Gap T-Shirt designed by Rosana Castrillo Díaz; photo: Winni Wintermeyer
SAN FRANCISCO—January 13, 2010—To celebrate the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)’s 75th anniversary, Gap is collaborating with the museum to introduce a unique line of eight limited-edition artist-designed T-shirts.
The T-shirts were designed by nine well-known artists who have connections to the Bay Area, including Rosana Castrillo Díaz, Simon Evans, Chris Johanson, Kerry James Marshall, Barry McGee, Ed Ruscha, Leslie Shows, and Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. All of these artsis are also represented in the series of SFMOMA’s anniversary exhibitions and programs entitled 75 Years of Looking Forward.
“We’re delighted to partner with the Gap and this amazing group of artists to recognize our 75th anniversary,” states SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “It will be a great pleasure to see the Bay Area community wear these original T-shirts with pride throughout our anniversary year.”
Starting January 16, the T-shirts will be available for $24.50 at the SFMOMA MuseumStore, online at sfmoma.org/museumstore, and in 13 Bay Area Gap stores—including Stonestown Galleria, Chestnut Street, Embarcadero Center, Jefferson Street, Market Street, Post Street in San Francisco; Bay Street in Emeryville; Northgate Mall and The Village at Corte Madera in Marin County; and Hillsdale Mall, Burlingame Avenue, Stanford Shopping Center, and Valley Fair Mall in the South Bay.
“As a San Francisco–based company with a long history of supporting the arts, we’re honored to partner with SFMOMA to celebrate the museum’s 75th anniversary,” said Marka Hansen, President of Gap North America. “This limited edition T-shirt collection celebrates the intersection of art and fashion and enables people to experience the work of these distinguished artists in a different way.”
About the Artists
Díaz’s work intentionally hovers at the edge of perceptibility—at the breakdown, she says, of visual familiarity and comprehension, somewhere in a zone between material and immaterial that is endemic to present-day experience. Barely visible against the gallery wall, her web-like veils reveal themselves slowly, occupying a place between nonexistence and being. Díaz also makes traditional works on paper—drawings that explore fragments of visual images derived from recognizable objects, such as the printed page or the edge of a spiral notebook. A native of Spain, Díaz received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996 and an MFA from Mills College in 2003.
Simon Evans
A self-taught artist, Evans began his creative life as a writer before pursuing visual art. Inspired by his reading of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Evans was intrigued by the idea of approaching art as an explorer of the everyday; as such, he incorporates everyday materials such as paper, tape, ballpoint pens, and liquid paper in his works. His collage and assemblage pieces often take the form of lists, diagrams, or maps that reveal an archival impulse to sort and classify the chaos of human experience. Born in London in 1972, Simon Evans has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1994.
Chris Johanson
Johanson, a key figure among San Francisco’s Mission School artists, combines social criticism with a certain optimism in his installations. His work often conceals sophisticated content beneath a seemingly naive, folk-art style of execution. He works in the street/skate/surf vein that has come to be one of the most identifiable aspects of contemporary Bay Area art. Johanson is a native of San Jose, California.
Kerry James Marshall
Marshall’s rich and varied body of work includes large-scale paintings, installations, and public projects that explore issues of racial identity and black history. He received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute, in Los Angeles, was a resident fellow at the Studio Museum, in Harlem, and in 1987 moved to Chicago, where he began teaching at the University of Illinois. His work has been widely collected by museums throughout the United States and has been featured in major national and international exhibitions.
Barry McGee
A lauded cult figure in a bicoastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991 he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the name “Twist.”
Ed Ruscha
A painter, printmaker and filmmaker, Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, and lived some 15 years in Oklahoma City before moving permanently to Los Angeles where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 through 1960. By the early 1960s he was well-known for his paintings, collages, and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery. He later achieved recognition for his paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all of which were influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop art movement.
Leslie Shows
In her large works on wood panels, Shows presents landscapes littered with the detritus of industry. Using paint and collage, she submits the medium to the message: oil paint resembles the greasy rainbow of an oil slick, watercolor bleeds to create a horizon hazy with pollutants, graph paper stands in for salt and introduces a geometry resonant with the artist’s interest in crystalline structures. Shows received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2006. Born in Manteca, California, in 1977, Shows currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel
Sultan was a leading figure in the Bay Area art community, both as an artist and a teacher. For more than 30 years, he explored the boundaries of documentary practice. His first major work was Evidence, a book of appropriated photographs that was a collaborative project with artist Mike Mandel; a subsequent exhibition was organized by SFMOMA in 1977. These pictures came from the files of government agencies, local corporations, and research institutions and, assembled in the narrative format of a book, produced a witty, provocative, and insightful look at contemporary American culture.
The SFMOMA MuseumStore is also producing a special line of products designed in honor of the 75th anniversary, including mugs, T-shirts, hats, notebooks, sketchbooks, luggage tags, business card holders, water bottles, coffee tumblers, and tote bags that will feature the 75th anniversary “starburst” logo. Print-on-demand posters featuring artworks from the suite of SFMOMA’s 75th anniversary exhibitions will also be offered.
For more information, visit sfmoma.org/anniversary.