Her View: The Bay Area Figurative Art of Gail Nanao

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art is pleased to present Her View: The Bay Area Figurative Art of Gail Nanao, the first solo retrospective of the Berkeley-based artist associated with the Bay Area Figurative movement of the 1950s. Nanao's work blends the spontaneous bravura brushwork of Abstract Expressionism with a reimagining of figuration. Having studied in the early 1960s at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) with Nathan Oliveira and James Weeks, Nanao is situated amongst the second generation of Bay Area Figurative artists alongside Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Bruce McGaw. Nanao had important early exhibitions of her work in New York and Tokyo in the 1960s, but dropped from the public eye until the early 2000s when her work was rediscovered.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.