Supernatural

Guerrero Gallery
San Francisco, CA
2010

PRESS RELEASE

Guerrero Gallery is pleased to announce Supernatural, a new exhibition by Brett Cook. Cook documents individual and collaborative transformation to promote awareness and celebrate the interconnectedness of all things. His creative practice includes crafting artifacts and experiences that reflect varied influences from art, education, and esoteric traditions. Supernatural features new and evolving installations from Cook’s public practice, altar-like assemblages, and works on mirror created from his ongoing study of nonviolence.

On Saturday, June 5th from 3pm to 11pm, an opening celebration at Guerrero Gallery will be the container for a social collaboration with Eco Chef/Author/Food Justice Advocate Bryant Terry, Trust Your Struggle (TYS) Collective, artist/educator Evan Bissell, and magic through participatory fabrication of a new artwork of La Virgen De Guadalupe. On Saturday, June 26th at 2pm there will be a public dialogue with the artists.

Supernatural includes new works picturing Arundhati Roy, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Julia Butterfly Hill and Thich Nhat Hanh that were originally drawn and colored by hundreds of hands at collaborative events in California and New York City in 2002 and 2004. The artifacts of these events have since been embellished by Cook with a wide array of media, including documentary photographs, medicinal plants, LED lights, and reflective paper. The inclusion of diverse sensibilities and symbols – from poinsettia flowers and brooms to the five elements – invites viewers to explore the similarities underlying ostensibly disparate cultural expressions and celebrate the interconnectedness of all things in their process and product.

Also on display at Guerrero Gallery will be Documentation of Multiplicity and Documentation of a Grandma, two of Cook’s large-scale, altar-like assemblages that incorporate biographical materials, drawings, objects, words, and photographs in kaleidoscopic installations. The works are self-reflective and intensely personal: the objects come directly from Cook’s past, saved carefully by his mother, and now displayed in contemplative, humanizing narratives. These works are physically as well as visually experienced. While the images insist on immediate attention, the complex narratives and craft gradually reveal themselves over time. These mandala portraits reflect the multi-faceted relationships of Brett Cook’s past and present in ways that remind each viewer of themselves.

Select works from the Models of Accountability series are also represented in the exhibition. These mixed media works are on mirrors that shift and refract the imagery of avatars for social change as the viewer moves among them. By allowing the mirror to show through the meticulously drafted drawings and painting, the viewer can recognize themselves within, rather than apart from, these advocates of human value.

In addition, Bay Area/New York City based Trust Your Struggle (TYS), a collective of visual artists, educators, and cultural workers dedicated to social justice and community activism and artist/educator Evan Bissell will collaborate with Cook on a site-specific wall piece that is the culmination of a two-week retreat focused on studying the divinity of collaboration.

Cook’s work cohesively integrates the breadth and depth of his diverse – and at times disparate – experiences with art, education, science, and spirituality. Raised in a reverent Catholic family of public school educators, Cook was introduced to transcendental meditation at age six. He was influenced by aspects of graffiti art and community art while studying zoology, education, and fine art at the University of California, Berkeley. In the late 1990’s, Cook began studying yoga in New York City while showing extensively in galleries, museums and making scores of permissioned and non-permissioned public projects. Today, Cook continues his study of contemplative traditions nationally and internationally with acclaimed yoga teachers, natural healers, and through bi-annual retreats in the tradition of Zen Buddhist venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. His childhood curiosity with the nature of things manifested as a prodigious, award-winning obsession with the life sciences through high school, and evolved after college to 20 years of farming and using plants for healing.

Cook’s creative practice includes making dynamic art works based in portraiture that honor the best of humanity in all of us. In his collaborative practice, Cook employs mindful interpersonal dialogue, participatory pedagogy, and contemplative curricula to facilitate rituals and to build environments where other people make things – and “things” include objects, ideas, and new ways of being. Cook’s body of work spans the continuum between the extremes of “solitary” artist and community catalyst, both as one signature and with countless hands skillfully working to relieve suffering in the world.

Teaching and public speaking are extensions of his social collaborations that involve diverse communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Columbia and Stanford Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Wendy Ewald and Amherst College Press.

He has received various prestigious awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and UNC – Chapel Hill, the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute, and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME, the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, Art Omi, NY, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA.

Selected highlights of Cook’s community building, multi-disciplinary work include: Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, Durham, NC; The Building Community Making History Collaborative Project with the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery and Duke Ellington School for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Colors of Compassion Collaborative Project, Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA; (De)Segregation, Harvard School of Education, Cambridge, MA; and Re-Invented at the Alvarez Bravo Photographic Center, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Cook’s solo exhibitions include Revolution and Multifaceted at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York; and Meditations at Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Group exhibitions include Portraiture Now at the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery; Walls of Heritage Walls of Pride at the Smithsonian Anacosta Museum, Washington D.C.; Black President Exhibition New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Hip-Hop Nation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Generation Z, P.S. 1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY.