Collection: "After Party" organized by Glen Helfand

About the Exhibition

I’ve always loved the word ‘after’ when used as an art term.

On Wikipedia, “After is an art convention used in the titles and inscriptions of artworks to credit the original artist in the title of the copy.” But it has so many meanings, interpretations.

After comes after, a following, but also engaging in an artist’s own right. Rembrandt, after all, painted The Last Supper, after Leonardo da Vinci. One legend after another. Leonardo may have got there first, but the Dutch guy had plenty of chops.

In my own artistic coming of age, I was taken by Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans photographs from 1981, in which she rephotographed reproductions of Walker Evans’s iconic photographs. Her work was termed appropriation. I always thought of it more as appreciation and homage. How can you improve on a masterwork? That’s not the point.

Artists make anything that inspires them their own. You can also be taken by more ordinary things, celebrities, old movies, a favorite product or service. That’s what the artists in this show engage. They honor favorites and make them their own.

You could title Danny Thach’s color riff on the Caltrans logo as After Phillip Anderson, Marissa Parez-Mijares, and the Public Affairs Division and Audio-Visual Unit, in the same way he has a whole series of works titled After Keith Haring.

Karen May makes Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol her own, while Heather Copus channels a Warhol look to the KISS band logo. There are also nods to professional wrestler celebs, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, James Whale (the director of the original Frankenstein movie), Charles Gaines, Lucian Freud, and Syvester Stallone’s Rocky. Some may be more explicit tributes than others, but one wouldn’t exist without the other.

Another thing I love about the term after is the way it suggests continuation. What comes after is locomotion and legacy, oral and visual history. There’s a party after the party. The fun never stops!

About the Organizer

Glen Helfand is a writer, curator and educator based in Oakland, California. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Guardian, Aperture, Photograph, and many other publications and exhibition catalogs. He's an Associate Professor and chair of Graduate Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and also taught at Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has organized exhibitions for the Asian Art Museum San Francisco; San Francisco Art Institute; Mills College Art Museum; deYoung Museum, and others. His most recent exhibition is Ralph Chessé: A San Francisco Century, on view at the Jewett Gallery in the San Francisco Main Library through August 18, 2024.