The Brooklyn Rail

It was the most DIY of times, soon to become the most dot-com of times. Almost by accident, the years between 1990 and 2005 fostered a burgeoning art scene in northern California, remembered here in a mixed bag of an exhibition featuring works by nineteen artists (or artist collaborations). Bay Area Then was gathered by guest curator Eungie Joo, its title a play on the Bay Area Now triennial exhibitions hosted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts since 1997. In normal circumstances, a three-decade reevaluation of past artistic glories would seem to be standard curatorial practice. But in this case, the timing seems premature, its result unfocused and half-baked with some debatable inclusions and many obvious omissions. One reason for this lack of focus is that Bay Area Then’s post-punk, post-National Endowment for the Arts generation of artists tended to refuse the presumed need for a collective question animating their projects because there was no longer a right or wrong side of any history to which such questions might be addressed. Why have a big-picture question at all when you could just make art with and for your friends in guileless ways, saluting the East Village artists championed by the 1983 Whitney Biennial or the insular artist communities of the 1950s Beat Era? Answers proliferated, buoyed along by new image-generation technologies or an adamant refusal of them.

Bay Area Then is two mixed bags intermingled into a single exhibition unbuttressed by any explanatory text. One foregrounds works created decades ago while the other emphasizes recent productions made by artists who came into prominence during that time. It was good to be reacquainted with Manuel Ocampo’s work from the early 1990s, reminding us that he did live and exhibit in northern California before returning to his native Philippines. His 1993 oil and collage on canvas work, Die Kreuzigung Christi, stands out for its castigation of hooded murderers wearing the garb of seventeenth-century religious crusaders, eerily anticipating our own troubled times. It stands in sharp contrast to the twee idiosyncrasy of most of the other works in the exhibition: it still looks more now than then. Margaret Kilgallen’s large 2001 installation titled Main Drag is another high point, featuring a layered barrage of ornate signage executed in circus placard script drenched in exaggerated drop shadows. In a way that is part delirious and part terrifying, it captures the feeling of being overwhelmed by cascading layers of incomprehensible language, asking the viewer to simultaneously tune in and tune out. In Bill Daniel’s suite of eight photographs originally taken in 1989 and recently re-printed at large, eight-foot-tall scale, we see a rogues’ gallery of old-timey bicycle messengers captured like crime suspects in harsh frontal illumination, their defiant postures displaying unconventional livelihoods yet to be made obsolete by the advent of PDF files and Docusign.

Recent works by Mission School mainstays round out the exhibition, some replicating earlier efforts while others revealing personal and stylistic evolution. Ruby Neri presents three recent paintings (2024–2025) that remind us that, prior to moving to southern California to develop a successful career as a ceramic sculptor, she made paintings of abstracted horses in an expressionistic style that bridged the gap between traditional description and cartoonish abbreviation, fusing the traditions of street art and New Image painting. The recent paintings feature large colorful figures bouncing about in fantasy landscapes that look like scenes from a storybook Elysium. Another artist who decamped for the southland was Carolyn Castaño, here presenting a stunningly colorful 2023 painting titled Chondua (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta). It is an ebullient landscape executed in watercolor and gouache with some additional collage elements, harking back to Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” only more fluid in execution and more amorphous in its dreamy form.

The best single work in the exhibition is Rigo 23’s huge mural titled Terra Nullius (2025), painted directly on a wall in the largest gallery. It depicts a dramatic stand-off between a group of defiant civilians and a phalanx of technological instruments of merciless coercion, including surveillance drones and robotic police vehicles, all painted on a backdrop that looks like a prison wall crowned with razor wire. The theme and the composition explicitly reference Francisco Goya’s The Third of May (1808), updated here to embrace a contemporary global perspective that brazenly undermines the insular short-sightedness of many of the Mission School artists, making their efforts look obsequious if not outrightly complicit. Rigo 23’s mural is the work that looks forward to a more politically engaged future for art that takes a moral stand amidst the rush to ruin that is everywhere to be seen.