Bonnie Ora Sherk:
Life Frames since 1970

Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 is the first survey exhibition of the late artist, environmental educator, and landscape planner Bonnie Ora Sherk (b. United States, 1945–2021). Known for her temporary public installations and performances, Sherk developed her initial landscape architectural intervention Portable Parks I–III (1970, with Howard Levine) by temporarily transforming San Francisco urban “dead spaces” into lush, living environments complete with sod, palm trees, and live animals. Sherk expanded this approach as the founding director from 1974 to 1980 of Crossroads Community (the farm), also known simply as The Farm, an experimental community art and ecology center. Active until 1987, The Farm reconnected parcels of land fragmented by freeway construction, conceptualized new uses for overlooked urban landscapes, and laid the foundation for a global movement to reclaim urban spaces.

Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 traces Sherk’s sustained commitment to art and ecology in the public sphere and her influential role within the first generation of California Conceptual and performance artists, as well as within the artist-run space movement of the era. It showcases newly transferred film and video alongside rarely seen photographs, collages, works on paper, artist books, printed matter, and ephemera documenting Sherk’s early performances and site-specific interventions of the 1970s and 1980s.

The AD&A Museum is an educational partner of the multi-year initiative High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027), which celebrates and historicizes High Performance (1978–97), the first international magazine devoted exclusively to performance art. Through educational collaborations and programming, this exhibition highlights Sherk’s feature in the magazine. Feminist art historian and Professor Jenni Sorkin (History of Art & Architecture) will offer a Fall graduate seminar on performance art and the alternative space movement of the 1970s, with opportunities for external participation when the class meets in the galleries. Her students will also offer personalized tours of the exhibition as a reflection of their learning environment and varied disciplinary interests.

Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 was organized by Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco and curated by Tanya Zimbardo. The presentation at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara is curated by Ana Briz, AD&A Museum Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions. The exhibition at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture was generously supported by San Francisco Grants for The Arts, the FMCAC Board of Directors, and individual contributions to the Fort Mason Fund. The exhibition at the AD&A Museum is made possible by Teiger Foundation. Generous support is additionally provided by Isabelle Greene.

About the Artist

Bonnie Ora Sherk (b. New Bedford, MA, 1945–d. San Francisco, CA, 2021) was a visionary artist, landscape architect, and environmental educator. Sherk’s work primarily centered the interdependent relationships between humans, animals and nature. Her performance art has cemented her status as a pioneering figure in the fields of Eco Art, Social Practice, Feminist Art, and Conceptual Art. Sherk founded Crossroads Community (the farm), situated under a freeway interchange in San Francisco. Between 1974 to 1980, she served as director of The Farm, in which she later influenced the city of San Francisco to transform seven acres of derelict land into what is today known as Potrero del Sol Park. In 1981 while living in New York, Sherk conceived of A Living Library (A.L.L.). She later founded the nonprofit Life Frames, Inc., to support the educational work of A Living Library (A.L.L.), a powerful framework for creating place-based, ecological change in communities and schools. Currently, active locations of ALL projects are on Roosevelt Island, NYC (2001-present), and in San Francisco at the Bernal Heights Living Library & Think Park Nature Walk (2002-present) and OMI/Excelsior Living Library & Think Park (1998-present).

The posthumous survey Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 premiered in 2024 at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco with an accompanying catalog. In 2025, Sherk's archives joined the special collections of Stanford University Libraries. Sherk was featured in the Liverpool Biennial 2021, the Venice Biennale 2017, and in numerous national and international exhibitions including Earthkeeping, Earthshaking – art, feminisms and ecology (2020), Quadrum Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal; Territories That Matter: Art, Gender And Ecology (2018-19), Centro de Arte y Naturaleza-Fundación Beulas (CDAN), Huesca, Spain; Trucco di Dio – The God Trick (2018), Parco Arte Vivente, Turin, Italy; Unsettled (2017), Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada; Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s—Now (2015), Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; Feast Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (2012), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (2011–12), co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81 (2011–12), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Sherk received a B.A. in Art from Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey, an M.A. in Environmental Sculpture from San Francisco State University, and a certification in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley Extension, San Francisco. Sherk lived and worked in San Francisco and New York City.