Martin Wong: visionary realist artist

September 20, 2017 2:18 PM

Today a retrospective of the art of Martin Wong (1946-1999) opens at the Berkeley Art Museum. The touring show originated at the Bronx Museum (NYT review), and its travels to the Bay Area represent a homecoming for the art of Wong, who was raised in San Francisco's Chinatown. He did set design for Cockettes spinoff the Angels of Light. He moved to New York in 1978, collaborated with his partner, writer Miguel Piñero, collected graffiti art (that collection is now at the City Museum of New York), and collected thousands of items including ceramics. He moved back to San Francisco after he was diagnosed with AIDS. His legacy is commemorated by the Martin Wong Foundation.
posted by larrybob (2 comments total)

Martin Wong is one of those artists I didn't appreciate until I was much older and had been making my own art for many years. Coming out of art school in the 90's he didn't fit my proscribed tastes for mostly Minimalism and anything that seemed to reinforce Post-Struturalism. (There were also a few years where I never read fiction and only read books after searching the index to see if they referenced other writers I thought I was interested in.) Thank god I grew up a little and worked all that out of my system.

I don't know what year it was or even exactly where it was, but I remember walking into a room and seeing a smallish painting by him and thinking "what the hell was wrong with me that I never let myself like this?" Actually, a lot of his paintings aren't simply paintings. They seem so object-like in person. The ones incorporating ASL are some of my favorites and I'm always kind of rooted to the spot when I encounter his work. I really wish someone at the Whitney would be smart enough to hang him in a room with Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Sheeler.

Actually he could occupy a lot of different ideological spaces, but that one seems to do him the most justice canonically.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 7:11 PM on September 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thanks for pointing this out, I I hadn't heard of the show touring! I was introduced to Wong's work in my 30s, through a group of San Francisco performers who hold some tenuous and distant connection to the Cockettes/Angels. Even then I've only seen his paintings. My gosh, all those ceramics!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 10:44 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]