Curator-led Tour and Talk on Bonnie Ora Sherk

Please join us for a walkthrough of Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 led by exhibition curator Tanya Zimbardo. Following the exhibition tour, Zimbardo will be joined in conversation by UCSB Professor Jenni Sorkin.

Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco-based curator and writer. She curated Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 for the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. This career-spanning survey of the late environmental artist is on view this fall at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara. Zimbardo is currently working on Wandering: Fifty Years of Work by Lewis deSoto (2027) for UCR ARTS, Riverside, and Material Frequencies (2027), Mills College Art Museum at Northeastern University in Oakland, as part of the inaugural Further Triennial.

As a former Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), she curated several exhibitions, including solo presentations of Jim Campbell, Runa Islam, Ragnar Kjartansson, Pat O’Neill, Kerry Tribe, and Jenifer K Wofford. Zimbardo has guest curated a range of contemporary exhibitions and artist film screenings for nonprofit organizations including Jen Liu: GHOST__WORLD (Slash), Equilibrium: A Paul Kos Survey (di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art), Origin Stories: Expanded Ceramics in the Bay Area (Berkeley Art Center), Organic Logic (500 Capp Street), and Center of Gravity: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley (SF Cinematheque). She has recently contributed essays to exhibition publications such as Claire Falkenstein: Zero to Infinity (San Diego Museum of Art), Jim Melchert: Where The Boundaries (Gallery 16), and Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby, (X Artists’ Books). Her writing and artist interviews have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and VoCA Journal.

Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. Her recent is Art in California (2021), written for Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed World of Art series. As a state, California is the site of tremendous diversity in the visual arts and has been at the forefront of cultural production throughout the 20th century. Her first book, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examined the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics. Recent projects include the essay “Affinities in Abstraction: Textiles and Otherness in 1970s Painting,” in Outliers and American Vanguard Art. Lynne Cooke, ed. (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2018) and “Alterity Rocks: 1973-1993,” Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now. Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino, eds. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has published widely as an art critic, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Art Monthly, East of Borneo, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters and Third Text. In 2004, she received the Art Journal Award. She currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Modern Craft, and has served as a member of the editorial boards of Art Journal and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-15), the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design (2012), the Getty Research Institute (2010-11), and the ACLS/Luce Fellowship in American Art (2008).

This program is made possible by Teiger Foundation.