ONE YEAR – Jos Sances
Extended through May 22, 2022
Kala gallery is excited to present a project One Year, a visual journal drawn in 12 monthly segments by Jos Sances. One Year is installed in our corridor gallery, where Jos wants the viewers to experience his pieces as they walk by, never seeing it in its entirety. He wants to give the sense of the passage of time as the work is viewed.
“This artwork was created over the course of an unusual year– a visual description of my experiences personal and political. It focuses on the passage of time, my existential decline, due to aging and my observation of the natural world that surrounds me and its complete collapse owing to climate change brought on by the burning of fossil fuel. It also deals with the manifestations of the US’s legacy of racism and misogyny. My direct experience with the birds and plants form a linking element to the work. I light-heartedly see my backyard experiences as my own little “Walden Pond” and their connection to the Transcendentalism of the 19th century.” – Jos Sances
The monthly panels are either 54”w x 36”h or 48”w x 36”h in size and each has accompanying short wall text, which he calls, Poetic Didactics. All the panels are colored scratchboard.
For over 45 years Jos Sances has made a living as a printmaker and muralist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He founded Berkeley’s Alliance Graphics, a successful union screenprint shop, and several years earlier co-founded Mission Gráfica, at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. Throughout these years as a union and community printer, Sances steadily and consistently maintained an output of politically engaged art.
In 2010 and 2016 the Library of Congress acquired nearly 500 of Sances’ prints that broadly represent his output. Having shown in California venues such as Avenue 50 Gallery in Los Angeles, Vessel Gallery in Oakland, the Richmond Art Center, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, and the Berkeley Art Center, he was included in the show “Committed to Print” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Currently Sances work is featured in “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is one of the few non-Chicanos whose work is featured in the exhibition.
From 2019 to 2021 Sances’ 51’ x 14’ life-size scratchboard drawing of a mature sperm whale was featured at the Richmond Art Center, The Bioneers Conference, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, all in California, and at the Lawrence Art Center in Lawrence, Kansas.
Jos Sances is a proud co-founder and life-long member of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, a political performance group that produces edible, satirical art that is screenprinted with chocolate on tortillas.
