Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Crawling on my belly in the garden, I photographed snails at their eye level and sometimes so close up the camera bumped into the snail. These images were often of exquisite beauty. I proje... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Adrian Piper staged a number of collaborative performance events entitled Funk Lessons (1982–84) in which participants were invited to get down and party together. In the process of learning to discuss, dance, and listen to funk music, the events opened up individual awareness of the complex personal associations of this popular dance form with racial and cultural boundaries. The experie... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Probably nobody knows what Diane Arbus as a person was all about. As a photographer, some people admired her work, others reviled it and some simply ignored it. Rarely, if ever, have I seen such deification of a personality and that person’s work as has followed Diane Arbus’ suicide. [...] It was with singular visceral reaction that I received Edmund Shea’s announcement of... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Owner of the gallery and sponsor of the happening is W.O. Thomas Jr., ex-cable car gripman and self-taught painter and sculptor. He spent two years preparing the event, having completely re... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera. More on the artist and industrial music pioneer Monte Cazazza here and here.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Poster text: “Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole comm... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“The New Museum of Modern Art brought some healthy fresh air to the Bay Area gallery scene for two short years in the early 1970s [1971–73]. A collective of nearly 20 artists put the museu... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Through the miracle of science, the Art in Space Center has built a state-of-the-art rocket containing all the vital technology for a successful liftoff into the outer limits of our galaxy.... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“The Six Gallery was established in September 1954 with the intention that there might exist in the San Francisco area some outlet for the works of local artists who had heretofore been met with varying degrees of indifference, disinterest, or hostility by the larger commercial galleries and museums of art, where the concern seems to lie less with local, contemporary artists, than with o... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“This piece was a long time ago, but was at a special time for me, a good time for my work. San Francisco was the breeding ground, the creative space, in which I could dream of Victorian lad... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“I began tending honeybees as preparation for a performance/film project called Immersion [1973–76]. At the time the 16mm film was a natural extension of my sculptural site investigations with moths, wild bees, living systems, harvesting and decay cycles, weathering and erosion processes — all the projects in one way or another involving a human intervention, gesture, or residual tra... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Today let us bow to the Mail Queen, aka Patricia Tavenner,and her long reign as a contributor to and curator within the global network of mail art and artists’ stamps. The Oakland-based artist adopted this nom de plume around the time that she began teaching courses on the “hidden” history of women artists. In 1972 she cofounded the Northern California Women’s Caucu... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“A long time ago (or so it seems), people made films just for the fun of it. Then someone got the idea that film had to hurt. No pain, no gain. Somehow film showcases decided they were right. Today people still make films just for the fun of it. And we show them at the No Nothing Cinema.” — Dean Snider, 1983, co-founder, No Nothing Cinema (1982-1997, now New Nothing Cinema)

T... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“The event resulted in a collaborative network that exceeded the boundaries of a single institution and its authority.” —Lew Thomas on 8 x 10, 1975

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Several intentions were announced in early press releases, but one of the most important functions of the gallery was to serve as a (store)front for my ‘guerilla art’ activities, for which the imprimatur of the gallery structure confers legitimacy and lays down a smokescreen … A basic philosophy of the Samore Gallery has always been subversion, sabotage, and upheaval.”

�... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

The name A.R.E. was open to interpretation, encouraged in fact by a chalkboard at the stairs. This was apt for a space that was interested in the present moment, resistant to being fixed and going on the path toward institutionalization taken by the first wave of alternative spaces in the 1970s. Artists for Revolution in the Eighties is how A.R.E. was best known and listed on the group cal... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Bay Area ceramicist Richard Shaw and his wife, painter Martha Shaw, have collaborated on music and art for many years; their renowned artistic family includes Alice Shaw and Virgil Shaw. This weekend an estimated 750,00 people will ‘walk in the park’ to attend the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, an annual free music concert in San Francisco.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Many thanks again for the guided tour through the Bay Area. It was one of the richest evenings during our trip: in one night four artists for documenta 5. This is to confirm the documenta will officially invite for participation Terry Fox, Howard Fried, John C. Fernie, and Jim Melchert.” – Harald Szeemann (correspondence with Carol Lindsley, Reese Palley Gallery, San Francisco, Dec... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“I had the idea that my outdoor work was going to appeal to two different audiences: my friends and the artists who received mailers on this will look at it as artwork. And then there... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

This Labor Day weekend post highlights Limbo, an artist-run project by Artspace (founded 1986) that transformed a restaurant on the corner of 9th Street and Folsom in San Francisco. Click here for several videos from the mid-1990s of different artists in the kitchen and their guest Wednesday night menus.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Press release (excerpt):

“X:THE UNKNOWN is purposefully being presented concurrently with Introductions, the exhibitions of emerging artists at San Francisco commercial galleries, and the equivalent program in the East Bay, Bay Currents. The works comprising X:THE UNKNOWN provide a powerful aesthetic alternative to the often ‘safely marketable’ selections of unknown artists w... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Mike Mandel (b. 1950) and Larry Sultan (1946–2009) began their 30-year collaboration around their shared interest in cultural artifacts and the idea of the billboard. Designing and then docu... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

A birthday tribute to Jess (1923–2004), whose magnificent works are on view here in two collection shows. Click the image to enlarge the 1960 text by his partner, the great poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988).

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Bernie Lubell and I were catching up the other day, talking about his recent work. I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about his 1980s-era exhibition cards. He clarified that those particular invitations for his sculpture shows in San Francisco were not just instruction-based, but could actually be assembled into paper mechanisms. These cards were the perfect format for an ... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Marilyn Bogerd, Mike Roddy, and Alan B. Scarritt established Site (later Site, Cite, Sight, Inc.) in San Francisco “to support artists without regard to its commercial potential” (brochure). During the initial years the founders curated 32 single-artist shows and held two group shows. The process evolved into an “artists choosing artists” series in which those artis... More