A workAday and a century of CCA.

Oakland artist Lisa Solomon is having a busy year. She’s been in seven group shows and had two solo shows.

You might assume with the amount of production needed to sustain this many exhibitions Solomon would find a working method and stick with it. But change seems to be the only constant in her work.

Maybe it’s the professor in Solomon, who teaches at several Bay Area colleges, that inspired her to challenge eleven other local artists to rethink their working methods over the course of three weeks. “WorkAday,” her curatorial effort at Blankspace, could easily be considered an art school assignment, except that the involved artists are making mature work and many are quite successful.

Cynthia Ona Innis is the standout of the bunch. Innis generally works in oil on large canvases, but for this show, Innis works on paper with acrylic and various media (including something that looks like carpet scraps). The resulting work is much faster, more lyrical and carefree than her more intentioned larger pieces. “WorkAday” may have opened a new road for Innis to wander down.

Eleven artists each making 21 new works in as many days may seem rather ambitious, but it appears intimate compared to the sweeping art epic that the Oakland Museum of California is now offering with  “Artists of Invention: A Century of California College of the Arts.”

If you have somehow missed the multitude of shows this year celebrating the centennial of that venerable Oakland institution, this exhibition--featuring work from 100 faculty and alumni of the school–will more than suffice.

Organized by era, the show begins with the plein-air painters of the 1920s and surges through the Bay Area figurative painters on to the photorealists, ending up with a merry, and way to vast, band of young artists that the curators would like us to believe are the voice of today (but to my eye most seem merely quirky in an annoying sort of way). “Artists of Invention” tends to focus on the school’s heavyweights – either folks who have moved away and made it big in NYC or LA or are just well-known and respected in our little pond. And why shouldn’t the show focus on CCA as a success story it – after all the show is ultimately a vanity project, a big hurrah for the Bay Area.

Here are a few noteworthy surprises:
- Kay Sekimachi’s “Amiyose III,” a hanging wall sculpture made more than four decades ago, easily engages with today’s hybridization of craft into art.
- Wally Hedrick’s “Hermetic Image". Though this comes from the Mills College collection, Rena Bransten donated a large scale oil painting from 1962 ("Orb of Power," which is seen in the show's catalog) to SFMOMA. They need to put it on view way more often (as a matter of fact, when have they ever had it on view?).
- Mary Henry’s “On/Off 8A & 8B.” This late 60s piece has the feel of a Noland but with the plus of extra emotion. I’ve never seen her work in person, and now I’ve fallen in love.

The accompanying catalog is excellent. The interview by Madison Smartt Bell with Judith Linhares and Glen Helfand’s essay on the Bay Area of the late 70s-early 80s are stand outs.

If you ignore the inclusion of far too many young artists – which is really just a propaganda tactic along the lines of “look how our school cranks out today’s stars” – "Artists of Invention" makes a convincing argument for the Oakland Museum to refocus its collection to holdings of exclusively Northern California artists (and yes, they can keep their delightful McCracken painting because he went to school up here).

related: Flickr photoset by Marshall Astor of Lisa Solomon's current solo exhibition in LA.

photo: Little Sow
Cynthia Ona Innis
2007.