Gene Beery Memorial Exhibition
June 28 – August 10, 2024

Opening reception, Friday, June 28, 5:30–7:30pm

Gene Beery was an iconoclastic artist who commingled mystic truths with mortal reflections. In painting, artist books, photography, and video, he molded language, as common as clay, into something just as tactile, slippery, and malleable. His most important medium was text itself, and much of his work pictured inside jokes, outside koans, and obliquely aspirational proclamations as if drafted by a wayward sign painter. Beery’s greatest ambition was for “art” to get beyond itself to what he called “tra” – art’s mirror image, a free space with no predetermined protocols or procedures. Though firmly in his own camp, his practice – first developed in late 1950s New York – presaged much of the conceptual and language-based explorations of the second half of the 20th century.

Since 1978, Beery made his home at the self-styled “Logoscape Ranch,” a hillside property in California’s Gold Country, alongside Florence, his wife of nearly 50 years, their children, and later, their grandchildren. The artist died late last year at age 86, after a retrospective at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, Switzerland, and exhibitions from coast to coast of the United States. His recent memorial was held in nearby Volcano (population 59), and featured touching family remembrances, photographs from the stages of his life (Wisconsin to New York to San Francisco to the woods), and a life-size cutout of the artist – in a state of nature – holding an iconic text painting over his nether regions.

In one corner of the room, Beery’s work – never not personal, revelatory, and off-center – met its match in an idiosyncratic installation of paintings unlike any other in the course of his long career, one complete with discovery and rediscovery.

His son-in-law, John, owner of the local telecom company, provided several fabric-covered office dividers on which another son-in-law, Tim, an electrician, mounted artworks from Beery’s personal collection and the walls of assorted family members. This one was Pam’s favorite; that one Liz’s. The unconventional greatest hits presentation was 100% Beery – brilliant and tender, heady and heartbreaking, absurd and perfect. The walls stood in a zig-zag formation to stabilize the situation.

Cushion Works recreates the installation note for note as it was assembled in Volcano, borrowing artworks and related support from Beery’s family. We are grateful to them for their generosity and participation – this exhibition is dedicated to them, and to the memory of Gene Beery.

This is the second Beery showing at Cushion Works: In 2019, the space mounted New Mythic Visualizations (co-curated with Nick Irvin), the artist’s first exhibition in the Bay Area since 1970, when he worked as a Yellow Cab driver in San Francisco.

Special thanks to Pam, Tim, Parker Gallery (Los Angeles), and Derosia (New York).