November 3, 2024

New College Circle Part 2: Other Music & Crime




It is totally amazing to me how my life is a never ending parade of circles/cycles intermingling, colliding and during The New College Circle exhibition at the Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland, SEVERAL of them came washing me away to Memory Land!   
 
Participants in the exhibition included David B. Doty, Henry S. Rosenthal and Dale S. Soules, all wonderful and excing music flashbacks for me from the seventies and eighties.           
 
Doty, Rosenthal and Soules recorded a superb series of Avant-garde music albums under the name, Other Music. Their works were inspired by Avant-garde musicians such as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and others of that ilk. I discovered their album, Prime Numbers, sometime in the early eighties; I have been intending to write about it on a future article on the vinyl LP section (link below); NOW I need to get on the ball and DO it.    
 
Doty and Rosenthal (aka Hank Rank) formed one of the early San Francisco punk rock groups in the seventies, Crime (link belows). They were intense to say the least; I caught them at the Deaf Club on Valencia Street, San Francisco. I bought their 45 RPM, Hot Wire My Heart, the "B" side had Baby You're So Repulsive. How could you pass up that?            

Well, back to the exhibition! It will have one more showing on Saturday, November, 9, then the closing reception will be the next day, Sunday, November, 10, from 4 to 6 PM.    

Closing reception: 
Sunday, November, 10, 4 to 6 PM   

         
This exhibition is a celebration of fifty years of creative achievement launched by an experimental education at New College of California (NCOC) in San Francisco.  On view in the exhibit are archival materials, costume design, film, drawing, landscape design, music, installation, sculpture, performance, and photography.

Featured Artists
Carola Anderson, David B. Doty, Michael Patrick Lynch, 
Elaine McKeen, Henry S. Rosenthal, Dale Soules 
and Meredith Tromble who curated the show

In the mid-1970s, a group of young artists at New College of California fueled their creative practices with friendship and the radically experimental education offered by the school. They drew each other, recorded their own physiological data, performed plays written by their professor, invented musical instruments, and received credit for a gallimaufry of life experiences. At the time, statistics revealed that of students graduating with an art degree, only 5% were still making art ten years later. But in the ensuing decades each person in the New College Circle created their own path over, under, or around the barriers that stop young artists from becoming mature artists, pursuing creative practices and careers. This exhibition presents the New College Circle’s vibrant work in context with the unique institution that prepared them to thrive creatively throughout life.             
 
Closing reception – November 10, 2024
 
 

Installation photos by Styrous®



  


 
 
 
 
Michael Patrick Lynch 

 
 
 








 
 
 
above: Michael Lynch
below: Time As the Crow Flies - 2023
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dale S. Soules & Other Music

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 

 

 
 
 


 
 
      
Viewfinder links:       
         
Crime           
Gray Loft Gallery            
Lou Harrison             
Harry Partch             
Jan Watten                 
     
Net links:        
         
Gray Loft Gallery          
Jan Watten                         
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
Styrous® ~ Sunday, November 3, 2024