of these works in a sense attempts to address beyond and the whole structure of the show like if we can turn it into a happening how do we take the work and make work at a time when we're living into a piece of history we couldn't yet imagine we've definitely lived beyond what we could picture like the american dream and the ways in which america knows itself to be heroic from world war ii we've now played it out beyond so far we're into really uncharted territory and so coming out of the breaking the frame title i think it just pushed into beyond to me what resonated for me is i feel like we're still going to be asked to go beyond like that kind of endless behind you that we don't know even still um and bobby after we had this discussion about the title and beyond you really quickly just sketched out the letters and sent it to me i like it as a word it was it looks good like the word yeah beyond i like it yeah i agree i mean i think chance beyond words like that are sort of that's it it's the beginning of something yes and that you don't know and you don't pretend to know i'm i'm very sick and tired of people who think they know i think you don't know we don't know what we don't know yeah and it's okay well it's not i mean we have no choice we don't know what we don't know i think that ties back to bobby's lack of reverence for authority like her her father taught her not to trust anybody that nobody knows i mean she tried to she didn't get gold star in school and so he bought her a whole package of them at wolves woolworths and it was similar like i asked questions when i was little and she showed me wittgenstein's duck rabbit you know that everything was relative so i think that we're now living into this place that is admitting that we have no idea what's going on and we don't have the structure and the answers and i think that actually that's kind of more real and comforting because i think we've been in that space for a while but didn't know it so in a way yeah that turns it to a more hopeful title because maybe we're admitting we don't know what's going on hopefully we survive through all of that i just want to say thank you then to both of you for being here through zoom we're so excited to share your work with the community and really with the world because we have um through all of these new platforms opened up uh open up ourselves to new audiences so um really appreciate you participating in the exhibition and i just want to say thank you jennifer i want to say thank you back i couldn't be more honored or lucky at this time in this fragile chunk of history of how to navigate life i moved to l.a and he gave me a museum show and we're really thank you it's a dicey time and you've made it a lot more um fruitful thank you i i agree yeah our work is going to propel us forward so keep up the good work thank you for inviting us i i've enjoyed immensely working with you and i love working with nelly we work together so much and i love that yeah i'm very thankful because there was certainly you know a risk when you invite two family members no matter how close to to be to take their relationship into a whole new space nellie and i work together often all the time you work really well together so well i want to thank you for making it public that we work together because my mom and i have worked together on so many projects over the past 20 maybe 30 years and nobody seems to know it it's always kind of this hidden thing that we know nobody's ever asked us to show together i know natasha boaz realizes that we're related and can see the influences but you're the first person to ask us to have a show together and talk about the way that we cross pollinate and influence each other which has been constant through both of our lives and thank you for making it publicly real because it's always been sort of like this private joke well that's my that's my small contribution right is the uh to breaking those norms is like you know there are some very interesting things that we don't talk about necessarily that that we can talk about and we should talk about um because i'm fascinated at how how we can raise creative people how we can foster creativity and individuals how we can keep that alive it's it's something you know when you work in an institution you have to advocate for all the time um so it's a it's a beautiful thing for me yeah bobby has been really helpful and instrumental in keeping me going forward there were like moments after graduate school when you think oh should i go get a real job and i'm in my studio and i don't have any money and she's like oh just shut up and paint here's a thousand dollars go to home depot buy what you need and just shut up and that's really helpful thank god for bobby that's nice yeah it's true yeah

Channel: SMoCA

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Id: r_684zTVTec

Length: 37min 57sec (2277 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021