di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art maintains a permanent collection of works by Northern California artists that was originally collected by Rene di Rosa (1919-2010) and Veronica di Rosa (1934–1991). The collection contains notable works by artists living or working in the San Francisco Bay Area from mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, highlighting a story of experimentation of the artists of the region. It is displayed in part, on a rotating basis, in the galleries at di Rosa.
This page represents a just a portion of di Rosa’s rich permanent collection. Stay tuned as we continue to populate this page with artworks from our collection.
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RICKY WILLIAMS: SLEEPERS
Photograph
Subject singer and microphone sprawled on parquet floor
551
Black and white photograph
Photographic Art
AR551
Smith Andersen Gallery
Purchase
Credit Line: © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Bruce Conner
Jan 20, 1978
Object
36 in
41-3/16 in
Based on a True Story: Highlights from the di Rosa Collection
October 26, 2016 - October 15, 2017, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa
Know the Rules–Then Break Them: Photography from the di Rosa Collection
October 30, 2010 - January 29, 2011, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa
Curator
2016
In late 1977, amid a culture of protest and resistance, Bruce Conner, camera in hand, was at the Mabuhay Gardens, a largely punk rock performance venue in San Francisco’s North Beach. The stage hosted the city’s earliest experimental bands, who brought their unique radicality and rawness to the broader punk rock scene that was exploding in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Conner ran into V. Vale there and quickly became, for the next year, a contributing photographer to Vale’s magazine Search & Destroy (launched with funding from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg). It was in those pages that RICKY WILLIAMS: SLEEPERS (1978) first appeared. Conner’s Mabuhay photographs are quiet, theatrical compositions framing an active, noisy, energetic scene. One can draw comparisons to his early collage work in the way figures and objects are arranged in each photo, and to his video work, in which he was both documentarian and contrarian.