INTRODUCING ARTIST
WENDY ACKRELL
One of a series of kintsugi self portraits
Seastar,theocean deceivedyou-yourtrue birthrightrepair; wounds,armor.- Wendy Ackrell WENDY ACKRELL BIO
San Francisco-based artist Wendy Ackrell has worked as a painter for over two decades, primarily exploring abstraction but returning to figuration over the past few years. Originally a writer, she incorporates fiber art, poetry and mixed media into her work.
Along with painting, her first love, Wendy animates and transforms natural materials such as river stones, trees and fallen branches with paint, wool and wire, leaving them to be discovered in situ. She is of the firm belief that joy in the act of creation and the wonder in alchemizing the quotidian into something precious and perceived anew is a resounding yes to life. She is currently investigating kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, both as artistic metaphor and a celebration of resilience.
Her great passion is making public art. Wendy was chosen to interpret works by five renowned poets for San Francisco Beautiful’sMuniArt2020Project,HiddenGemsinSanFrancisco . Wendy’s paintings were displayed on Muni buses throughout the city. More recently, Wendy created a 400-pound heart sculpture, LabyrinthineHeart , for SFGH Foundation’s Hearts in San Francisco 2023.
Wendy is a member of the InterFem Book Club founded by activist artist Ann Lewis. Previously, Wendy was a Mastermind group leader and forum moderator for Thrive Art Studio, an online women’s art collective.
Wendy received her B.A. in English from Duke University. She is currently studying at The Alternative Art School, an online community of artists founded by art writer and curator Nato Thompson.
wendyackrell.com wentay@me.com
@wendyackrell 415.336.9691
A lot of what I’ve been exploring and discovering over the last twenty years or so is that I’m so much a product of my earliest years, carrying and borrowing more than I ever realized. The same personality traits that make me good at being alone happily and exploring deeply by myself needing lots of time to lose myself in books and research, learning how to be resilient, and listening to my own instincts were formed by my earliest experiences.
My home life in childhood was colored by fighting and felt terrorizing a lot of the time. I grew up in a home with an alcoholic parent and couldn’t predict if things would be normal or crazy from day to day. That unpredictability made for so much tension and uncertainty I still fear surprises of any kind. Even though I am getting better at understanding where my overprotective reactions come from, it’s still hard to change them. But those marks and scars not only informed my personality and future decisions, I think they made me a more openhearted and loving person, actually. I’m still an optimist, probably more so with each passing year.
When I was old enough to forge my own path, I knew that I craved a peaceful and private life, with as much quiet and harmony as I could find. The places I explore in my work have been a reflection of my desire for order and reason and balance. That’s part of why I’ve loved using math in my work it doesn’t lie, it doesn’t shout. It just is, beautifully.
I’ve been reading a lot about post-traumatic growth recently, and I started to think about the place between resilience and thriving, a big point of difference really. I’ve always thought of resilience as more of a positive feeling, but I’ve been realizing that it’s not exactly the right word to describe the ability to be openhearted and optimistic and trusting. That place is further down the road, and I would call that thriving. It took me until my midforties to get there, but I am actually (sometimes) right there.
What’s new for me in my work these days is using figuration to express myself. I haven’t painted literally or representationally in twenty years. I didn’t realize how I missed it. And it’s given me a way to make my work more accessible and less oblique, and I like that. My greatest hope is to have a sort of communion with the viewer, and I think that painting figuratively will make that happen more often.
I can also use symbols or a representative scene to talk about what really matters, like Americans stripped of rights such as the right to privacy and to control our own bodies and destinies. I wrote some notes about “mother as vessel” for a show I did last year called HereWeAre,LaidBare , and it’s even more the case now, with motherhood barely a choice now for so many people. We’re seen as incubators; these minoritarian rulers said the quiet part out loud.
Right now, with so many people still in such stasis, or whatever you want to call this nutty, numbing, sorrowful past few years, it’s nice to be able to paint a vase rejoined with kintsugi and think that people will get the message of the beauty found through lived experience, and the strange and difficult loveliness found in change and even, sometimes, in loss.
So like I say in this world cloud or mind map on womanhood and motherhood and aging and change, I feel like I’ve had the most harrowing yet exquisite decade of my life and to compare it to a crucible sounds fair. Being able to alchemize these struggles into something beautiful is my great joy and reward.
I like this definition of a crucible so much:
A situation of severe trial, or in which different elements interact, leading to the creation of something new. “Their relationship was forged in the crucible of war.”
And yes, I think we’re in quite a few wars ourselves now, existential ones as I see it. To be living in a time like this, where even our right to life when we get up and leave home isn’t guaranteed, has become tritely and recurrently terrifying, and I think my new series reflects that sort of banshee wail that a lot of people seem to be feeling together these days. It’s a release. It’s joy as an act of dissent. It’s my hope presented to you on a piece of stretched cloth. Say it with flowers.
- Wendy AckrellHEARTS IN SAN FRANCISCO
The San Francisco General Hospital Foundation supports and funds patient care and innovation at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. SFGH’s Hearts in San Francisco project debuted in 2004. Heart sculptures, created by Bay Area artists, were placed on display throughout San Francisco for the public to enjoy. After three months, they were auctioned by the Foundation in support of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. The Foundation raised nearly $3 million in that first year. Today, the Foundation carries on this tradition by commissioning a new set of hearts each year to be auctioned at its annual gala held at San Francisco City Hall. The funds raised support those delivering on the promise of accessible and equitable health care for all in San Francisco.
Hearts in San Francisco sculptures can be spotted throughout San Francisco and beyond. All of the ‘heartworks’ are privately owned some are in easily discovered locations, such as the lobbies and storefronts of corporate supporters, while others are at the homes of private individuals. One of the most recognizable hearts, Tony Bennett’s America’sGreatestCitybytheBay , resides permanently on the corner of Powell and Post Streets in San Francisco’s Union Square.
To celebrate SFGH’s 150-year anniversary this year, the Foundation commissioned 33 hearts for Hearts in San Francisco 2023. The hearts came in three sizes: large, tabletop and mini. Six large hearts, 400-pound fiberglass sculptures, measuring 6 feet wide by 5 feet high were commissioned.
Wendy Ackrell received a commission for one of the large hearts for Hearts in San Francisco 2023. Wendy’s heart, LabyrinthineHeart , along with more than 20 others, was on display at the San Francisco Ferry Building from January 25 to February 28, 2023. Wendy’s heart was purchased by Genentech, a leading biotechnology company. Genentech was the Platinum Sponsor of Hearts in San Francisco 2023. LabyrinthineHeartis currently on display in San Francisco’s Union Square, across from Neiman Marcus.
Since the summer of 2021, I’ve been researching the history of hourglasses, photographing and sketching and thinking about them so frequently, and I haven’t been exactly sure why. I keep a family of three in my kitchen and flip each one reflexively whenever I walk through the room. I have a seed, as Rick Rubin says in his new book, TheCreativeAct:AWayofBeing , and I’m figuring out how to sow it. (I’m generally wary of ‘how to’ books but got a clear nod from the universe to get this one, and I’m glad I did. It’s reminding me to heed my gut knowledge and atavistic instinct and pay attention worth the time for that alone.)
There are two quotes about attention that I hold especially dear and keep in a small but precious indigo notebook covered with stars. One is by George Washington Carver: “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also if you love them enough.” That feels so earnest and true to a person like me, who wants to find the best in everyone, who looks for a reason to love unreservedly. The other, by Simone Weil, is often quoted but never feels tired: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Sometimes it seems that in the hyperkinetic overload of daily living, listening to each other with absolute focus is becoming a lost art, at least for my Gen X tech-added self.
Now I am thinking about ladders, and transcendence, and the challenging, unapologetically imperfect beauty of kintsugi and mosaic work. I am remembering the freedom of the lucid dreams I used to be graced with when I was young. (If you are lucky enough to experience them, let me know if you have any tips on how to invite them back. I miss that feeling of floating around the ether like a giant wayfaring eye.)
This is a 48” x 24” study for a larger piece I’d like to do. I’m curious how this will read on a larger, wider canvas; scale will definitely change the spirit. I’m thinking 72” x 48.”
LiminalPerpendicularity
Latex and spray paint on canvas
30 x 30 inches 2018
Orange is the color of so many of my favorite things: clementines, turning leaves, Theravada Buddhist monks' robes, battered orange-spined Penguin Classics, Kuri squash, California poppies the list is endless.
There is something so joyous and uplifting about a bright, true orange that I so appreciate now. In my callow youth, I disdained it, associating it with traffic cones, construction barricades, safety vests, and the like. Now it just imbues me with happiness, energy, and optimism.
In this piece, I wanted to highlight the simplicity of line contrasted with the shock of brilliant color. I find something at once tranquil and a bit “betwixt and between” in how these matte gold lines parallel two edges of the canvas while leaving the rest a pure and exuberantly bright color field.
Mathematicalinspiration:thesquaresofanyoddnumberhavearemainderof1 whentheyaredividedby4.
Demarcation,Magenta
Latex and spray paint on canvas
30 x 30 inches 2020
Mathematicalinspiration:Thesquaresofdoubleanyoddnumbermustbeamultipleoffour.
One fine day, noodling around at Green Apple Books on Clement Street, I spied a book with a promising Toulouse-Lautrec illustration. Misia:TheLifeofMisiaSert , it announced insistently. I read the first few lines and was immediately in thrall. The next few days were a blur, where I tried to get my living done in fits and starts while feasting on this fantastical tale.
From the safety of my armchair amphitheater, I get to read biographies of astonishing people, relishing their monumental successes and painlessly reliving their trials, while speculating about the wild directions their lives often took. That is both the disillusionment and delight of learning about people who lived in a different era, when freedom and fulfillment weren't commensurate with what some of us enjoy today. Their choices seem frustrating and often bizarre, as some decisions of the remarkably avant-garde and hypnotically alluring Misia Sert appear to me.
The book's authors, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, have so much appreciation and empathy for this woman born out of time. She was known as The Queen of Paris: granddaughter of famed cellist AdrienFrançois Servais and daughter of sculptor Cyprian Godebski; Misia lost her mother in childbirth and grew up with her maternal grandparents, music, and a convent education as her companions. She was an incredibly gifted pianist but established herself more as a tastemaker and patroness than an artist in her own right.
This isn't to say she wasn't a powerful force of the zietgeist: everyone who was anyone wanted to paint her and was generally besotted by her (Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard); Proust used her as the model for both the delightful Princess Yourbeletieff and the social-climbing Madame Verdurin in InSearchof Lost Time ; and Misia was the staunch benefactress and champion of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and other genius creators of their time. Without her support, some ravishing artwork might not even exist.
Misia was not only prescient about what was truly great art but had the money and will to back her favored composers, musicians, and painters in accomplishing their work. She married three times: first, she wed a cousin who began La Revue Blanche, a contemporary arts publication with great influence; a few years later, her extremely wealthy second husband-to-be basically purchased her from her first; finally, she fell for the Spanish artist and muralist Jose Maria Sert, who made her very happy (until he fell in love with a much younger Georgian aristocrat, Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani.) Mdivani was seemingly a Kardashian of her day; her tragically short life sounds bananas too, from what I could tell.
To me, Misia’s most incomprehensible relationship was her long friendship with the enormously talented and morally repugnant Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who not only collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis but was said to have been an actual spy (handle “Westminster”) herself. An addiction to morphine united them, and many believe they were lovers. Drugs and sex can make for some strange bedfellows indeed.
Although this piece is based in mathematics, the effect is of a golden cage or purdah window of some kind. When I stood back and inspected the finished work, a thought went through me: “This was Misia; this was her life.” All brilliant fuchsia and whispery gold, the lines read like metallic bars or even talons wrapping around something feminine, strong, yet not thoroughly realized.
While Sert let her own extraordinary talent for piano lie fallow, she championed and in some cases, kept afloat the careers of others whom she deemed exceptional. Her own work might have been writ in water, but her influence was both enduring and profound.
Clive James had this to say in a magnificently comprehensive article for The London Review of Books: “Without directly creating anything, she was some kind of artist herself….She gave the artists the gift of her sublime ephemerality and they made it last.”
Bhāskara’sBigIdea
Latex and spray paint on canvas 30 x 30 inches 2019
This yellow is a Ben Moore houseplant called Bumble Bee Yellow that makes me so happy to this day.
To my chagrin, I am not much of an Instagram poster and often wonder who is a bigger laggard, me or the three-toed sloth. I envy those of you who seem to be able to work, photograph, and post your art so frequently. It truly captivates me, and if it ever does start to wear, I discreetly mute the few over-sharers in my feed. No, I’m not talking about you never you! You’re my raison d’être. Really.
What I do behind the scenes often seems rather quotidian to me, but may be a bit different or of interest to you. In that spirit, I’m going to be posting quite a bit more frequently over the next month or so.
As some of you know, I’m more than a little in love with math and haven’t been able to get this proof out of my head since I first encountered it. The rightness and just...sheer inevitability of it translates so well to canvas, as I hoped it would. Here’s my take on the Pythagorean theorem independently discovered by the 12th century rock-star mathematician (and astronomer, in his spare time) Bhaskara, drenched in a marigold yellow-orange so vivid and exuberant it makes me smile every time I walk past it.
Pythagoreantheorem:
In any right triangle, the sum of the square of the two perpendicular sides is equal to the square of the longest side. For a right triangle with legs measures a and b and length of hypotenuse c, the theorem can be expressed in the form a² + b² = c²
CopperSquares,Indigo
Latex and spray paint on canvas 30 x 30 inches
Desire(v)
early 13c., from Old French desirrer, (12c.) “wish, desire, long for,” from Latin desiderare,“long for, wish for; demand, expect,” original sense perhaps “await what the stars will bring,” from the phrase “from the stars,” from sidus,(genitive sideris) “heavenly body, star, constellation.”
I've been thinking so often lately about the Latin word desiderare . It feels ineffably poetic and wholly right that it conveys the longing of being “away from your star.”
Sometimes when I'm doing these mixed media pieces, my mind wanders to thoughts of mapping constellations. I marvel at how vast the world is, and how starkly impersonal yet deeply universal all our lives, griefs, and joys seem to be. Cityscapes, power lines, geographic grids, sacred geometry, webs these images and others roll through my mind and shape-shift as the work does too.
The sense of connectedness and completion they bring is something I haven't experienced in this particular way before. Lifting the work partly off the canvas creates a extraordinary feeling of ascension of some kind.
hello,world
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
30 x 30 inches 2020
This was a piece for the “SF Beautiful Muni Art 2020” project that I loved so much. Taylor’s poem mourns the loss of connection and the growing isolation that accompanies our collective technological advances. I decided to do an old -fashioned letter in the colors the poet paints her poem in. Don’t you miss letters and phone calls? I’ve learned about births and deaths by texts and I miss the humanity of those now-antiquated ways of communicating so much.
TRAINTHROUGHCOLMA
But will anyone teach the new intelligence to miss the apricot trees
that bloomed each spring along these tracks?
Or the way afternoons
blazed with creosote & ponderosa?
Spring evenings flare with orange pixels in the bay-scented valley where in the algorithm
will they account for the rippling ponies that roamed outside Fremont?
When the robots have souls, will they feel longing?
When they feel longing,
will they write poems?
- Tess Taylor
AmorFatiVII
Acrylic, spray paint, wool and metal studs on canvas 36 x 36 inches
Thispieceispartofamathematically-basedseriesIdidduringthe2016-2020 years that helped me maintain a sense of order and sanity during such an emotionallyfraughttime.
AmorFatiVIII
Latex paint, spray paint, wool and metal studs on canvas 30 x 30 inches
Tools,inSheep’sClothing,1
Sculptural installation on metal pegboard
72 x 33 inches
2019
This installation is mounted on galvanized metal pegboard. I've included all sorts of beautiful and functional tools with the wool outlining their forms, I can see lovely curvatures and elegant shapes that I might not have picked up on before working with them.
Have you ever looked at a wrecking bar in such a light? I certainly never had. It's as elegant and curvaceous as a dancer now and knows it. The axes are a dapper pair of color theorists, basking in their new incarnations. And the blacksmith's hammers? Even Hephaestus’ dim spirits might have been buoyed by using such gloriously vibrant tools.
I began creating woolen sculptures in 2009 after a tumultuous period in my life. Out in the peaceful woods of Sonoma, I began gathering large, gnarled branches that had dropped onto the forest floor. A week of total quiet and a huge skein of yarn led to the creation of my first wool wrapped branches. Eventually, my thoughts turned to exploring other elements, and I became drawn to the idea of softening traditionally male-oriented objects with beautiful, colorful yarn.
Yarn, historically used in women’s work, tempers items which have prototypically masculine or violent connotations. For me, the material and the wrapping motion become both the act of accessing memory and the creation of hope. As I wind and unwind, spool and unspool, I am reliving moments in life and thinking of possibility, of the future. Working with fiber lets my hands bear burdens for me, permits me to fumble around in search of new insight, and guides me in searching for answers I might otherwise never find.
Gentling these pieces with plush, richly colored wool while pushing them into new sculptural forms allows me to establish an extremely different, almost familial, relationship with them. The repetitive, meditative, and transformative nature of fiber art is one of the most healing and hopeful acts of renewal I know.
PortraitofaMidlifeWoman
This piece is part of a series I began last year called Everything Is Fine, a meditation on loss and resilience that has helped sustain me during this long, strange season.
In these paintings, vases are perched precariously on edges of tables; flowers droop; objects are in the process of falling into space; others are mended imperfectly but lovingly with the deeply meditative Japanese art of repair, kintsugi.
When I find myself overwhelmed by all the dark and broken parts of this world, I remind myself of these words from Anthemby the great songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen:
Ringthebellsthatstillcanring/Forgetyourperfectoffering/Thereisa crackineverything/That’showthelightgetsin.
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36 inches 2022
PortraitofaMidlifeWomanis my latest and most personal painting in a series I began last year called EverythingIsFine , a meditation on loss and resilience that has helped sustain me during this long, strange season.
I haven’t shown the entirety of the series here yet but have been sharing progress with artist friends as it develops. PortraitofaMidlifeWomanis the sixth piece, with a couple more in the works.
From the first time I saw a piece of ceramics threaded with gold, I’ve been fascinated by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair. The satisfaction in turning fracture into a new wholeness, and of wounds alchemized I can’t think of a better way to celebrate resourcefulness and resilience than these golden scars.
This painting, and the story of its genesis, is included in HereWeAre,LaidBare , a group show put on by art writer and curator Nato Thompson’s The Alternative Art School. Fifteen of us took a course called ArtLab with the spectacular Amber Imrie in spring of 2022, and this collaboration is the result of a group of powerfully openhearted artists and a great deal of trust.
Mathematical inspiration: Tennenbaum’s proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2.
This work is a precursor to the kintsugi series I see that now in retrospect. Time is a funny teacher.
Sometimes a mistake can be revelatory. When I was working on this, I grabbed my trusty automotive tape to separate sections as I normally do (or so I thought). What I’d actually picked up was frog tape, which is great for protecting sections covered in kraft paper when you spray paint. Unfortunately, it’s about the worst choice ever to use on wet paint or leave on for more than a short time. Of course, I’d pressed it on firmly after a few hours of drying and promptly forgot about it for three days, as I often do when juggling a few pieces at once.
Imagine my horror when I went to remove the tape and found swaths of paint peeling off like bark from a Melaleuca tree. Yes, I was appalled but reminded myself that it was “only stuff,” as I often counsel myself when annoying yet insignificant problems arise.
Okay, then, but what in tarnation am I going to do now, I wondered grimly. I sure wasn’t binning it after all the work I’d put into this piece already.
Wabi sabi is something I wholeheartedly espouse in theory. In actuality, though, I’m strongly drawn to symmetry and precision. This seemed like a good opportunity to get more acclimated to discomfort. “What does a ceramicist sometimes do when a bowl or vessel is chipped or broken?” I asked myself. Kintsugi! Well, I usually love that madly and feel that it adds so much humanity and tenderness to the work. The best of it often reminds me of the lines I so cherish from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.
Taking a deep and now thoroughly enlightened breath, I picked up my favorite metallic Golden paint, Iridescent Bronze. It has a wonderfully subtle green that I just love, and this is the end result: nowhere I was headed but just where I needed to be.
WherethePastComestoBeKissed from SFBeautiful’sMuniArt Acrylic on canvas 12 x 24 inches 2020
Painting represented on San Francisco’s Muni buses in response to Randal Mann’s poem “The Long View.”
TheLongView
Two lovers sit atop Dolores Park: they stop their argument to see a church, a bridge, a sea.
They play a little game: each man proceeds to name his list of lovers, dead. There’s no one left unsaid.
Anxious pigeons wait for crumbs to fall. It’s late. The weather starts to shift: all fog, all love, will lift.
- Randal Mann
TimesLikeThese
Acrylic on canvas
12 x 24 inches
2020
(Created for Muni Bus project)
TimesLikeThese was my reply to a poem called "The Antidote to Fascism is Poetry" by Matthew Zapruder. This was my interior vision of a thicket of magical trees, an imaginary place where we are all seen and heard: a shelter, a sanctuary, a safe harbor of some kind.
What I found surprising was that while the visual artists involved were expressly cautioned not to submit any political art, somehow a poem with a name like this could sneak by. I was so pleased to see that they were allowing artists to give some voice to the resistance building for the last number of years. Zapruder’s piece obliquely made my thoughts return to the Adrienne Rich poem that I love so much, "What Kind of Times are These.”
This painting is a continuation of the conversation I am having with both Zapruder’s and Rich’s poems. Rich asked with hushed and whispery urgency what kind of times she was bearing witness to. I am inquiring in return, because a great deal of what I see in human behavior is a cipher to me.
Watching the creep of the worst of history insinuate itself into daily life until the catastrophic seemed quotidian and the taboo commonplace has been utterly exhausting. We’ve spent too long at the edge of dread. Color, joyous color, is my act of resistance.
SpeciesofLeastConcern
Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 inches
For as long as I can remember, I have been bewitched by color. What keeps me challenged and constantly driven is the tricky yet magical relationship between colors and the ability of negative space to highlight their differences and unique characteristics. Geometry has become a crucial component of my work as well.
Along with brushes, I work with scrapers, putty and palette knives, and softtipped sticks to create my paintings. Experimenting with these tools often helps me discover new directions.
Some of my greatest inspirations are Agnes Martin, Pat Steir, and Louise Bourgeois: Martin for her strength in solitude and belief that the artist must work free of ego; Pat Steir for her profound, continual search for communion, along with her faith in the controlled freedom of her work; and Bourgeois for her ability to transform emotion into mythological, totemic sculptures and delicate but imposing fabric works.
Each painting is part of an ongoing conversation between the new work and the lessons learned from the challenges I encounter resolving previous pieces. They are descendants of each other, whether I like it or not. Every mistake I make and idea that falls flat eventually, meanderingly, leads me to a successful painting. By successful, I mean work that is done in joy and with no expectations other than following where the painting leads.
CrossroadBlues
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 24 inches
29 songs. 41 takes. That’s all the music extant of the colossus Robert Johnson, whom I’ve been obsessed with for more than a decade. His plaintive, haunting voice and astonishing guitar work are utterly mesmeric. The mystery of his life and, to a lesser extent, his death at a mere 27 years old seized my imagination in a visceral way.
Searching for Robert Johnson; Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson; and Escaping The Delta have all provided insight in fleshing out Johnson’s life and musical influences. Yet, even after rereading each book thoroughly, watching multiple documentaries, and listening to every recording I could find, Johnson remains an enduring and mysterious cipher, to my great fascination and frustration.
I won’t go into too much detail about Johnson’s life if you know him, you’ll recall he aspired to be a great guitarist but was derided for his poor playing by legends such as Son House and others until he headed to Martinsville, Mississippi in 1929 to learn from the immensely talented Isaiah “Ike” Zimmerman.
The Faustian legend of Johnson selling his soul to the devil likely arose from Johnson’s and Zimmerman’s habit of practicing in a graveyard at night, presumably to avoid waking Zimmerman’s children. When Johnson returned home, his astonishing artistry stupefied his fellow musicians and led to the myth of Johnson’s selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his newfound, mindboggling virtuosity.
Johnson’s death at age 27 has never been attributed to one definitive cause. The theory that after playing in a juke joint, he drank poisoned whiskey supplied by a jealous cuckolded husband sounds most plausible to me, given his reputation as a ladies’ man who didn’t turn a hair over whether a potential paramour was single or married.
From Eric Clapton to The Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan, so many artists venerate Johnson as a virtually peerless yet recondite genius. As Martin Scorsese said, “The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend.” This painting took me 3 months and over twenty years to make. The actual construction of the piece was three months in the making, with some time spent lost in the wilderness, and more than a few late nights spent puzzling over line and color. In reality though, the lessons and experiences I’ve accrued over the last two decades are what allowed me to achieve significant change. I’m quite proud of this piece and intend to use it as a springboard for future exploration.
Divided,WeStand
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 24 x 24 inches 2020
“Patriotismmeanstostandbythecountry.Itdoesnotmeantostandbythe presidentoranyotherpublicofficial,saveexactlytothedegreeinwhichhe himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficientlyservesthecountry.Itisunpatrioticnottoopposehimtotheexact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.Ineitherevent,itisunpatrioticnottotellthetruth,whetheraboutthe presidentoranyoneelse.”
Theodore Roosevelt
EverythingisFine
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 26 inches 2021
Over the course of this pandemic I’ve gotten away from the near-total abstraction I’d been exploring for the last two decades. Something about the ubiquity of this worldwide trauma pushed me to be more literal, even as my paintings have been moving towards two dimensionality. I wasn’t intending to investigate painting in a naive, almost childlike style, but somehow that was what emerged.
In these paintings, vases are perched precariously on edges of tables; flowers droop; objects are in the process of falling into space; others are mended imperfectly but lovingly with the deeply meditative Japanese art of repair, kintsugi.
Although I’ve always painted with the hope of achieving a kind of communion with the viewer, I’ve been struck by an even greater longing to communicate and make myself clearly understood than in calmer, less tumultuous times. This has led to me finding my way back to figuration in the hopes of speaking even more directly with others.
Rumspringa
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 40 inches
From the EverythingIsFineseries
MementoVivere,or“IToldYouIWasSick!”
Acrylic and latex paint on canvas 36 x 36 inches 2022
From the series EverythingIsFine
TheEarthisBlue
This installation is from a show I was part of at The Alternative Art School called TheEarthisBlue. I collaborated with a visual artist from Istanbul, Ayçesu Duran we were trying to share each other’s experience in our own location/worlds during the lockdown. Ayçesu went around Istanbul writing poetry on stones, walls, whatever she could use, in the cobalt blue of my eyeliner. I would love to have seen it.
Some of these stones are written on in Turkish and are of animal spirit guides she and I both share and are visited by, hummingbirds, dragonflies, peregrine falcons in particular. I painted over 100 stones they are different on each side.
THEMUNIPROJECT
The Muni Project was 100 buses with poetry and art rolling through San Francisco from January - May 2020. Then unfortunately, Covid shut things down in mid-March of that year there were a lot of empty buses the last month and a half!
When I was so anxious many years ago and felt claustrophobic riding home from work, these kind of art projects saved me. I felt like they were my talismans and read the poems, cherished them, silently prayed to them to keep me from having a panic attack/freakout as Muni drove me home. I always swore I’d do this one day if I got accepted to paint or write for one of these collaborations it felt like such a passion project to be chosen for this purpose.
Thank goodness I haven’t had a panic attack in so many years. They are the worst and I am so, so empathetic to anyone who’s experienced them ever. It feels like you’re dying little deaths. Hallelujah for them passing.
Wendy Ackrell – Exhibitions and Public Works
Why I Am Not a Poet
O’Hanlon Center for the Arts (Mill Valley, CA)
Labyrinthine Heart SFGH Foundation (San Francisco, CA)
Here We Are, Laid Bare The Alternative Art School
March 2023
Fiber Art: The Expressive and Innovative O’Hanlon Center for the Arts (Mill Valley, CA)
The Earth is Blue The Alternative Art School
Times Like These Museumoftheblackportal.com
Oh Say Can You See A July 4th Instagram Exhibition @ohsaycanyousee2020
The Artist as Curator California State Building (San Francisco, CA)
One-person show
February 2023 Created a 400-pound heart sculpture for SFGH Foundation’ s Hearts in San Francisco 2023
July 2022 Online exhibition as the culminating statement from the school’s Spring 2022
April 2022 Juried exhibition exploring fiber art
May 2021 Online exhibition that explores collaboration across the world
April 2021 Online show presented by Vashti DuBois and Michael Clemmons of The Colored Girls Museum (Philadelphia, PA)
July 2020 Critical reinterpretation of the US flag relating to July 4th and expressions of freedom. An online show in collaboration with @wideawakes2020 by @michelepred.
March 2020
Exhibit presented by California State Senator Scott Wiener and curator Joseph Abbati, in which artists each curated a space to express something about their work, their influences and how their work is received in the current political climate
Hidden Gems in San Francisco
Five Women
Women’s Work
San Francisco Beautiful (San Francisco, CA)
Jeff King & Co (San Francisco, CA)
The Apothecarium Castro (San Francisco, CA)
In The Gallery CounterPulse (San Francisco, CA)
Continuum The Apothecarium Marina (San Francisco, CA)
StARTup Art Fair The Kinney Hotel (Venice, CA)
Tools, in Sheep’ s Clothing ImagiKnit (San Francisco, CA)
January 2020 Interpreted works by five renowned poets for San Francisco Beautiful’ s Muni Art 2020 Project. Paintings were displayed on Muni buses throughout San Francisco.
December 2019 Group show of five women artists curated by artist Ray Beldner
December 2019
One-person show
June 2019 Group show of three artists
May 2019 One-person show
February 2018 Juried exhibition, in which each artist curated a room in the hotel with
March 2017 Storefront window exhibit