BAY AREA JULY OFFERINGS ARE DIVERGENT AND RICH

If you’re planning a trip to the Bay Area in July, two divergent exhibitions there may help relieve the summer art blues.

Feathers, safety pins and paper fans proliferate a portion of the works by Bay Area artist Robert Hudson on view at the San Francisco Museum of Art through Aug. 18.

This first major retrospective exhibition of over 100 pieces includes sculpture, drawings, paintings and ceramics, and represents 20 years of work by the eclectic, internationally known creator. Hudson’s colorful ‘60s sculptural works, his rich tactile paintings and drawings of the ‘70s, and his recent polychrome sculptures combining welded metal shapes, natural materials and found objects, are included.

Hudson is widely recognized for his method of combining found and constructed elements and juxtaposing materials, color and forms. The show was curated by David Rubin, director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Secondly, “Te Maori: Maori Art From New Zealand Collections” opens July 10 at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, following appearances in New York and St. Louis.

The exhibition--174 works of sacred art created by the indigenous Maori peoples of New Zealand--marks the first time the Polynesian settlers have allowed their treasures to leave home turf.

Included are sculptures and carvings in wood, stone, bone, ivory, jade and shell dating from about AD 1000 to 1880, all of which are considered to be imbued with ancestral powers. (So respectful are the Maori of the spirits believed to inhabit their works, that over 60 tribal members flew to New York to perform a welcoming ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum when the exhibit opened there last September.)

Several pieces, such as tattooed figures with spiny fingers and protruding tongues, often served to ward off evil spirits. All but one of the works, representing 50 types of useful objects, are on loan from 13 New Zealand museums.

The De Young Museum will present a lecture in conjunction with the exhibition on July 10; on July 13, related demonstrations and music and dance performances will be held. The show ends Dec. 1.

Also of a supernatural theme, but closer to home, is “I Am Not Myself: The Art of African Masquerade” at the UCLA Museum of Cultural History through Dec. 15.

Here are 60 humanoid and animalistic masks (made from wood, mud, brightly colored beads, quills, grass, horns and sacrificial materials) and costumes from 17 cultures. The elaborate masks are said to transform the wearer into a spirit, while he acts and dances out tribal rites and life’s lessons.

A new foundation to give financial assistance to visual artists has been established in New York.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc. was formed under the will of the late painter Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock, a leading Abstract Expressionist painter. The organization will consider grant requests from American and foreign painters, sculptors, graphic and mixed-media artists. No ceiling will be set on the size of the grants nor will grantees be required to produce specific projects.

“The Pollock-Krasner Foundation was established for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to talented individual working artists who have a current financial need, whether professional or personal,” said Gerald Dickler, chairman of the foundation’s board and senior counsel of the New York law firm of Hall, Dickler, Lawler, Kent and Friedman.

Completing the foundation’s management team are Eugene Victor Thaw, a private art dealer, and Charles C. Bergman, former vice president of the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts.