BRUCE CONNER

Through gallery ephemera and more than 40 works by 10 artists, the exhibition documents the activities and artistic production of the Rat Bastard Protective Association (RBPA), an inflammatory, close-knit community of artists and poets who lived and worked together in a building they dubbed “Painterland" in the Fillmore neighborhood of mid-century San Francisco. The idiosyncratic group included Wallace Berman, Bob Branaman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, Manuel Neri, and Michael McClure, among other, less constant members.

Coming of age during the Sixties, Bruce Conner was at the forefront of a Cultural Revolution set against the stark backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Summer of Love. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war and the prevailing Conservative Capitalist Culture, Conner and his peers sought an alternative lifestyle and value system on the margins of society.

"Summer of Love '07" - a conscious repost to the uptown exhibition of the same name, a montage of contemporary equivalents: excess, youth, hippy chic, war, wayward souls - Bruce Conner, Hope Gangloff, Annette Lemieux, Simone Shubuck, Greg Smith, and Christopher Ulivo.

The show is timed to coincide with the exhibition Semina Culture to open at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University 16 January. The two exhibitions provide a wonderful opportunity to examine the culture and community that produced the Beat Movement, along with the art of one of its most infamous practitioners.