Born in 1942, Paul Kos has been a highly influential artist in the Bay Area for well over three decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was one of the major figures on the early Conceptual art scene, notable especially for his early experimental video works and seemingly simple but technically innovative sculptural installations, which generally featured evocative audio or video components. He was one of the first to incorporate video into interactive installations. The artist's best-known work is arguably the sublime “Chartres Bleu,” a 1986 video installation that re-creates in full scale a stained-glass window from the Chartres cathedral in France. Each of the 27 vertically stacked video monitors duplicates an individual leaded glass panel. The brightness of the images stimulates the light changes in a normal day, accelerated to 12 minutes. Depending on the light, the narrative scenes are clearly readable or, when brightly illuminated, dissolved into abstractness. Everything Matters, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Kos's work at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major volume on his work.

Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective

Arts & Photography

Constance Lewallen

Berkeley Art Museum

Pacific Film Archive

Individual Artists

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Robert Moskowitz: Window Shades, 1959-62

Craig F. Starr Gallery

Over a period of four decades--from the early 1960s until his death in 1994--artist, writer, and designer Joe Brainard contributed greatly to the arts in a number of media. From his early paintings and assemblages, which built upon the work of Jasper Johns and Joseph Cornell, to his set designs for LeRoi Jone's The Dutchman and Frank O'Hara's The General Returns from One Place to Another; from his comic book collaborations with various poets, C Comics and C Comics 2, to his later drawing, collage, painting, and assemblage work, Brainard exemplified the link between avant-garde art, writing, and theater that defined the New York School. In addition to a checklist and bibliographies of work by and about Brainard, this exhibition catalogue includes the artist's published and unpublished writings, as well as interviews and letters. Also included are essays by John Ashbery, Carter Ratcliff, and Constance Lewallen, who chronicles Joe Brainard's formative years in Oklahoma and move to New York City, his involvement with Pop Art, assemblage and painting, and his literary and artistic associations.

Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (GRANARY BOOKS/U)

John Ashbery

Carter Ratcliff

Granary Books/University of California, Berkeley Art Museum

The artistic collaboration between Larry Sultan (1946-2009) and Mike Mandel (born 1950) began in 1972, when they were both graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Over the next 30 years, they created 20 photographic projects: two publications (including the landmark book Evidence); two exhibitions; the film, JPL; three public commissions; and 12 billboard series displayed on sites throughout California and the continental U.S. This collaboration enabled Sultan and Mandel to evolve a seemingly authorless style; most of their works adapted found imagery from archives or from popular media, neutralizing the intended commercial or documentary content by uncovering and emphasizing the inherent banality. This substantial overview surveys Sultan and Mandel's 30 years of collaboration beginning with early billboard projects investigating themes of Californian culture and wealth, such as "Oranges on Fire" and "Cornucopia", based on a 1955 hand-tinted postcard of a model posing amid ripe oranges, and bearing the tagline: "California Gold Fills the Horn of Plenty To Overflowing." Their billboard projects continue with the tongue in cheek Ties and Whose News? in which the secondary title, "Whose News Abuses You?" is slyly imbedded in the image; and the duo's final billboard collaboration, Trouble Spots, a billboard project that used conflated and opposing ideologies in both fictitious and real locations. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel continues this extensive overview by chronicling their work with sourced images in the exhibitions Replaced (1975); Newsroom (1983); and the publications How to Read Music in One Evening (1974) and Evidence (1977). Five critical essays provide further insights on their collaboration.

Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel

JONATHAN LETHEM

Charlotte Cotton

Photography & Video

D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

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Books by Constance Lewallen