The five women artists in this exhibition, Sonia Gechtoff, Nancy Genn, Marge Rector, Beate Wheeler, and Anthe Zacharias, all have the Bay Area as a common thread tying them together. More important, they lived and worked in the Bay Area during seminal periods in their respective careers. Their unique experiences and learnings profoundly influenced and informed their artworks, including the aesthetics, compositions, processes and methods of applying paint to a canvas, as well as forming the ethos of their artworks and careers.

The early influences of the Bay Area on each of these women, to varying degrees, included: institutions such as the California School of Fine Arts (currently, San Francisco Art Institute), UC Berkeley, De Young Museum, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; their teachers and mentors, including Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Claire Falkenstein; gallerists and curators such as Walter Hopps, Edward Kienholz, and Irving Blum (each of the Ferus Gallery at different times in its history), Jim Newman (Dilexi Gallery), Nick Wilder Gallery, and 6 Gallery (Deborah Remington was a founding member); and last, but not least, life-long friendships with Jay De Feo, Sonya Rapoport, Debora Remington, Ernest Briggs, Wally Hedrick, Peter Voulkos, Jack Zajac, Mark di Suvero, and Sam Francis.

The exhibition title, Painting on the Edges of America Since the 1950s, Five Bay Area Women Painters, reflects the bi-coastal careers of several of the artists, specifically Gechtoff, Wheeler and Zacharias. Each of those women had lived on the east coast of the US, Philadelphia and New York, respectively, prior to moving to the Bay Area and each ultimately moved to New York following their time in California. Genn was born, educated, lived, raised a family, and worked in the East Bay her entire life and continues to produce new bodies of work in the same studio. Rector moved from Texas to Sausalito in the 1970s, then worked and lived in California the rest of her life. Each artist, except for Anthe Zacharias, had and raised children during their professional artistic careers.

The 15 paintings presented in this exhibition, three by each artist, do not always represent paintings produced in the Bay Area per se, due mostly to limited availability. However, the paintings by Genn and possibly one by Zacharias were painted in the Bay Area. The paintings selected for this presentation represent iconic and important aspects of each artist’s oeuvre as influenced by their time spent and career experiences and/or learnings while in the Bay area.

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present this exhibition, Painting on the Edges of America Since the 1950s, Five Bay Area Women Painters: Sonia Gechtoff, Nancy Genn, Marge Rector, Beate Wheeler, and Anthe Zacharias and represents each of these artists and their artworks.