This morning I met an artist who’s as famous as the people she photographs.

Annie Leibovitz.

Known mainly for her portraits of actors, politicians, artists, writers, dancers, musicians and other larger-than-life personalities, the reknowned Rolling Stone/Vanity Fair/Vogue magazine staffer was in San Francisco attending a press conference today for the opening of “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life” a survey of personal and professional photographs created between 1990-2005 which runs through May 25 at the Legion of Honor. Look for Fine Art critic Robert Taylor’s review Tuesday, March 25 in the newspaper.

I’ve been really excited about this show because it includes what I consider to be her best work and one of my favorite genres of photography - the family photo. Many of the photographers whose work I admire have made their families the central theme of their work. They include artists like Sally Mann who photographed her children in various so-normal-they’re-surreal slices-of-life on their bucolic Virginia farm, Emmet Gowin who tenderly captured his wife Edith in the late 1960’s and early 70’s as both ethereal muse and down to earth, and Harry Callahan, the self-taught photographer whose delicately stark photographs of his wife Eleanor fit in seamlessly with his avant-garde style.

But unlike those photographers, Leibovitz has never really put her family work out there for conspicuous public viewing, at least not to the extent that she has in “A Photographer’s Life.” The beautifully toned black-and-white images of her parents, siblings, nieces, children and late partner, the author Susan Sontag, might be intimate in scale but they rival, and in my opinion, often surpass, the power of her larger, famous color portraits. Both are on display.

Leibovitz herself is as fascinating as her work. I wondered what she was thinking as she walked up to the front of the room to find a seat and was greeted with flashing strobes and the buzz of camera shutters snapping. Clad in a black long-sleeved top and black pants with hair flowing and skin make-up free, she looked every inch “A Serious New York Artist” until you glanced at her quirky bright blue sneaker -clad feet. And she’s incredibly approachable and nice.

As the pack thronged around Leibovitz, she gave us a quick tour of the show which is organized chronologically and somewhat thematically. The first gallery on the right features family photos of her mother, a former dancer, joyously kicking her leg up at the beach. That’s followed by images of dancers like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris and athletes like Charles Austin and Brian Earley in various forms of movement: swimming, leaping and soaring through the air. I liked the tone that first gallery set.

Leibovitz shared anecdotes about the show like how she holed herself up in a barn in upstate New York after Sontag and her father died, looking over and joining her two “edits” or bodies of work. She talked about pointers she picked up from former Harper’s Bazaar editor Alexey Brodovitch, to “look back at your work. You’re going to learn most from looking back and it will teach you how to look forward.” She shared her experience as a photo student (she had intially studied painting) at the San Francisco Art Institute and confided that she “didn’t think she was a good photographer.” And she let us in on how some of her most famous photographs were created. The naked and pregnant Demi Moore was a collaboration between Leibovitz and the actress while the formal yet still edgy portrait of the Bush Administration was choreographed a few days before by the photographer and her assistants.

We learned that one of her favorite bodies of work is Alfred Steiglitz’s sculptural and erotic photographs of his then-wife Georgia O’ Keefe (“He loved her. She loved him.”) She loves Diane Arbus but thinks she’s “too nice on some level” to take the kinds of pictures Arbus did. “I like to like people which is why my pictures are going to be gushy and soft,” she said.

And prompted by someone in the admiring crowd, she quietly shared that her psychiatrist encouraged her to publish the tender photographs of the dignified, dying Sontag. “People come up to me and say ‘My mother or father was dying and I took photos.’ I’m glad I have the pictures.”

And I’m glad she’s allowing us to see them.

Here are a few images from the show:

Patti Smith with Her Children, Jackson and Jesse, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, 1996. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz. From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990 – 2005 Courtesy of Vanity Fair

Susan’s Shell Collection, King Street Sunporch, New York, 1990. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz.

My Parents with My Sisters Paula and Barbara and Paula’s Son, Peter’s Pond Beach, Wainscott, Long Island, 1992. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz.

“Annie Liebovitz A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005″ runs 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays through May 25 at the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Ave and Clement St., San Francisco. $11-$15 with $5 exhibit surcharge. 415-750-3600, www.legionofhonor.org.

A quirky Web site, Garfield minus Garfield, is making the rounds around the ‘net. There is little said about who is doing it and why, but the creators are taking Garfield out of the daily comic strip and just leaving Jon Arbuckle there to talk to himself.

The result? A look inside “schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?” according to the creators of Garfield minus Garfield.

I freaking love it. Jon Arbuckle asks no one about the stain on his shirt. He leaves a plate of food on the counter for no one. He reminds no one that they forgot his birthday.

Brilliant.

I just wanted to pop in here and remind you that the White Elephant Sale is happening this weekend. I went to the preview sale last month and bought a painting for $10 that has been alternately described as creepy and ugly. I, however, love it. I’ll show you a picture once I get one.

The White Elephant Sale is the largest rummage sale in California and the money goes to the Oakland Museum Women’s Board, which buys art and helps bring exhibitions to the museum.

And it’s a lot of fun.

It’s at the White Elephant Sale Warehouse at 333 Lancaster St., off the Interstate- 880 Freeway/Fruitvale exit near the Oakland Estuary. The sale is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day and they usually discount the remaining stuff on Sunday.

The sale will be offering a shuttle from the Fruitvale BART station. I suggest taking it. It was a real drag last month trying to get my purchases to the car 20 blocks away in the rain.

I had every intention of posting my take on Enrique Chagoya’s “Borderlandia” exhibit a week ago but alas, things didn’t go as planned. I still want to share my thoughts because it’s a great exhibit and not to be missed.

I can’t remember exactly where I first saw Enrique Chagoya’s work. More than likely it was in the book “Friendly Cannibals,” a collaboration between Chagoya and the Mexican-American performance poet Guillermo Gomez-Pena but the specifics aren’t really important. What I do know is that I immediately and viscerally responded to his work.

I was a visual arts student at the time making things like paintings, handmade artists books and silkscreened collages. Looking at Chagoya’s one-of-a kind and limited edition artists books which pay homage to Aztec and Mayan codexes, I found something I could relate to both culturally and visually. His imagery borrowed heavily from sources like comic books, religious iconography, historical woodcuts, vintage magazines and medical textbooks. The techniques lept from bookmaking and printmaking to drawing and painting, all mediums I was interested in.

I was also familiar with some of the subjects his work addressed (colonialism, culture clash, immigration issues, appropriating imagery.) But to me, the ways these issues were presented and explored was something entirely exciting and new.

Nearly a decade later, viewing the work at BAM only enhances the sense of amazement I felt when first looking at Chagoya’s work. There’s beautifully collaged artists books, satirical charcoal drawings and blistering prints. Yes, his subjects come from politics (war, the military, American foreign policy, immigration,) religion, and race relations but it’s the humor he injects into his work that distinguishes him from other artists working in similar genres. I also like his visual vocabulary…the images of Mickey Mouse, Superman, Aztec deities repeated over and over is part of Chagoya’s highly specific visual language. Their meanings are often mutable and change depending on the context. Chagoya’s technical prowess and his ability to move from intaglio printmaking to large oil painting to collage to book art with seeming ease is equally admirable.

And yes, Chagoya’s artwork might not be for everyone. In fact, some people will probably find his work offensive. Chagoya seems O.K. with that. “This is just a drawing,” is the way he responded at a recent artist’s lecture to a question about slack he might receive about his satirical artwork, especially in light of the recent death threats against a Danish artist for his political cartoons. And he’s right. At the end of the day, it is just a drawing, just a painting, just a collage and sure, it might not be something you’d want to place in your house. But it’s vitally important that it exists.

“Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia” runs Wednesdays-Sundays through May 18 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $5-$8. Free for UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff and children ages 12 and under. 510-642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

It occurred to me over lunch that I didn’t mention in my previous postabout Tim Barsky that Barsky is a “Fluteboxer,” a combination of flutist and beatboxer. Yeah, like all at once. It’s so hard to explain that I attached a video for you to zone out to. The “fluteboxing” begins at about 40 seconds in.

 The first time I saw Tim Barsky’s work as a poet, beat-boxer, flutist and all-around performer, it was in Everyday Theatre’s production of “The Bright River” in 2005.  For someone who doesn’t quite like theater, I was seriously blown away.

Barsky is a traditional Ashkenazi storyteller whose modern, urban work can be described as both painful and uplifting. He is a sight to behold. “The Bright River” introduced me to this man of many talents, talents I didn’t know I even liked like beat-boxing and spoken word, but I craved more.

Luckily for me, I got to see Barsky at a number of smaller events since. I saw him at a storytelling night arranged by a local artist and I saw him at a solo show produced by Everyday Theatre. Each time I saw him, I craved more. If I could only repeat those nights. If only I had a recording of my favorite poem in “The Bright River.” If only, if only.

When I heard this past weekend that Barsky was performing another solo show,  “Over 9 Waves” at the Climate Theater in San Francisco, I was ready to go. Unfortunately, the flu had other plans for me this weekend.

So my friend went without me. He said the show was not only sold out but that Barsky received a standing ovation for his work.  Not quite “The Bright River,” “Over 9 Waves” is one of Barksy’s strongest solo shows to date, and that says a lot. He said I would basically be a loser if I didn’t kick this flu and go to the final show at the Climate Theater this coming Saturday.

So I got my $15 tickets here. Don’t expect tickets to last long.

Oakland artist and sculptor Cynthia Handel is showing her work from now until March 20 at Contra Costa College’s Eddie Rhodes Gallery.

Poetic Objects 

I love metal sculpture and I was particularly interested in seeing Handel’s work because she is one of the very few women in the country that works with metal for her art.

“You have to show you can be as rough and tough as the guys,” she says about making art with metal. “But when woman learn to weld, they love it.”

Handel is not only an artist, she’s a teacher, teaching classes at the college and at The Crucible in Oakland among other places. In fact, she is the foundry department head at The Crucible.

Hand Prints 50 Pieces installation

Handel works not only with metal but with plaster, silk and beeswax. She makes works of art that show hand prints, works that show the circulatory system and works that show her interpretation of residences. “Hand Prints” above are Handel’s hand prints in various media. There are 50 in this installation, representing Handel’s own age.
 Urban Shelters 2

As I stood with Handel and she discussed her work with me, I found myself being really attracted to the earthyness of some of the pieces, like “Poetic Objects” while being turned off by the coldeness of the “Shelter” pieces.

Perhaps that was her intention, I don’t know. 

See Handel’s work at Contra Costa College Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Parking is $2.

 The image to the right is similar to a piece of artist Enrique Chagoya’s work I saw at the San Jose Museum of Art Superbowl Sunday.  When I saw the one piece at the museum, I was totally impressed by its visual strength and its message about capitalism and the like.

I was not so impressed by the Chagoya retrospective at the Berkeley Art Mueseum and Pacific Film Archive entitled “Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia” on now through May 18. Our other arts blogger, Jennifer Modenessi, has a completely different view of the work than I do. She’ll fill you in on her take Friday.

The show layout was just fine and seemed to make visual sense. Chagoya certainly proves that he is a masterful painter. But, to me, the work itself felt redundant and stale. Let’s just say I got Chagoya’s use of Mickey Mouse to symbolize capitalism. No, really, I got it. Painting after painting -the cannibalism, the blood the guts and the gore-I heard what he was trying to say.

Perhaps the setting was wrong. I love BAM/PFA and the work they present but perhaps it was too “museumey” for such a huge presentation of Chagoya’s work. Both my friend and I thought the retrospective would be better suited and more powerful (yet surreal) in a storefront of some sort.

And maybe, too, I was a little turned off by Chagoya’s modern copies of classic works of art. For example, one large section of the exhibit is dedicated to Chagoya’s modernization of Francisco Goya’s caprichos, some of the same ones that I saw in San Jose last week. While I spent a good amount of time thoughtfully taking in the caprichos in San Jose, I merely glanced at Goya’s take on them. Some were interesting but many simply served, for me, to be a repetition of his painting and I made a game of it trying to find what is different between the classic etchings and Chagoya’s newer pieces.

So instead of spending a lot of time within the Chagoya gallery, I, like many people, spent much more time munching yummy cheese and pate from Berkeley caterer Bistro Liaison.

I also had time, within the mere hour and a half that I was at the museum, to check out the work of  Joan Jonas. Quirky and weird, I felt more comfortable in the Jonas exhibition watching the videos than I did in the Chagoya exhbit. Maybe the work of Chagoya - strong, brazen, and political - is just too real for me. Or maybe it’s just not my thing.

Make sure you come back to the Seen blog Friday to hear what Jennifer has to say. She’s the one with the arts background, and I am dying to know how she felt about the Borderlandia exhibit.

A visit to the museum costs $8. BAM/PFA is at 2626 Bancroft Way in Berkeley. Chagoya will be lecturing on his work at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17 and on selected Thursdays and Saturdays UC Berkeley students will be offing tours of Borderlandia. Find a schedule of tours here.

I am not sure if I quite understand what artist Brent Bishop of San Francisco dreams are, but his performances are something so interesting and fun that they should not be missed.

I was first introduced to Bishop’s work through his work with the Elationists. As you may recall from my post about the Elationists’ event, I truly enjoyed the work he and his artist friends were doing. Really, they were melding music and art with history and fantasy and creating this sort of other-world where you were not just gathered in some warehouse in San Francisco’s SOMA district, but you were in another time period enjoying life as it was never really lived before. Or something like that ;).

Bishop is a filmmaker, a musician and a performance artist. Don’t let his performance artist title scare you though. His goal is to make people feel good, to enjoy themselves, and to have fun within a performance that he and his friends appear to live for.

With Tango La Melodia, Bishop and a bevy of musicians bring an experience to the stage again. There will be singing, there will be dancing, there multimedia and there will be fun.

Check out this video of the group, if you are not yet convinced.

Tango La Melodia will play at 8 p.m. Feb. 14 to Feb 16 at the Red Poppy Art House at 2698 Folsom @ 23rd Street  in San Francisco. Buy $15 tickets here.

An advance “warning” of something you definitely won’t want to miss: Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s Feb. 12th opening celebration for “Freedom of Art.”

The inspiration for the free public exhibit of San Francisco poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s series of paintings “House Painter Tarps” and reading of late Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl” by a trio of past and present San Francisco poet laureates, stems from YBCA executive director Kenneth J. Foster’s encounter with active censorship of the arts.

Foster writes in his blog that he was shocked to learn last October that a radio station decided not to air a reading of “Howl,” fearing fines from the FCC.

A short while later, Ferlinghetti, “Howl’s” publisher, had his “House Painter Tarps” series removed from an office building due to complaints about its content. While Foster acknowledges that it was a private office building and the owners were “free to do with their space what they wanted”, he writes that the “disturbing irony of the confluence of these two events was a sign” that “as an institution dedicated to experimentation and new ideas, we could no longer sit silently by.” The paintings now hang in the YBCA lobby.

The rest of the post is an interesting read and quite heartening, frankly. I especially like this thought: “Art, in fact, is dangerous and the very dangerousness of it is what we should be announcing to you, without apology and without fear. The warning signs have to go. At YBCA, we actually DO want you to be exposed to things that you might not wish to see. We DO want you to provoked and disturbed. We DO want your thinking and perceptions to be challenged—deeply and profoundly—and in unexpected ways. This is what we, and the artists we work with, strive for in everything we do.”

Here’s a sampling of images from the series:

While the event is free, call ahead as space is limited. 6:30 p.m. Feb. 12. YBCA Forum, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org.