The Riverside Art Museum (RAM) proudly presents Sandra Rowe | Mother Wit, running February 1–May 24, 2020, and Brenna Youngblood | Lavender Rainbow, running February 1–March 29, 2020.
The public is invited to the no-cost Opening Reception on Saturday, February 1, 6 p.m.–8 p.m., to see Rowe’s and Youngblood’s work and meet the artists. This reception will also celebrate the openings of Henry L. A. Jekel: Architect of Eastern Skyscrapers and the California Style and The 52 Project 2019 Exhibit. Join us for a night honoring art, architecture, and aspirations.
For nearly fifty years, Sandra Rowe’s work has been impossible to categorize. With her unflinching views of relationships, race, and gender, she pokes and prods, asking questions that are difficult to answer and which often go unspoken aloud. Figures are often stripped of gender and race yet, somehow, more deeply embody the core of the human experience. Rowe’s long overdue retrospective, Mother Wit, explores the full range and depth of Rowe’s artistic expression.
“Sandra is one of Riverside’s most important art stories,” says Drew Oberjuerge, RAM Executive Director. “This retrospective is very crucial for the Riverside Art Museum to showcase.”
The exhibition is curated by Todd Wingate, RAM’s Director of Exhibitions and Collections, who showed Rowe’s work in the 1980s in his gallery, the Mind’s Eye in downtown Riverside. Throughout this time, Rowe and Wingate have maintained a good friendship. When Wingate came to RAM, one of his top priorities was to organize this retrospective. For over three years, they have poured over hundreds of pieces of art and combed through boxes of archives to create this powerful exhibition featuring Rowe’s life-time achievement of work.
“For over 30 years, I have been awed by Sandra’s unflinching view of human nature and more so by how that view informs her work,” says Wingate. “Often deep or dark, but always incredibly powerful, Sandra does not shy away from shining a bright light upon social injustice in her work. She confronts it head-on, navigating the various layers created by love, fear, lies, and truths.”
“For several years, Sandra and I had studios next to each other in an old produce warehouse on Vine Street,” says artist and former gallery owner Connie Ransom. “Sandra made me dizzy with all the art she was in the process of creating and her ideas for all the art that she was ‘going to make’ in the future. It was hard to keep up with her ideas because they clicked by so quickly. Nothing stood in the way of her creating except for time or health. Even then, she would put her time in bed or on the sofa to good use, constantly creating and breaking new ground.”
In 1994, Rowe wrote about her work: “Living in this time and place provides all that is needed to give me abundant information from which I make art. My thinking about how language and visual art interface continues to motivate me. Usually in my work, they can only exist together: they complement, explain, clarify, connect with, and can only be understood when one explores the images and language together.”
“It’s about time people recognize what Sandra has created and contributed to the community,” says artist Charles Bibbs. “I am a collector of hers and encourage everyone to see this exhibition.”
Brenna Youngblood’s work explores issues of African American identity and representation and often references historically significant moments and organizations in African American history, such as her 2017 sculpture M.I.A. that “refers to the Montgomery Improvement Association, a group co-organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., to guide the Montgomery bus boycott protest in 1955.”
“RAM is very fortunate to showcase Brenna’s work,” says Drew Oberjuerge, RAM Executive Director, “particularly because she was born in Riverside. We are grateful for the work of Lisa Henry to guest curate this exhibition.”
“Brenna Youngblood’s work is both complex and beautiful,” says Lisa Henry, Guest Curator. “While her mixed media pieces fit into the history of the Southern California tradition of assemblage, her work has a unique feel. She pushes the boundaries of the diverse media that she employs. This is a wonderful opportunity for audiences in the Inland Empire to experience the range of Brenna’s work, from her early photographs, to mixed media panels, wooden sculptures, and her impressive abstract painted canvases.”
