Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton is the first exhibition to highlight the life and work of the artist Rick Barton, an active member of San Francisco’s bohemian art scene in the 1950s and 60s. Containing numerous drawings, print portfolios, and accordion style sketchbooks, the exhibition will unfold over across four thematic groupings, inspired by the artist’s personal preoccupations. Writing a Chrysanthemum will contain self-portraits and drawings of places important to Barton’s artistic career; drawings that captures the personal spaces Barton inhabited in the late 1950s and early 1960s; works that delve into Barton’s affinity for religion and its rituals; and a selection of Barton’s carefully observed drawings of fish, plants, flowers, birds, and other creatures.
Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton
Rick Barton, Untitled sketchbook, [detail], 1962. Brush and ink on accordion-folded book. 28 panels, 11 × approx. 231 in. unfolded. Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries. Photo by Tom O’Connell.
Rick Barton, Untitled [Signature self-portrait], 1961. Pen and ink, 8 × 5 1/4 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Rick Barton, Untitled [Bed with reclining figure and musicians], 1962. Pen and ink, 9 1/4 × 12 1/2 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Rick Barton, Untitled [Interior with fishbowls and map], February 5, 1962. Pen and ink, 22 3/4 × 15 3/8 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Rick Barton, Untitled [Inmates reading], 1959. Pen and ink, 10 1/4 × 14 1/2 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Rick Barton, Barcelona, August 28, 1962. Pen and ink with graphite, 10 1/4 × 14 1/2 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Rick Barton, Untitled [Inmates], 1959. Red and blue ballpoint pen, 10 1/4 × 14 1/2 in. Rick Barton papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”