New Langton Arts
Encyclopedia
About
New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organizationNot-for-profit arts organization
A not-for-profit arts organization is usually in the form of a not-for-profit corporation, association, or foundation. Such organizations are formed for the purpose of developing and promoting the work of artists in various visual and performing art forms such as film, sculpture, dance, painting,...
focusing on contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
founded in 1975 in San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the US, New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art, and involving artists in the decision making process. Its first directors were Judy Moran and Renny Pritikin
Renny Pritikin
Renny Pritikin is the Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis.Pritikin was named Chief Curator for all artistic programs of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in January 1997 after serving as Director of the...
who have been a central figures in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene for 30 years. Subsequent directors include Nancy Gonchar, Susan Miller, Christiane Robbins
Christiane Robbins
Christiane Robbins is a trans-disciplinary artist, director, curator/programmer, designer and scholar. She is known for creating works of video/film, photography, visual art, installation, varied cultural projects and publications...
and Sandra Percival.
New Langton Arts focused on collaborating with artists on the "production and presentation of new work, exhibitions and events, that challenged the boundaries of conventional art practice, while encouraging broad public appreciation and access to the art of our times."
History
In 1975 San Francisco’s art scene reached a turning point. A substantial enough number of younger artists working in the new mediums of performance, installation, video, and interdisciplinary projects was reached, and they identified themselves as a community. Local commercial galleries and museums were not showing these art forms, and artists and their supporters were organizing various opportunities for each other on an ad hoc basis. For example, a series of performance events were held in 1974 in a vacant industrial space on Bluxome Street. When artist Jock Reynolds purchased and renovated a former coffin factory at 80 Langton Street, he made the ground floor available for a new organization to support new work.Inspired by models in New York and elsewhere (Artists Space, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) that were committed to artist control, artist financial support, and support of artists by other artists, the not for profit 80 Langton Street Corporation was created in 1975 and opened its doors in July 1975 with a one person video installation by artist Peter D'Agostino
Peter D'Agostino
Peter d'Agostino is an artist working in video and new media. He is a Professor in the Film and Media Arts Dept, and Director of the NewTechLab, Temple University, Philadelphia.-Life:...
. Signers of the corporate documents included Judith Dunham, then editor of Artweek, David Robinson, architect, and gallerists Ruth Braunstein and Diana Fuller. A Board of Directors made up of artists and arts professionals took control.
New Langton Arts emerged into a local ecology that already or soon would contain peers such as Site/Cite/Sight (run by artist Alan Scarritt), La Mamelle, Inc./Art Com
La Mamelle, Inc./Art Com
La Mamelle, Inc. / Art Com was a not-for-profit arts organization, artist-run space, or alternative exhibition space, active from 1975-1995 in the San Francisco Bay Area...
(run by Carl E. Loeffler), Galeria de la Raza
Galería de la Raza
Galería de la Raza is a non-profit art gallery and artist collective that serves the heavily-Latino population of San Francisco's Mission District. GDLR mounts exhibitions, hosts poetry readings, workshops, and celebrations, sells works of art, and sponsors youth and artist-in-residence programs...
(run by Rene Yañez and Ralph Maradiaga), San Francisco Camerawork, Southern Exposure, Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art among others. All these organizations shared some of the ideals mentioned above. These emerging arts organizations were an extension into the fine arts realm of alternative organizations of the era that sought to inplicate themselves between producers and consumers in ways that bypassed traditional distribution methods, whether in education, food, or information distribution. Furthermore these New Left ideals extended to giving artists power over their fate using a participatory democracy model.
Artist and exhibitions
Langton’s history is closely tied to the emergence of new art forms in the ‘70s—performance and time-based art, video and installation, improvised and electronic music, and experimental writing: Barbara KrugerBarbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...
in the literature program (1977); residencies by Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
and Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. She graduated from Brooklyn College and the University of California, San Diego . Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture...
(1980); Charles Ray
Charles Ray
Charles Ray was a silent film star. Extremely popular in a series of films casting him in juvenile roles, primarily rural young men, Ray's career faded as he lost his youthful looks- he also had a reputation of being demanding and having an outsized ego...
’s performance installation (1985); and Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research...
’s first show in the US (1996). At the time these artists were under 35, at emergent moments in their careers, and had never before been seen in the Bay Area.
In solo, group installations and performances, Langton has produced and presented the work of Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
, Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
, Chris Burden
Chris Burden
Christopher "Chris" Burden is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.-Education:Burden studied for his B.A...
, Nancy Rubins, Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...
, Tony Labat, Steve Benson
Steve Benson
Stephen Reed Benson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. editorial cartoonist for The Arizona Republic. Benson is the grandson of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson.Benson attended Brigham Young University, from which he graduated cum laude...
, Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...
, Allen Ruppersberg
Allen Ruppersberg
Born in 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio. Allen Ruppersberg is one of the first generation of American Conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about and made. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books.- Biography :...
, Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island.Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies--- often finds...
, Tom Marioni, Chip Lord
Chip Lord
Chip Lord is an American Digital Media artist currently teaching at UC Santa Cruz and residing in the Bay Area. He is best known for his work with the alternative architecture and media collective known as Ant Farm, which he co-founded with Doug Michels in 1968...
, Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
, Jock Reynolds, Paul DeMarinis
Paul DeMarinis
Paul DeMarinis is an American electronic music composer, sound, performance, and computer-based artist.-Education:In 1971, Demarinis received a B.A. in Music and Filmmaking Interdisciplinary from Antioch College...
, Howard Fried
Howard Fried
Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.He lives and works in Vallejo, California.-Biography:...
, John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
, Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...
, Kevin Killian
Kevin Killian
Kevin Killian is an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009...
, Dodie Bellamy
Dodie Bellamy
Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles...
, Eleanor Antin
Eleanor Antin
Eleanor Antin is an American photographer, author, and artist working with video, film, performance, and drawing. Originally from New York, USA, she is currently based in Southern California where she is a professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego...
, Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas
Born in 1936 in New York City, Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.She began her career in New York City as a sculptor...
, Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...
, Lorenzo Thomas
Lorenzo Thomas
Lorenzo Thomas was a career United States Army officer who was Adjutant General of the Army at the beginning of the American Civil War. After the war, he was appointed temporary Secretary of War by President Andrew Johnson, precipitating Johnson's impeachment.-Early life:Thomas was born in New...
, Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two other nonfiction...
, Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets.Since 1994, Watten has taught modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit...
, Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is an American poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties.-Life:Born in New York on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper...
, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an Korean American novelist and artist most famous for her 1982 work, Dictee....
, Félix González-Torres
Félix González-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was an American, Cuban-born visual artist."For Felix it was much more powerful to assume that the gay and straight audience was the same audience, that being a Cuban-born American is the same as being an American. And being American was something he was extremely proud of."...
, Maria Nordman, Alvin Curran
Alvin Curran
Composer Alvin Curran , is the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran's music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds....
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
, Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
, John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
, Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...
, Aaron Young
Aaron Young
Aaron Young is an artist based in New York.Young was born in San Francisco. He works in sculpture, performance, photography and drawing....
, Robin Rhodes, Adrian Piper
Adrian Piper
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States...
, Sonya Rapoport
Sonya Rapoport
Sonya Rapoport is an American conceptual/digital artist and New media artist who has created computer-assisted interactive installations and participatory web-based artworks.-Early life:...
, Beth B, Victor Burgin, Lyle Ashton Harris/Thomas Harris, Nora Ligarano/Marshall Reese, Jayce Salloum/Yasmina Bouziane, Sandy Stone, Eileen Myles, and Jalal Toufic and more recently: Harrell Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher is an American artist in Portland, Oregon who creates socially engaged interdisciplinary projects.-Early work:While completing his degree at California College of Arts and Crafts, Fletcher began collaborating with artist Jon Rubin...
, Tony Labat, Rigo 23
Rigo 23
Rigo 23 , born Ricardo Gouveia, is a Portuguese muralist, painter, and political artist residing in San Francisco, California...
, Kota Ezawa, Frances Stark, Mads Lynnerup, Felipe Dulzaides
Felipe Dulzaides
Felipe Dulzaides is a Cuban-American artist.Felipe Dulzaides’ is an artist whose work includes video, installations, photography, assemblages, neon, performance-actions, drawings, social sculptures and concept based public art projects...
, Tim Sullivan, Marc Horowitz
Marc Horowitz
Marc Horowitz is an artist, actor, writer, filmmaker, comic, and internet celebrity based in Los Angeles, California....
, and others.
New Langton Arts has presented retrospective exhibitions of seminal SF Bay Area artists: Jim Pomeroy
Jim Pomeroy (artist)
James C. Pomeroy was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.-Career:...
(1999) and Tony Labat (2005). Also in 2005 they hosted Downtime: Constructing Leisure the first exhibition of the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts
California College of the Arts
California College of the Arts , founded in 1907, is known for its broad, interdisciplinary programs in art, design, architecture, and writing. It has two campuses, one in Oakland and one in San Francisco, California, USA...
.
Public programs
The Performance Writing series brought multi-disciplinary literary artists to Langton to present works that explore language in the context of live performance. The series, curated by Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brandon Brown, earned a 2005 “Best of the Bay” award in the San Francisco Bay GuardianSan Francisco Bay Guardian
The San Francisco Bay Guardian is a free alternative newspaper published weekly in San Francisco, California. The paper is owned mostly by its publisher, Bruce B...
for “Best New Reading Series to Catapult Language Off the Page."
An uncertain future
On 22 July 2009 Sandra Percival announced her resignation as Executive Director of Langton, having taken over the position from Susan Miller four years earlier. Subsequently, the Board of Directors, chaired by Primo Orpilla, suspended programing, laid off remaining staff, cut expenses, vacated the gallery and theater space at 1246 Folsom.Dissolution of NLA
A year later the NLA website features an updated statement confirming the closure of the organization: "After a process of thorough deliberation, the Board of Directors of New Langton Arts (NLA) has determined that dissolution of NLA is the best option in light of short-term and long-term institutional challenges. The Board hopes that this difficult decision does not diminish the many achievements of the organization and the countless collaborative efforts of those who created and sustained it during its 34 years[...]The Board of Directors considered many factors in making its decision, including the state of NLA’s financial health during a period of economic downturn that shuttered thousands of non-profit organizations. During its final years of existence, NLA undertook a number of new initiatives in an effort to secure the viability of the organization. Such initiatives and urgent appeals to save NLA proved insufficient. NLA moved out of its location at 1246 Folsom Street in San Francisco and had to let go of its staff. The Board of Directors is currently taking steps to wrap up its affairs in a manner that honors the organization’s excellence."
External links
- New Langton Arts Website
- 80 Langton Street performances in Performance Art Anthology: A Source Book of California Performance Art
- Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pause Still performance, March 24, 1979
- Video Installed 1986 NLA exhibition, Vasulka's archive