“On San Francisco Art Week 2026”
It should come as no surprise that many of the best things I saw during SFAW were made by artists who are dead or don’t make the Bay Area their home.
Wendi Norris’s show of Marie Wilson (d. 2017), particularly the colorful, bilaterally symmetric works dated to 1957, are the kinds of gems that should have made it into the Whitney’s Sixties Surreal show. All of the rudiments of the California counter-culture aesthetic are here, which is apt, as the “mediumistic practices” to which Wilson was introduced when she moved to France in 1952 were themselves the product of an exported nineteenth-century American spiritualism.
I still feel compelled to ask, though: could it be possible that Wilson experimented with psychedelics? I know that runs against the very dutiful, very dry, very rational art historical narrative that situates Wilson’s move to bilateral symmetry as stemming from her encounter in France with work by self-taught artists such as Augustin Lesage, but consider this: the CIA began its hilariously cavalier experiments with LSD in 1951, after an episode of accidental ergot-fungus poisoning caused a hallucinatory, and ultimately deadly, hysteria in a small town in southern France — this had to have been the talk of L’Hexagone in the early '50s. By 1954, the CIA had set up “safe houses” in San Francisco (on Telegraph Hill) and in Mill Valley, from which it conducted “operations” that amounted to dosing members of the public, and their own agents, with LSD and (sometimes) recording what they did. Call it circumstantial art history, but the 1950s were far more psychedelic, both in France and in the Bay Area, than they get credit for, and if we can’t call Wilson’s post 1957 work “psychedelic,” then aren’t we missing something? It is after all just this quality that makes the post ’57 work feel so contemporary, while the work dated to 1952-54 feels, well, merely “surreal.”
