In the Company of Fran Herndon: Spirits Willing

In the Company of Fran Herndon: Spirits Willing brings together paintings and collages by Fran Herndon (1926–2020), a San Francisco artist whose works intimately commingle social critique and reverie. Spirits Willing places her artworks alongside work by artists and poets with whom she shared close ties and affinities, including Jess, Harry Jacobus, Norma Cole, Lyn Brockway, Paul Alexander, and Madeline Gleason.

A Black and Indigenous artist from a working-class background, Herndon was not merely adjacent to the predominantly white, gay male circle of poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, she contributed fundamentally to the exchange of poetry, painting, collage, and visual abstraction of the 1950s and 1960s. Working with a swift brush and strong feeling for color, Herndon conjures figures and scenes that tend to withhold, creating fleeting encounters. Her attentiveness to place—and to how the imaginary discloses what lies beyond visible surfaces—remains in tension with a wider world she sometimes referred to as “a poisonous place.“

Herndon’s artworks are defined by cavities, swirls of color, surrealist topographies, and geological textures; flowers and trees; icons drawn from pop culture and religion; and references from literature and sport. Together, these elements from contemporary visual culture push beyond the present, suggesting the artist’s radical receptivity to what is ambiguous, latent, and unseen, yet deeply felt.

In the Company of Fran Herndon: Spirits Willing is curated by Juf (Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra).