Crocker museum al farrow biography
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ArtBeat February Al Farrow
By Ed Goldman
AL FARROWS HALF-CENTURY RE-LINK TO INK
“When you love your work you don’t get old in the way other people get old,” Al Farrow is telling me a few days before his newest show opens. At 80 years old, the prolific Farrow’s enthusiastic voice complements the outright vigor he’s brought to an art career filled with accomplishment and accolades.
Primarily a sculptor, Farrows new show, INK—at Archival Gallery through February 24, with a Second Saturday celebration from p.m. on February 10—marks his return to doing ink and brush works on paper “after a year break from it.” But this isn’t any old India ink: it’s a handmade ink Farrow concocts from crushing oak galls.
Galls are plant growths made by small wasps on vegetation and twigs. The galls turn tan and then—when the baby wasps reach adulthood and break through the growths to make their debut— brown. Farrow says he adds a small amount of iron sulfate and a litt
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Al Farrow interview with introduction by Alan Magee and commentary by Chris Hedges
Alan Magee – Al Farrow
I remember Monika saying, “Alan, come over here. You have to see this.” We were at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, in a room displaying recent acquisitions of contemporary political art. I had been standing in front of Gottfried Helnwein’s impressive Adoration of the Shepherds.
When I turned around to respond to Monika, she was examining what appeared to be an intricate scale model of a Gothic cathedral. It was about six feet in length. Moving close to it I began to realize that every part of this exquisitely-crafted likeness of a thirteenth-century European church was actually a gun, a part of a gun, or a bullet. I was experiencing the inescapable double-take that the artist had built into this work. That visceral jolt is what grabs you, and once you are captured, the piece holds onto you. Cathedral is a work by the San Rafael-based sculptor Al Farrow, who has pra
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November 17, – February 24,
VIP & Press Preview
Friday, November 16,
San Francisco, CA. September – This fall, the Museum of Craft and Design presents Al Farrow: Divine Ammunition opening November 17, Having traveled the nation the exhibition comes home to San Francisco as Bay Area sculptor Al Farrow (American, b) completes his most recent piece, The White House (). The White House, weighing almost a ton, will debut at the exhibition alongside the public premiere of Farrow’s privately commissioned work, Temple Emanuel ().
Opening directly after the mid-term elections and during a contentious period in the history of the nation, Al Farrow: Divine Ammunition casts a striking visual commentary on the contemporary political climate, religion, war, history, culture and faith. Through the display of twenty-four of Farrow’s ornately rendered sculptures of churches, synagogues, mosques, mausolea, ritual objects and reliquaries created from munitions, the exhibition