donna anderson kam

Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present

Legion of Honor Museum
San Francisco, CA
October 9 - February 13
2021 - 2022

dateline: (08-07) 16:22 PDT Trona, CA (AP)—
Museum Purchase:
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, gift of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council, 2020

“Color into Line” celebrates the exquisite art of pastel and the way that artists, from the Renaissance to the present day, have explored its delicate and unique effects, Drawing heavily on the riches of our Achenbach Collection for Graphic Arts, the exhibition brings fresh light and scholarship to a medium that is often overlooked because such works are so fragile and rarely lent and displayed.”
Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Press Release: Color Into Line: Pastels From The Renaissance to the Present
The Legion of Honor Museum

Review:
SARTLE. Rogue Art History, Exhibition Review: Color into Line at the Legion of Honor

5. Dateline: (08-07) 16:22 PDT Trona, CA (AP) by Donna Anderson Kam (2020)
There’s no mistaking that this is a contemporary piece of art, since the artist has depicted one of the people in the photo wearing a mask and another gazing at the screen of a cell phone. It’s a portrait of three young people in a homeless encampment. The image is rich in color, has impressive detail in the texture of clothing and hair, and shows off what artists are doing with pastels today.

Kathryn Vercillo
Sr. Contributor

exhibition wall text: Gallery 5, A Focus on California 1950 to the Present:

By including works drawn only from California collections, this exhibition offers a selective perspective on pastel’s remarkable vitality among artists working in the state during the postwar and contemporary eras. Such artist’s used pastel’s chromatic scale to capture California’s unique slanting light, translating the medium’s highly keyed colors into luminous images saturated with shades of white. Wayne Thiebaud -a modern master of pastel- adopted the medium beginning in the early 1960s. He also embraced it as a subject in Various Pastels (Pastel Scatter), a work whose consistency mirrors that of the objects it depicts. In pastel’s gestural freedom, Bay Area artists such as Donna Anderson Kam, Enrique Chagoya, and Rupert Garcia have found a means through which to express, respectively, their heightened environmental awareness, political engagement, and belief in social equality.

exhibition catalogue: Color Into Line: Pastels From The Renaissance to the Present
Furio Rinaldi Ph.D
Curator, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
A Focus on California (page 24)

Donna Anderson Kam’s dateline: (08-07) 16:22PDT Trona, CA (AP) was executed in 2020 during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 quarantine. Her work involves a long process of observation that she translates into large drawings dedicated to pressing social issues, particularly the modern conflict between prosperity and sustainability. A monumental pastel measuring roughly four by eight feet, it was acquired by the Fine Arts Museums through The de Young Open, a juried exhibition of Bay Area artists that opened in October 2020 amidst the global pandemic. In the artist’s choice of pastel and her luminous palette, this anxious work becomes an expression of the will to survive, and to create, in spite of the obstacles-an impulse that unites the artists in this exhibition across space and time.