Making Fun: The Rise of Humor and the Pictorial in Art of the West

In the late 60s, when high-minded abstraction and media-obsessed Pop art from New York reigned supreme, a quorum of artists, emerging in California, Oregon and Washington State, found inspiration in places sidelined by artistic convention: comics, political cartoons, and visionary and folk art. Making Fun: The Rise of Humor and the Pictorial in Art of the West offers a new understanding of the region's role in legitimizing narrative art of a new order, one that gives license to humor and play, diverse voices from the Indigenous and the feminist to the rural, and vernacular sensibilities and craft. The exhibition, a collection of works by over two dozen artists, many underknown, including Robert Arneson, Ken Cory, Richard Glazer-Danay, and Judith Linhares, features painting, ceramics, metalsmithing, and other mediums, conveying each artist’s idiosyncratic vision of the American experience in the last quarter of the twentieth century.