Jean Conner: Collage

Friday, May 6, 2022 – Sunday, September 25, 2022

Jean Conner: Collage

For more than six decades, San Francisco–based artist Jean Conner (born 1933, Lincoln, Nebraska) has created seductive, clever, and humorous collages. Primarily made from images cut out of such large-format color magazines as Life and Ladies’ Home Journal, Conner’s vivid, pictorial worlds feature playful arrangements of animals, nature, religious symbolism, aquatic environments, food, women, dancers, and divers. With a keen eye to art history and popular culture, Conner summons nineteenth-century practices in collage, when some women used the medium as both a domestic pursuit and subversive tactic to render the incredible believable and unsettle the mind.

Conner’s early collages from the 1950s comprise black-and-white newsprint images arranged into simple yet cunning compositions. By the 1960s, Conner began sourcing her images almost exclusively from color magazines, reveling in their bright, outlandish hues. The resulting flamboyant scenes remain as excessive as the era’s advertisements and even stranger than its Mad Men could conjure. In her uncanny pictures, Conner’s command of color, line, and form imparts an astounding seamlessness, merging discrete images into rule-bending and impossible realities.

Organized by SJMA, Jean Conner: Collage is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and brings long-overdue recognition to her extraordinary and fanciful collages. The exhibition features work from the 1950s to the present and includes rarely seen materials from the Conner Family Trust, recent acquisitions by major public museums, and private collections. Arranged thematically, the exhibition highlights Conner’s whimsical imagination and clever critiques of mass-media representations of women, war, the environment, and burgeoning new technologies.