Anglim Gilbert Gallery PRESS RELEASE

Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to present a joint exhibition of works by Gay Outlaw and Carlos Villa at Independent New York 2020.

Outlaw (b. 1959) and Villa (1936-2013), are San Francisco-based artists who share a personal, idiosyncratic approach to color, material, and form. Their respective practices — which includes their work as curators, writers, and teachers — demonstrate an energetic pursuit of singular creative vision.

Gay Outlaw, born in Mobile, Alabama, delights in the inherent strangeness of familiar objects. Her casually composed photographs of oddball city scenes — mannequin legs in midair, a house tented for pest extermination — are strategically obscured by

amorphous blobs of candy-hued glass. Adding another surreal layer to uncanny mise en scène is integral to Outlaw’s visual language. Her latest work, New Crate Wave, functions in a similar manner. Here, Outlaw molds cast paper into an oversized pillar resembling a cylindrical egg crate. The form is then layered with images of common breakfast foods and reproductions of Hokusai’s The Great Wave of Kanagawa. Bananas and belgian waffles mingle with abstracted woodblock waves, creating a patchwork of disjointed, comical ubiquity.

Carlos Villa, a native San Franciscan, was an unparalleled contributor to the city’s artistic fabric. An original member of the Rat Bastard Protective Association — which included the likes of Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Bruce Conner, among others — Villa was involved with the cohort of Beat-era artists. This was indicative of the community-based approach to artmaking that would later sustain his practice. His felt-tip pen drawings and works on unstretched canvas are at once theatrical and meditative. Informed by Oceanic objects in the deYoung Museum’s permanent collection and Filipino tapa cloth patterns, his works from the 1960s and ‘70s combine action, performance, and activism to dramatic effect. By celebrating a long-marginalized artistic heritage, Villa claimed space for a new generation of artists to fully embrace their specific cultural identities.

Gay Outlaw’s work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the diRosa Collection, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, among many other public and private collections. This year, three of her large-scale sculptures will be installed in the plaza of Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport.

Carlos Villa’s work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, Columbia University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum, and the Crocker Art Museum, among many other public and private collections. In the spring of 2021, his work will be the subject of a major retrospective and catalog, Carlos Villa: Roots, organized by the San Francisco Art Institute, in conjunction with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and funded by an Andy Warhol Foundation grant. His work is prominently featured in the Singapore Biennale, on view through March 22nd, https://www.singaporebiennale.org/.

Independent New York 2020 Gay Outlaw and Carlos Villa Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Spring Studios, 5th Floor

Anglim Gilbert Gallery 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 415-433-2710 gallery@anglimgilbertgallery.com