Actor and director Diego Luna's first introduction to Cesar Chavez was seeing the union activist's funeral on T.V. The 13-year-old Luna was impressed by all the people walking with his body and that Chavez was being buried in a wooden box. Then while working in California, Luna started seeing Chavez's image on murals and his name on streets and got curious about what Chavez had done. When Luna's son was born in Los Angeles, that really made him want to tell the story of Chavez, a Mexican American born in Arizona. Luna says he remembers when he got to be 9 or 10, noticing the income inequality in Mexico and struggling to make sense of things.
When the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco went through a remodel with a focus on local culture, it found the aesthetics it was looking for with Mission's Luna Rienne Gallery.
In 2013, the Hyatt commissioned Luna Rienne to curate seven large-scale paintings. The paintings were to capture San Francisco's art entirely, and to live on the hotel walls indefinitely as a part of the Hyatt's permanent collection. A committee comprised of Hyatt officials and Luna Rienne coordinators selected artists David Choong Lee, Mario Martinez, Damon Soule, Erik Otto, Ursula Young, and Reuben Rude. Once the artist were selected, they knew they had to document the process, beginning to end.
"It's our job as a gallery to document these events," Luna Rienne curator Olivia Ongpin says. "We understood the awesome scope of the project from the beginning, and anticipated that the artists would make their best works."
Ever since he Rudolf Bauer's work at a gallery in New York in 2005, Rowland Weinstein, owner of the Weinstein Gallery on Geary, has been entranced.
"Oh my God, it's so vibrant and colorful," he says, pointing to a painting, "ConRoso" hanging on the wall of his gallery. "When I look at it, it's so magnetic -- I feel like I could stare at it for hours and go on a complete and total journey."
Weinstein started researching Bauer's life and found an amazing story that includes a love triangle, a Nazi prison camp, and tons of betrayal. After being called the greatest living artist by the New York Herald Tribune and having it hang in the Guggenheim Museum, Bauer's work fell into obscurity.
