Strange Ideas, Time-Travel and Reckless Contact with Electric Eels

April 28 - May 30, 2013, open 10am - 6pm, M-F

In this exhibition of ambitious, large scale mixed media paintings, David Young Allen explores the complex achievements of three men who opposed slavery, Simon de Bolivar, activist warrior who freed Latin American colonies from Spain; Alexander von Humboldt, adventurer and explorer of South America; and Roger Williams, advocate for Native American rights and early proponent of religious freedom and separation of church and state.

Allen made these paintings in New York City, where he lived during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, before returning to San Francisco. Informed by his travels to Ecuador, Venezuela and Australia, Allen's near-obsessive interest in the three figures portrayed in these paintings was his response to the United States' illicit interventions in Central America in the 1980s and Reagan's failure of leadership during the AIDS crisis.

Allen lives and works in San Francisco, California. He is known as a member of the San Francisco Renaissance, when a thriving poetry scene in San Francisco in the 1950's and '60's broadened into a community of artists. Painters, avant-garde filmmakers, collagists, and musicians freely explored form and content, embracing new aesthetics and breaking away from codified style. The blossoming movement encompassed philosophy, a new interest in other cultures and changing social sensibilities.