PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Pyramid Dreams, a one-person exhibition with Bay Area artist David Huffman. Huffman will present paintings and drawings. Exhibition dates are September 7 through October 14, 2006. Reception for the artist is September 7, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Please join us for an artist talk with David Huffman and Patricia Sweetow on Saturday, September 16th, at 2:00 p.m. The essay, Funk Upon a Time, written for the exhibition by artist Arnold J. Kemp, will be published in the exhibition announcement - the essay will also be available online.

In his fourth one-person exhibition at PSG, Bay Area Artist David Huffman will continue his metaphoric story of conflict, resolution, enlightenment, and fear in muted tones of liquid atmosphere. A narrative painter, Huffman mines historical and contemporary events to populate his parallel universe of African American space explorers called Traumasmiles.

The exhibition Pyramid Dreams is the "Hoop Dreams" of Huffman's oeuvre. Basketballs form monolithic Pyramids infused with extra-terrestrial mythology. Offering promises of redemption through conquest, Huffman reclaims the Pyramid's legendary power while simultaneously eclipsing the Traumanauts' hopes through images of looming guard towers in a muddle of slave quarters. As the Traumanauts sink basketballs they liberated from the Monolith into hoops seared to barren trees, Huffman surprises us with the tree's doppelganger - a tree harboring phantoms of lynched Traumanauts. Huffman's universe is one of contradiction, where praise and degradation reside in the same breath. Built on the backs of slaves, the Basketball Pyramid becomes the Traumanauts' altar of hope and despair.

Huffman's palette and brushwork seduce the viewer with watermarks that dissolve in a mat, powdered surface of luminous plumes. Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, was the first to reference Huffman's familiarity with Chinese Landscape painting, where he lays down a wash of mutable paint, then populates the environment with a hierarchical structure as in Chinese Court paintings or Japanese Screen paintings.

In the essay Funk Upon a Time, written by Arnold J. Kemp for the exhibition Pyramid Dreams, Kemp eloquently synthesizes Huffman's ethos. "Huffman began his project around 1995 when 1 in 4 black men had a relationship to the prison industrial system. That percentage is now 1 in 3 and starman Huffman has recently felt the effects of the terror of September 11, 2001, the inadequate response to the disaster of hurricane Katrina in 2005, unabated global warming, genocide in Darfur and the occupation of Iraq that continues despite international pleas for its immediate end. Things are worse for us all; and Huffman reacts by making larger, more complex, more politically toned work as if in direct communication with [George] Clinton’s martian-mack-daddy Dr. Funkenstein who says: 'The bigger the headache the bigger the pill.'"

David Huffman is one of the The Studio Museum in Harlem's celebrated Freestyle exhibition (2001) artists. He is a recipient of the 2005 Artadia Foundation Award. Exhibitions include CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Crocker Museum, Sacramento; and The Luggage Store, San Francisco. Upcoming exhibitions include Alien Nation, co-produced by the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Institute for International Visual Arts, London. Huffman's work has been reviewed and written about in Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, Flash Art, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, NY Arts, Art Journal, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

For further information and press materials please contact the gallery at 415-788-5126.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday 11:00 - 5:30 pm, Saturday 11 - 5.