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= San Francisco Women Artists =

San Francisco Women Artists (SFWA) is one of California's oldest arts organizations. Created in 1887 as the Sketch Club, the organization was created by local San Francisco Bay Area women to support and promote the talents of established and emerging Bay Area women artists. Located in San Francisco's Sunset District, SFWA is a nonprofit organization that welcomes all genders, while specifically serving women artists.

Contents

 * History
 * Notable former members
 * Funding
 * References
 * External links

History
Initially known as the Sketch Club, SFWA was organized by independent women who met to share and critique each other's work and to counter the all-male Bohemian Club. The Sketch Club met monthly and also went on field trips. In 1887, the group's activities included lectures, semi-annual exhibits, and weekly sketching trips to the East Bay,  summer trips to Aptos, and trips to Pacific Grove. The group also established a university art scholarship in 1887. The organization was active until its  San Francisco headquarters was destroyed During the 1906 earthquake. After the earthquake, the group began to exhibit men's work regularly, and in 1915 it merged with the San Francisco Art Association to create a coed organization. This merger did not last long, and by 1925, the women of the Society had branched off and formed the Society of San Francisco Women Artists (SSFWA) and held its first solo exhibit in 1926. In 1931, the SSFWA sponsored the first decorative native arts exhibit at the De Young Museum. In 1932 the SSFWA exhibited Frida Kahlo' s "Frida and Diego Rivera" at its 6th Annual Exhibition. This exhibit marked the first public showing of Kahlo's work. In 1939, it contributed to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition with murals, artists, and landscape architects. During World War II, the SSFWA partnered with the Red Cross to help rehabilitate servicemen in local hospitals. By 1946 the SSFWA changed its name to San Francisco Women Artists and began a 30+ year relationship with Marchelle Labaudt (future Executive Secretary) and her Gough Street Lucien Labaudt Art Gallery. In 1976 the SFWA and Labaudt were commended by the Senate for their "outstanding contributions to the cultural enhancement of the City of San Francisco." In 1983, the SFWA procured a gallery that provides exhibition space for members. After moving galleries multiple times in the 1980s and 90s, the organization held two landmark exhibitions, "Hands and Heart, the Art of Healing" in 1997 and "To Life" in 1998, which received praise from First LadyHillary Clinton. In 2009 the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutger's University included the SFWA in a historical survey on organizations promoting women and women artists. In 2014, the design firm Studio Hinrichs designed the new SFWA logo pro bono while the organization was going through a rebranding. Then in July 2015, SFWA moved to the Inner Sunset area of San Francisco. Most recently, in 2016, SFWA was awarded the Neighborhood Arts Collaborative grant from the SF Grants to the Arts. The organization now runs a student intern program in conjunction with the Mayor's Youth Education & Employment Program (MYEEP) and the Mercy High School "Women in Arts" Program as well as different educational presentations and discussions that are open to the public. These talks include the "artist-in-action" demonstrations, where SFWA artists teach the community different techniques and skills.

Notable former members
Members have included the artists Marcella Labaudt, Alice B. Crittenden, M. Evelyn McCormick, Helen Hyde, Dorr Bothwell, Claire Falkenstein, Ruth Asawa, Nell Sinton, Eva Almond Withrow, Imogen Cunningham, Emmy Lou Packard, Dorothy Winslade, Eleanor Dickenson, Dora Williams, Matilda Lotz, Clara Taggart McChesney and Ruth Bernhard.

Funding
San Francisco Women Artists is funded by its member artists, gallery activities and programs, individual donations, and grants. SFWA has received the San Francisco Arts Commission: SF Grants for the Arts, Neighborhood Arts Collaborative, and the Voluntary Arts Contribution Fund. It is currently a nonprofit ( 501(c)(3) organization.

The Artists
Joan Heemskerk was born in 1968 in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands, and Dirk Paesmans was born in 1965 in Brussels, Belgium. They both have a background in photography and video art and studied at CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University in California. Paesmans also studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with the founder of video art Nam June Paik.

Currently, both Heemskerk and Paesmans live and work out of the Netherlands.

Artworks
In 1999 they began the practice of modifying old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D to create art mods like SOD. Their efforts were celebrated in the 1999 Webby Awards, where they took top prize in the category of "net art." Jodi used their 5-word acceptance speech (a Webby Award tradition) to criticize the event with the words "Ugly commercial sons of bitches." Further video game modifications soon followed for Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 (2006), to create a new set of art games. Jodi's approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. In one of their more well-known modifications of Quake places, the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the game engine discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the Quake engine tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checkered wallpaper.

"Screen Grab" Period (2002- )
Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their "Screen Grab" period, making video works by recording the computer monitor's output while working, playing video games, or coding. Jodi's "Screen Grab" period began with the four-screen video installation My%Desktop (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict mammoth Mac OS 9 computers running amok: opening windows cascaded across the screen, error messages squawked, and files replicated themselves endlessly. But this was not a computer gone haywire, but a computer user gone haywire. To make this video, Jodi pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped so frantically, it seemed that no human could be in control of such chaos. As graphics exploded across the screen, the viewer gradually realized that what had initially appeared to be a computer glitch was really the work of an irrational, playful, or crazed human. Since 2002 they have had significant shows and exhibitions all over the globe, including Jodi: goodmorning goodnight, which was on display at the Whitney Museum from 2013- 2015. More recently, Jodi has had significant exhibitions. These exhibitions include one fo there newest projects, OXO (2018), which was displayed at the Lightbox Gallery at Harvard University. The piece is an interactive multichannel installation based off of old computer games and tic-tac-toe. "Difference Engine" was also on display at the And/Or Gallery in Pasadena, California, during the same year. The exhibition marked Jodi's first solo show in the Los Angeles area.

"JODI's work underlines the innate anarchy of the online medium, an arena that we've come to recognize as public but one that the duo constantly undermines and tweaks to their own purposes."