The work of contemporary artist Doug Rickard signifies a new era for the photographic medium while referencing a rich history of street photography. Google Street View technology allows Rickard to study street scenes from around the country — without leaving his studio. He appropriates the scenes captured by Google’s automated lens and edits the images to reveal a lifestyle often hidden from our gaze.

Google launched Street View in 2007. Their vans mounted with nine-lens, 360-degree cameras roam every street capturing unauthorized panoramas of places and people, posting them online to be accessed by anyone on the Internet. Some find this practice intrusive and degrading, others see beauty in the grainy and gritty quality of the photographs. Rickard saw an opportunity to document the American reality. After studying the works of Depression Era photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Ben Shahn, Rickard wanted to extend their tradition of strikingly real, emotionally stirring portraiture into the 21st century. He says, “I was interested in photographing America in the same context, with the same poetry and power, that has been done in the past.”

Doug Rickard was born in San Jose, CA and studied U.S. history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, web sites that aggregate essays on contemporary photography and historical photographic archives. In 2011, his series A New American Picture was included in the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is represented in New York by the Yossi Milo Gallery and by Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.

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Since its inception in September 2011, the Occupy movement has resonated with artists and photojournalists worldwide, resulting in a distinct visual aesthetic of imagery designed to inspire and mobilize support. Occupy Bay Area at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (from July 7 through October 14, 2012) is an exhibition that brings together Bay Area artists to illustrate the power of art to cut across language and social barriers.

Spark focuses on three of the poster artists who are featured in the exhibit. Though he’s most famous for his artwork for The New Yorker magazine, Eric Drooker has been designing political street art since he was a teenager. His iconic image of a woman stepping over the Brooklyn Bridge became one of the first rallying images adopted by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The Berkeley-based artist’s design is a call to action for the “Occupy Caravan” currently en route to a national gathering in Philadelphia.

Young Oakland-based artists Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes screen-print their bold, high-contrast posters in the 30-year tradition of Chicano graphic art activism. Thousands of their posters helped rally the Latino community for May Day marches throughout the Bay Area. Barraza and Cervantes encourage free downloading of their designs; as a result other social justice movements around the globe often use their imagery.

Long before the first tents were pitched at Occupy Oakland and San Francisco, the Bay Area was home to other landmark political struggles. From the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960’s to the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-71 and the AIDS Vigils from 1985 – 1995, using historic videos, photos, and other artifacts, the exhibition provides historical context for the theme of art as a vehicle for social change.

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Pixar, the Bay Area’s Oscar Award-winning animation studio, is responsible for such modern classics as A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and Up. Sanjay Patel is a supervising animator and storyboard artist at Pixar and has worked on such films as The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Toy Story 3. He also has created a series of works that draw upon his Indian heritage, illustrating adaptations of ancient Hindu epics. Spark catches up with Patel on the occasion of the Oakland Museum of California exhibit Pixar: 25 Years of Animation.

Patel was a student at CalArts’s renowned animation program, founded by Walt Disney to train his animators, when he was recruited by Pixar, not long after Toy Story‘s 1995 release. Patel was amazed by how Pixar’s films were able to tell compelling, emotionally engaging stories through the use of computer animation. He traded in his pencil for animation software and a mouse and began working at Pixar.

Pixar encourages its artists to grow creatively, offering classes in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and to pursue projects outside work. Since 2006, Patel has been illustrating retellings of ancient Hindu mythology. Under the brand name Ghee Happy (named for the clarified butter commonly used in Indian cooking), Patel has created a line of books, apparel, and other products that celebrate Indian traditions through his distinctly fun and modern design sensibility.

Ghee Happy finds its roots in Patel’s upbringing. Growing up in San Bernardino, California, in a Gujarati family, Patel found himself surrounded by two sets of compelling iconography: the Hindu gods and scenes that populated his family home and the Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons that he watched obsessively on television. Patel absorbed everything he could from these programs and started to draw his own comics, often spending hours at a time working on them. Patel recounts that as he began to see himself as an artist, he felt in some ways a disconnection from both the broader Southern California culture and the Indian community in which he lived. His work with Ghee Happy reconciles these two iconographies that were so influential to his development, creating a unique and fresh expression of his experience.

Spark checks in with Patel as he develops his latest book, about the Hindu deity Ganesha and Ganesha’s legendary love of sweets. When creating these projects for Ghee Happy, Patel often finds himself drawing on the skills he acquired while working at Pixar. Important story points are reduced to single panels in the book format, so he takes into consideration animation concerns like acting, narrative arc, and the importance of illustrating moments that reveal character and transformations.

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The Fisher Collection of Contemporary Art is widely considered to be one of the most impressive private art collections in the world. Beginning in June 2010, a preview entitled Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection debuts in a major exhibition during a three-month presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Calder to Warhol is culled from the more than 1,100 works collected over four decades by Doris and the late Donald Fisher, founders of Gap.

Part of the museum?s yearlong 75th anniversary celebration, the preview of approximately 160 works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Any Warhol, and Chuck Close marks the arrival of the collection at its new home after multiple years of controversy surrounding its fate. The Fishers initially sought to build a new museum to house the collection in San Francisco?s Presidio, but the project was ultimately stymied by community opposition. In September 2009, an agreement to house the collection at SFMOMA was reached just days before Donald Fisher?s death.

Begun in 1969 as a collection of graphic art prints to decorate the offices of their then-small retail company, the Fisher Collection grew into one of the world?s premiere private art collections as the apparel company expanded from a single San Francisco storefront into a multibillion-dollar household name. Choosing to select works themselves instead of relying on brokers, the Fishers as collectors have been noted both for the personal manner in which they added items to their holdings and for their talent at selecting important works from key moments in the decades-long careers of some of the 20th century?s most respected artists.

The collection includes works from 1928 to the present by 185 American and European artists and represents movements ranging from pop art to minimalism and photorealism. It is especially esteemed for its large number of career-spanning works by Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol.

The preview exhibition alone will occupy the entire fourth and fifth floors of SFMOMA as well as its recently opened Rooftop Garden. In coming years, the museum plans to undergo a large-scale expansion project in order to house the massive collection alongside its current holdings. Many art experts and enthusiasts expect the presence of the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA to put the museum on par with such internationally recognized institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London?s Tate Modern.

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