In her solo exhibition Eye to Eye, Mary Curtis Ratcliff has collaborated with her father through the photographs he left behind. A world traveler, Ken Ratcliff made thousands of images on four continents; he painstakingly printed and mounted them into 42 bound albums which have languished in a Midwestern storage unit since 1990. Rediscovering these images decades after his death, Mary Curtis Ratcliff has taken a select handful and entered into artistic dialogue with her father, incorporating his work into her own using techniques as diverse as projection, montage, image transfer, drawing, and painting. In the process, the original black and white source images have been transformed as has the artist’s understanding of her father and the way he viewed the world.
Mary Curtis Ratcliff studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been featured in over twenty solo exhibitions and more than 100 group shows. It is represented in the collections of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California.
SPECIAL EVENTS:
Artist Talk and Reception: Saturday, June 7, 5-7pm (artist talk at 5:30pm)
Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: June 6, 6-9pm
Third Thursday Evening: June 19, 6-8pm