East Bay
Over the Bay Bridge in downtown Oakland, near a burgeoning enclave of cutting-edge galleries, the Oakland Museum of California fetes the California College of the Arts’s centennial with “Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA.” This survey of work by 100 faculty and alumni, many among California’s most influential artists, has two parts. The first presents established history from the Society of Six from the 1920s, through the Bay Area Figuration and the modern studio ceramics movements, to Minimalism, West Coast Conceptualism, and Photorealism. The second half examines the college’s shift away from crafts in 1987 to its current emphasis on contemporary art, design, and curating.

A short drive north to the University of California, Berkeley, campus is the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, host of a consistently full schedule of avant-garde film screenings and, through July, the special exhibition “Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things.” A pioneer in performance and video art, Jonas has focused on the body since the 1960s. The centerpiece of this exhibition is the eponymous multimedia installation that incorporates video, sound, drawings, photography, and found objects and reflects the artist’s experiences in the Southwest, which she first visited in the 1960s and revisited years later after reading 19th-century art historian Aby Warburg’s essay about his seminal visit there. To underscore the persistence of the past and the fragmentation of memory, Jonas has incorporated footage from the work’s earlier installations (it was first exhibited in 2004 at Chicago’s Renaissance Society) into this final iteration, which has been jointly acquired by the museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

South Bay
A few minutes drive from central Palo Alto, “Dreaming of a Speech Without Words: The Paintings and Early Objects of H. C. Westermann” continues a legacy of provoking thought and debate at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center. Westermann’s unique, surreal, and violent works from the 1950s and 1960s were born from his military experiences in World War II and Korea and refer to Native American art. Though best known for his prints and sculptures, Westermann also created incisive and difficult paintings, which are showcased in this enlightening exhibition.

"The Best of the Bay Area" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine.