Rigo 23, Backtracking 199485, 5/11, 6-8pm opening, luggage store gallery

Press Release
For more info. Contact:
Laurie Lazer: 415. 255-5971
[email protected]

VISUAL ART
SOLO EXHIBITION

RIGO 23
Backtracking 199485
new work, large-scale mixed media drawings on canvas

Dates
May 11 - June 16, 2007

Opening
Friday, May 11, 6-8pm

Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday, 12-5pm and by appointment

Venue
the luggage store
1007 Market Street (near 6th)
San Francisco, CA 94103

Telephone
415. 255 5971

Email
[email protected]

Website
www.luggagestoregallery.org

In this solo exhibition, Rigo 23 presents large-scale mixed media drawings with text on canvas with accompanying hand made zines. Rigo’s graphic imagery borrows stylistically from signage, advertising, popular cartoons, and newsprint photography.

The drawings portray activists and events that have influenced and shaped local Bay Area, national and global politics, and have all but been forgotten in the Bay Area.

San Francisco has always been regarded as a “safe haven” for social experimentation; as a place where differences enriched rather than divided the socio-political landscape. San Francisco was a sanctuary town, which welcomed individuals fleeing from war and hunger; people moving towards freedom of expression – sexually, politically, socially, artistically and spiritually; and as Rigo says, who “…at least walked towards a better and more humane collective future.”

Backtracking 199485 pays tribute to, honors and thanks those who have sought to preserve and extend freedom as the artist shares seminal moments that shaped and influenced his life in the Bay Area during this vital period.

Dr. Huey P. Newton, (1942-1989), co founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Dolores Huerta (b 1930), co founder United Farm Workers of America and co founder with Cesar Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association

AIDS Vigil on UN Plaza at Civic Center, focusing on the connections between homelessness, poverty and HIV.

Keith McHenry, Co-Founder, Food Not Bombs.

Critical Mass, monthly mass bicycle/non-car ride.

Brian Wilson, Vietnam Veteran Against the War who protested US arms shipments to Central America by practicing civil disobedience

Judi Bari (1949-1997) Earth First! Activist

“Backtracking…” too stems from the artist’s need to share some of the seminal moments in this particularly vital period 1985-1994 that shaped and influenced his life in the Bay Area.

Representations of time and issues of justice have always played an important role in Rigo’s artistic practice. His first solo show at the Richmond Art Center in 1994 was titled "Time and Time Again" and was dedicated exclusively to the plight of Geronimo Ji Jaga, at the time incarcerated at Mule Creek State Penitentiary. In 1992 he did a series of works focusing on the 500-year celebrations of the arrival of Europeans to this continent. In 2002 he painted a giant mural across the street from the Civic Center entitled “Truth” in dedication to Robert King Wilkerson, an ex-Black Panther who after spending 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola State Prison was released from prison and found innocent.

Towards an ever more meaningful intercommunalism… Rigo continues to place his powerful murals, paintings, sculptures, and tile works in strategic locations, encouraging viewers to examine their role and their relationship, locally, nationally and globally to their community and their environment, and as participants (whether willfully or unwittingly) in the public policies that affect us all.

A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and Stanford University (MFA), Rigo has been exhibiting work for over 20 years internationally and locally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museo de Art Contemporanea in Brazil, Artists Space in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, The DeYoung Museum, Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco.. He has participated in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum, the 2006 Liverpool Biennial; the Liverpool Biennial, and has been featured in a wealth of group exhibitions including The SFMOMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, and the Pasadena Museum of Art.

He has been awarded public commissions from the San Francisco International Airport, the Gerbode Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission, as well as permanent murals and terrazzo walks in Portugal. In October of 2005, a commissioned outdoor sculpture was dedicated on the campus of San Jose State University. Rigo depicted the two 1968 Olympic athletes, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos in a larger-than-life version of their fisted saluteHis much publicized San Francisco murals, “One Tree” and “Inner City Home” have made him a spokesperson for urban San Francisco residents. In 1999, Rigo received the SECA Award from SFMOMA.

A mid-career survey exhibition of Rigo’s work, Jam Sessions: RIGO 84 - 23, is traveling from The Centro das Artes, Casa das Mudas in Madeira, Portugal onward to Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, Brazil in 2007.