Mark Dean Veca: Ornamental Illness
May 7 through May 29, 2022 San Francisco Heritage’s Pop-Up Gallery 1506 Haight Street near Ashbury Street
Exhibition Schedule: May 7 – May 29, 2022 Wednesday-Sunday, 12:00 – 6:00 PM Opening Reception: Saturday, May 7, 5:00 – 8:00 PM Conversation with the artist and curator Renny Pritikin: Saturday, May 14, 3:00 – 4:00 PM
San Francisco Heritage is pleased to announce artist Mark Dean Veca as our next artist-in-residence in the Haight-Ashbury. Veca’s time at SF Heritage’s historic Doolan-Larson Building starts in May 2022, where he will host a pop-up exhibition and create new drawings and paintings inspired by the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood’s past and present.
“I’m so grateful to receive this unique privilege- this gift of time and space to live and work as an Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco Heritage’s Doolan-Larson Building,” said Veca. “I look forward to immersing myself in the history of Haight-Ashbury and filtering it through my own artistic sensibility to create something new, that would never have emerged from my own studio.”
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, for over thirty years Veca has produced murals, paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, prints, designs, and other sundry inventions. In the essay “Mark Dean Veca: Life|Drawing,” art critic, author, and curator Shana Nys Dambrot summed up Veca’s artistic repertoire:
“Along the way, he has experimented with a range of visual styles from the loose and abstract to the obsessive and meticulous; mastering the power of the confident line and discovering the patience required for meticulous detail and the bravado for a super-saturated palette. And though the scale and scope of his work have expanded toward the operatic, his process has never been more intimate. An omnivorous observer of visual culture equally versed in Mad Magazine and Modernist theory, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and French Regency, R. Crumb and Ed Ruscha, Mark Dean Veca’s art truly is the sum of its paradoxical parts and his particular gift lies in making gorgeous, giddy, glorious sense of those paradoxes.”
During his time as artist-in-residence, Veca will run a concurrent exhibition at SF Heritage’s Pop-Up Gallery, located at 1506 Haight Street on the groundfloor storefronts of the Doolan-Larson Building. Mark Dean Veca: Ornamental Illness will open May 7, 2022, and will be on view through May 29, 2022. The exhibition will feature a new suite of screen-printed editions originally created during a residency at The Space Program in San Francisco late last year. Veca will also host an artist talk on May 14 with Renny Pritkin, former curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
“I look forward to immersing myself in the history of Haight-Ashbury and filtering it through my own artistic sensibility to create something new, that would never have emerged from my own studio.” – Mark Dean Veca
San Francisco Heritage first launched its pilot artist-in-residency program in the fall of 2020 with visual artist Jeremy Fish, and has since hosted musicians, choreographers, non-profit organizations, and journalists.
“We are honored to be hosting Mark Dean Veca as part of our new Artist-in-Residence program, which invites artists and activists to take inspiration from our mission—to preserve and enhance San Francisco’s unique architectural and cultural identity—during a residency at Haight and Ashbury with its echoes of the counterculture,” said Karalyn Monteil, President & CEO of San Francisco Heritage. “We are especially looking forward to his exhibition and artist talk with curator Renny Pritikin in our pop-up gallery space at 1506 Haight Street,” she added.
To read more about Veca and his new edition of screenprints, visit his website.