OPENING TODAY - Post Times is stoked to be presenting Frank Gaard at Independent, Booth 505, Open Friday - Sunday at Pier 36
Frank Gaard (b. 1944, Chicago) is one of the most important artists in Minnesota, having presented survey exhibitions at the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, yet his solo presentation at Independent will be his first in New York. Gaard is known for his brash personality and idiosyncratic art practice, using a vibrant, sometimes acrid palette, offering up satire through imagery derived from art history, his intellectual and political obsessions, bipolar disorder, and relationships, skewering pop culture excesses as well as academic and art world elitism. “Monet had his water lilies, and I have my panties,” he jokes.
From 1974 to 1994, Gaard published and distributed the incendiary underground art magazine, Artpolice, which was founded by a collective of artists as a response to the Nixon presidency and was a protest to the cultural repression of the time, featuring a mix of political commentary, absurdism, humor, Dadaist attitudes. In addition to their regular publishing, they mounted a few exhibitions, including their 1985 exhibition at L.A.C.E in Los Angeles, on the invitation of artist Mike Kelley, who was a contributor. Esteemed curator Walter Hopps also nominated them for the 1985 Paris Biennial.
Frank Gaard was born in Chicago in 1944, in a working class household with an alcoholic father and a schizophrenic mother. A talented artist from a young age, most of his pals in high school called him Pablo or Picasso, even in signing the yearbook. He received a B.F.A. in 1967 from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1968 he earned an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied under Peter Saul. In 1969, he moved to Minneapolis for a teaching gig at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which he continued for almost two decades, becoming an elemental part of the Twin Cities art scene.
Most of these works were presented in Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy at the Walker Art Center, January 26-May 6, 2012.
He chopped down a cherry tree and confessed he lied about it.
Grant Wood painted this in his closet , the idea of our first president
being a slave owner always creeped me out. The cherry tree story
Seemed like a distraction from the compromise at the root of the bill of rights for white property owners and slaves being property , it
could be why we wind up with autocrats , the racism in the beginning.
Remember the IRAQ War ? The rise of ISIS ? False reports of weapons of mass destruction.
Notebook from war times which seem to be most times. IMAGINE PEACE - SATANIC WARS
Our Lady of Artpolice 1984 Private Collection I found this Jpeg searching on Google yesterday it’s quite good. Enlarges well and has always been a favorite page from our Artpolicecomics project. These drawings were larger and reproduced smaller to modular sizes vis-à-vis the 8 1/2 X 11” matrix for offset printing . Now it’s quite a rare thing to find this zine and many others at quite steep prices, books are in many museum and private collections.
Untitled (colored heads ) 1976. 41 X 29 1/2” acrylic on Rives BFK
collection of MMAA St Paul MN USA pretty typical of that time when
I did hundreds of these heads on many different platforms .
The numbers are the way they were made in order 1 through 22.
