Art Collectors Conversations Panel Discussion

Announcing a special event open to the public, Art Collectors Conversations Panel, featuring Patricia Sweetow, a gallarist from San Francisco, and Ramekon O’Arwisters, one of her featured artists. Topic: the direction art is taking in the early 21 st century at monca on Tuesday, March 10 at 6:30pm. Art Collectors Conversations is a new group started by monca in December 2019 for people interested in art collecting. Patricia Sweetow opened her doors in downtown San Francisco in 1997 with her namesake, Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Over her twenty-three year-plus history in San Francisco, the gallery has presented diverse programming and advanced the work of artists across a broad spectrum of media and platforms.  With the interests and concerns that form the gallery today, focused exhibitions confront viewer’s ideas of institutional culture, embracing work that expands art historical lineages, while dissolving boundaries between High and Low art.

Exhibiting artists mine the rich, multifaceted traditions of craft, in ways that embrace diverse cultural origins and conceptually nuanced discourse. Recent exhibitions include work from seminal artist Tony Marsh, who chaired the ceramics department at California State University Long Beach for 25 years, and founded the Center for Contemporary Ceramics; Linda Sormin, whose site-specific museum installations break boundaries mirroring disparate, fractured communities; and Helen O’Leary, recipient of the 2018 Rome Prize, whose reformulations of broken wood and stretched fiber transform into SafeHouse, archeological sculptural paintings reflecting those imperiled through uncertain immigration.

The gallery also debuted the textile/ceramic sculptures of Ramekon O’Arwisters, whose family history immersed him in the African/American folk tradition of quilt making.  He’s applied those early concepts in his community-engaged practice, Crochet Jam. Last, but definitely not least, the gallery hosts artist and arts writer, Julia Couzens on our blog.  Her artful writing on exhibitions and artists in the gallery invigorates the dialogue our program supports.     Event Details: Day/Date/Time: Tuesday, March 10, 6:30pm Admission: $8 Adults, $5 Students, $5 monca Members, Free Art Collectors Conversation Members