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Upcoming Exhibitions


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Upcoming Exhibitions


MCASD


MCASD


 How to Build a Sky: (Gloaming), (Southern Cross), (C-Moon), 2022 is currently on view as part of the exhibition Celestial and Terrestrial Worlds at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in the Richard D. Marshall Gallery as a recent acquisition, alongside contemporary works of American art from the museum’s permanent collection. The installation is curated by David C. Copley Director and CEO Kathryn Kanjo.

How to Build a Sky: (Gloaming), (Southern Cross), (C-Moon), 2022
Acrylic on canvas in artist frame
Overall: 80 1/2 × 109 1/2in. (204.5 × 278.1cm)
Each of three: 25 1/2 × 109 1/2 × 2 1/4in. (64.8 × 278.1 × 5.7cm)
Museum purchase with funds from Patsy and David Marino, Nancy and Matt Browar, Craig Hartzman and James John, Kevin Comer and Rick Distel, Keith Markovitz, and William Stewart

SARA GENN: How to Build a Sky 

Artists will forever look for more powerful ways to access the purity of the thing they are trying to achieve – in my case, it is a kind of delicate joy; in the traveling eye, in association, in reorganization, in paucity, in immersion. Color and its relationship to itself invite us to consider our own impulses to rearrange, to single out, to connect, to order and to indulge in a preference. Organizing color is perhaps also an effort to stabilize a mutable force; to play at ordering nature while embracing its mysteries. In this way, omission and emphasis, and the vital spaces between things are what allow us to understand their meaning. 

In the late 50s, jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus would hang out with Allen Ginsberg and others at socialite Peggy Hitchcock’s house in upstate New York. Mingus, known for integrating loosely composed passages with solos, and for espousing collective improvisation as a means of creating an interdependent artwork, saw the collaboration of sounds as a vehicle for achieving his aesthetic goals. In her country house, Peggy had a skylight she wanted to replace with blue aircraft shield plastic. She was going for a permanent blue sky. Though she never got a building permit, Mingus wrote her something of a consolation and called it, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” You can find it on his 1962 album “Oh Yeah!”

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” (Charles Mingus)

How To Build a Golden Hour, 79.5 x 109.5 inches, installed, Acrylic on canvas, 2023