Byron Randall

Byron Randall (October 23, 1918 - August 11, 1999) was an expressionist artist and social activist. Recognized as both a painter and a printmaker, he produced landscapes, still lifes, portraiture, satire, and nudes. Labor, war, and Mexico are among his most prominent themes. Critics identify glowing and unusual color, dramatic lines, intense energy, and emotional range as the hallmarks of his style. As an activist, Randall was known for peace and environmental work, founding and chairing arts organizations, and promoting international cultural understanding.

Biography


Byron Randall was born in Tacoma, Washington and raised in Salem, Oregon. He trained at the Federal Art Project's Salem Art Center in 1939 under the tutelage of Louis Bunce and Charles Val Clear, and later taught there. His first solo show was in 1939 at the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C.

Randall met his first wife, Canadian sculptor Helen Nelson (1914-1956), at the Salem Art Center. Nelson was brought over from New York to be the first instructor in sculpture for the blind at the Center. They were wed in 1940 and moved to Mexico where the couple's daughter, Gale, was born. There, he continued his development as a painter. He served in the Merchant Marines in the South Pacific during World War II.

After the war, Randall traveled to Eastern Europe, as arts correspondent for a Canadian news agency, where he witnessed and painted the post-war devastation of Yugoslavia and Poland. With Helen, he eventually took up residence in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. The couple had a second child, Jonathan, in 1948. In 1953, Randall and his family moved to Canada to escape the Red Scare. In 1956 Helen died in a traffic accident.

The family moved to San Francisco, where he married the artist Emmy Lou Packard in 1959. They had an art gallery in Mendocino, California for nine years. They attended the World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General Disarmament, Helsinki, July 10–15, as U.S. Delegates. They divorced in 1972.

Randall established a guesthouse/art gallery in Tomales, California. He converted a dilapidated chicken coop to become his home and studio, in 1971. This conversion brought him national attention. So did his huge collection of potato mashers. He married Eve Wieland in 1982. She died in 1986. Randall died in San Francisco on August 11, 1999.

Career


Randall produced still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes, in oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and print. Randall's concern for social justice ran across his career, for example in his 1947 "Diabolical Machines" print, his 1938 Spanish Civil War painting "Fight for God and Spain",  and his prints of dispossessed Jews from the ghettos of Eastern Europe,  created from firsthand observation. In the 1960s, Randall satirically explored what was for him the grotesque pageantry of US militarism, using a visual vocabulary of ghastly females, skulls and skeletons that drew upon the folk traditions of Mexican graphic art.

The threat of nuclear apocalypse prompted Randall to create a "Doomsday" series of huge oils, in the late 1950s and 1960s. Randall's "Flotsam & Jetsam" mixed media series of the 1980s and 1990s, use cosmological references, skulls, Mickey Mouse, Lucifer, and articulated dolls to ponder the he saw as the chaos, horror, and surrealism, of consumer culture. For a 2004, Fresno Art Museum exhibition of this series, curator Jacquelin Pilar explains: "Fascinated by the recent discovery of “black holes” as compacted energy, the artist responded with a series … that reflected the compacted materialism of American society. These cast-off objects, accumulating and languishing in Salvation Army Thrift shops, served as models of excess. Following each painting … Randall would turn to the linocut as the final exploration of his inquiry."

Randall saw manual labor as affirming the positive elements of a non-industrialized life. This led him to portraits of working people, as hewers of coal and wood, house painters, diggers, laundry women, cooks, carpenters, farmhands, stevedores, sellers of bread, balloons, and chickens. The landscapes of rural Oregon, California, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico and Scotland stimulated Randall, as a watercolorist, to the use of intensely vivid colors and energetic brushstroke.

Randall was an expressionist whose art was strongly responsive to physical environment. Of his paintings he wrote: "The look of them might have been different if I'd grown up anywhere but in Oregon. Brilliant sunlight nursing the green valleys after a long rainy winter . . . there's a powerful bit of environment that would show in a man's work all his life. I've seen that creative communication has a vitality all its own. It's not a refuge from life, but an intensification. It's the practice of humanity. In painting I think the approach that best affirms life is expressionism, and that's why I became and am now an expressionist."

Organizing, public art, and peace activity


Randall saw printmaking as a democratic art form that had an established and international history in mass media. This drew him to Mexico's graphic arts tradition, embodied in its Taller de Gráfica Popular, associated with artists Leopoldo Mendez, Pablo O'Higgins (a close friend of Randall), Francisco Mora, and Elizabeth Catlett. In 1940, Randall worked briefly at the Taller, and he later became an Associate Member. The Taller inspired Randall to establish the co-operative Artist's Guild of San Francisco, in 1945 (serving as President). He served as treasurer of the San Francisco Art Association, and was a member of the San Francisco Artists' Council. In 1947 he became involved in the California Labor School, from which developed San Francisco's Graphic Arts Workshop. Artists of the California Labor School and Graphic Arts Workshop included Victor Arnautoff, Pele deLappe, Louise Gilbert, Lawrence Yamamoto. Members of this leftist circle illustrated the 1948 Communist Manifesto in Pictures, commemorating the Manifesto's centenary with prints by Randall, Giacomo Patri, Robert McChesney, Hassel Smith, Louise Gilbert, Lou Jackson and Bits Hayden.

Randall's commitment to public art led him to murals: in the late 1940s he painted a mural for the historic Vesuvio's Café, in San Francisco's North Beach; in 1954, he painted a fresco in a Mexico City public school; in 1957 he painted a mural for the Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association, in Montreal, and in the 1960s he assisted his then wife Emmy Lou Packard in creating the Chavez Student Center bas relief mural at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley. He also restored Pablo O'Higgins' mural, 1969, in the Honolulu ILWU headquarters. Randall joined forces with prominent artists Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Charles Wilbert White, and Frank Stella, in protesting the Vietnam War. Randall's activism also led him and Packard to the Soviet Union, in 1964, where they had a show of 48 prints in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, which was featured on Soviet television. And it led him, in the mid-1970s, along with artists Mary Fuller, her husband Robert McChesney, and the Sonoma community, to protest against Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Californian Running Fence installation.

Collections
Randall's art is in the permanent collections of


 * National Gallery of Art
 * Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
 * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
 * Phillips Collection (formerly held)
 * Ackland Art Museum
 * Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art
 * Art, Design & Architecture Museum
 * Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
 * Bolinas Museum
 * Center for the Study of Political Graphics
 * Centro Cultural de la Raza Archives
 * Crocker Art Museum
 * Dana–Farber Cancer Institute
 * Davis Museum at Wellesley College
 * Davison Art Center
 * de Saisset Museum
 * Fresno Art Museum
 * Frost Art Museum
 * Georgia Museum of Art
 * Grinnell College Museum of Art
 * Hallie Ford Museum of Art
 * Henry Art Gallery
 * Housatonic Museum of Art
 * Hunter Museum of American Art
 * Janet Turner Print Collection and Gallery, California State University
 * Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
 * Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University
 * Krannert Art Museum
 * Long Beach Museum of Art
 * Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
 * Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
 * Mariners' Museum
 * Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
 * Maryhill Museum of Art
 * Middlebury College Museum of Art
 * Mills College Art Museum
 * Minneapolis Institute of Art
 * Montefiore Medical Center
 * Monterey Museum of Art
 * Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
 * Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
 * Museum of Northwest Art
 * Museum of Sonoma County
 * Oakland Museum of California
 * Palm Springs Art Museum
 * Pushkin Museum, Moscow
 * Randall Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel
 * Riverside Art Museum
 * Saint Mary's College of California Museum of Art
 * San Jose Museum of Art
 * Schneider Museum of Art
 * Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
 * Smith College Museum of Art
 * Swedish Health Services
 * Triton Museum of Art
 * UC Irvine Institute and Museum for California Art
 * University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art
 * University of Michigan Museum of Art
 * University of Washington
 * Weatherspoon Art Museum
 * and Western Art Gallery, Western Washington University.