Silent Light: San Francisco and the Art of California Zen

Silent Light: San Francisco and the Art of California Zen, a collaboration between Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and Lucid Art Foundation, explores the influence of Zen Buddhism on artists and thinkers involved in the California counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. This exhibition introduces select Bay Area artists who were deeply influenced by the Asian aesthetics of Zen, and typically pursued organic materials and forms in their practice. These artists often utilized art making as a form of meditation while others pursued traditional meditation and Zen theory.

Artworks are primarily presented through the principles of Zen aesthetics introduced by Shin'ichi Hisamatsu (1889–1980) in his book Zen and the Fine Arts (1971). Featured artists include Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, JB Blunk, Claire Falkenstein, Sam Francis, Sabro Hasegawa, Adaline Kent, Masatoyo Kishi, Arthur Monroe, Arthur Okamura, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Hodo Tobase, and Peter Voulkos, among others.

California Zen offered an alternative to the consumerism and conformity of postwar American society, emphasizing self-sufficiency, communal living, and creating art for oneself and one’s community. Abstraction was a natural vehicle for these artists, and compatible with the Zen approach of exploring consciousness and stressing artistic process over outcome.

Well before Shunryu Suzuki established the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962 and Tassajara Mountain Center in 1967, Japanese Zen found fertile ground in California through influential figures including D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Sabro Hasegawa, helping shape a distinctly Californian approach to Zen, art, and creative practice.

The exhibition concept was originally presented at Monterey Museum of Art and is being expanded by Sonoma Valley Museum of Art as part of the Further Triennial.