Bonnie Sherk, landscape artist full of surprises, dies at 76
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Sunday, December 8, 2024


Bonnie Sherk, landscape artist full of surprises, dies at 76
A provided image shows the landscape artist Bonnie Sherk sitting in San Francisco’s financial district as part of her “Sitting Still,” series. Sherk, an artist and landscape architect, made a career out of unusual art projects that explored humanity’s relationship with nature. She died on Aug. 8, 2021 in hospice care in San Francisco, her sister Abby Kellner-Rode said. She was 76. Bonnie Ora Sherk via The New York Times.

by Neil Genzlinger



NEW YORK, NY.- On a Thursday in June 1970, a police officer in San Francisco was going nuts because motorists entering the busy Central Freeway near Market Street were jamming on their brakes, startled by an unusual sight. On what the day before had been a bare patch of ground, a young woman was sitting on a bale of hay, surrounded by potted palm trees and 4,000 square feet of green turf, patting a Guernsey calf that was tied to a railing.

“Keep those cars moving!” the anonymous officer shouted, according to an account in the Los Angeles Times.

“We could have a terrific pileup,” he added.

The woman on the hay bale was Bonnie Ora Sherk, and the temporary roadside attraction (created with the approval of highway officials) was the first in a series of conceptual-art pieces she called “Portable Parks.”

“I like the element of surprise,” she told the newspaper, explaining that the idea was to re-imagine empty spaces and inject a humanistic element into locations defined by anonymity and sterility.

“Freeways are beautiful, but they need to be softened,” she said. “Why use them just for cars?”

Sherk, an artist and landscape architect, went on to make a career out of unusual art projects that explored humanity’s relationship with nature. She died Aug. 8 in hospice care in San Francisco, her sister Abby Kellner-Rode said. She was 76.

Kellner-Rode did not specify a cause. The death has not been widely reported previously.

Sherk, who lived in San Francisco, was among a group of artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of them women, who sought to move the definition of art beyond painting and other traditional genres, creating momentary conceptual pieces that were site-specific and performance-based.

A few months after she and the Guernsey surprised motorists that June, she was outside the San Francisco Museum of Art with 80 sacks of crushed ice, which she and some helpers turned into a flurry of October snowballs; the performance ended with her handing raspberry-colored snow cones to passersby. The next year, for a piece she called “Public Lunch,” she sat in a cage at the San Francisco Zoo, eating a meal at a nicely set table while jungle cats in the cage next door were being fed.

“Women artists working in the 1960s and ’70s like Bonnie Ora Sherk sought to interrupt and subvert how viewers perceived art, power, gender and place,” Jennifer McCabe, director and chief curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, said by email. “She used performance as a way to investigate fragile and threatened environments and challenge the notion of audience through spontaneous performances.”

McCabe, who included Sherk’s work in an exhibition last year called “Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions From the 1970s — Now,” said the 1970s work of Sherk and others continues to resonate.

“Artists who emerged in the 1980s and later incorporated these strategies of performance and place to address issues of social and environmental justice,” she said, “including borders, migration, climate crisis and economic disparities, as well as race and gender.”

One particularly ambitious project that Sherk spearheaded was called the Crossroads Community, often shortened to simply the Farm. It transformed a 6-acre parcel amid the tangled Army Street (now Cesar Chavez Street) highway interchange in San Francisco into what Sherk described as an “environmental sculpture,” with crops, livestock and educational components; schools would bring students by to learn about agriculture.




“In the city, things tend to be very fragmented, and the freeway is a symbol of that fragmentation,” she told The Associated Press in 1977, 2 1/2 years after the founding of the Farm, which lasted for years. “We’re attempting to reconnect people and humanize environments.”

Sherk saw growing vegetables and creating art as close cousins.

“Learning to be a farmer is sensitive, like learning to be an artist,” she said. “The growth process in life is like the creative process in art.”

Bonnie Ora Kellner was born May 18, 1945, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and grew up primarily in Montclair, New Jersey. Her father, Sydney, was area director of the American Jewish Committee and a lecturer in art and archaeology, and her mother, Eleanor (Lipskin) Kellner, taught first grade.

Her father worked with various organizations promoting cooperation among people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, which put him in contact with some important figures. One gathering brought Eleanor Roosevelt to Montclair, which made an impression on young Bonnie.

“After the meeting, he had to drive her home,” Sherk recalled last year in the interview series “My Life in Art,” “so my older sister sat in the front seat with her, and I sat in the back seat, and we drove her back to New York.”

Sherk studied art at Rutgers University, where artist Robert Watts, a professor there, schooled her in the avant-garde Fluxus movement. After graduating, in the late 1960s, she headed to San Francisco with her husband at the time, David Sherk. (The marriage ended in divorce.)

Another early art series came about in 1970 when, at the Army Street interchange she would later help transform, she noticed a plot strewn with water and soggy with storm runoff, with an overstuffed armchair plunked amid the debris.

“I immediately realized that this was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how a seated human figure could transform the environment by simply being there,” she said in an interview with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “I went home and changed into an evening gown and came back, waded into the water, and sat in the chair for some time, facing the audience of people in the passing cars.”

She later sat in armchairs in the Financial District and various other locations in the city, calling it her “Sitting Still Series.”

In her art and in her daily life, her sister Rachel Binah said, she was flashy, theatrical and unpredictable.

“She loved costumes — when performing and in daily life,” Binah said by email. “When she worked the night shift at Andy’s Donut Shop in San Francisco’s Castro district, she would wear a big bouffant wig and a pink waitress costume.” Also, “When women around her were, or were not, shaving their legs, Bonnie would shave one leg and one armpit.”

She is survived by her sisters.

There was serious thought behind her work, especially regarding ecological themes. In the 1980s, she began developing what she called Living Libraries and Think Parks, small parcels and nature trails in San Francisco and elsewhere that invited the community to learn about the past of a particular place and help cultivate its future. Many people, she said in a 2013 interview with the journal SFAQ, “don’t have the sense of wonder about the richness that surrounds them.”

“We have to learn how to uncover it,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

November 21, 2021

Looking for a stolen idol? Visit the museum of the Manhattan DA

Installation reunites Édouard Manet's three Philosopher paintings

Maurizio Cattelan's first solo exhibition in China presents 29 works from his more than three-decade-long career

Major exhibition devoted to German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer opens at the National Gallery

Historic development: Afghanistan's disappearing box cameras

Peter Blum Gallery opens a survey across seven decades of Chris Marker's career

Storyboards for doomed 'Dune' film up for auction

Artpace San Antonio announces new works by Fall 2021 International Artists-in-Residence

nft now x Christie's to present 'The Gateway' at Art Basel Miami

Ethiopia hails return of looted artefacts

Bonnie Sherk, landscape artist full of surprises, dies at 76

Heather Gaudio Fine Art opens an exhibition of works by Ann Gardner

New $50 million Shepparton Art Museum opens to the public

Christie's online auction offers the latest collections of illustrations by Sir Quentin Blake

Untitled Art announces highlights of expanded curatorial program

Worcester Art Museum held annual meeting and elected two new trustees

MCA Chicago announces new curatorial leadership

Caroline Todd, half of a mystery-writing duo, dies at 86

Beatles signed 'Please Please Me' album sold for $31,251 at auction

Oliver Lee Jackson debuts original body of work in new exhibition at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art

Medals of Battle of Britain fighter ace squadron leader 'Bolshie' Bartley to be sold at Dix Noonan Webb

JD Malat Gallery presents a new body of work by Henrik Uldalen

Tourbillon, Rolex lift Heritage Watches & Fine Timepieces Auction above $3.2 million

Elijah Burgher's first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W Gallery opens in New York

How to Make Bubble Tea




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Houston Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง
Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful