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The SDSU Downtown Gallery’s inaugural exhibition highlights the work of three important alumni from the School of Art, Design, and Art History: John Baldessari, Deborah Butterfield, and Andrea Zittel. While the stylistic and generational differences between these important artists are vast, they share a commitment to conceptual acuity and visual strength. Divergence: The Work of John Baldessari, Deborah Butterfield, and Andrea Zittel will be on view through January 3, 2011.

John Baldessari John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California. He received a B.A. from San Diego State University in 1953, and an M.A. from SDSU in 1957. From 1967-1970 he was Professor of Art at the University of California, San Diego. In 1970, Baldessari joined the faculty of the newly established California Institute of the Arts where he taught until 1988. Following his tenure at Cal Arts, Baldessari was Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996-2007. He currently lives in Santa Monica, California. Badessari’s work has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and he has received numerous awards and distinctions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1986 and a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded in 2009 at the Venice Biennale. Since 1979, he has curated several exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including, most recently, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Deborah Butterfield
with Vicktoria and Isabelle,
August 2007Deborah Butterfield was born in 1949 in San Diego, California. She attended San Diego State University from 1966-68 and graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in 1972. She received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1973. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, Butterfield was Professor of Sculpture at the University of Madison, Wisconsin and Montana State University in Bozeman. She currently divides her time between Bozeman, Montana and Hawaii. For the last three decades the single subject of Butterfield’s work has been horses fabricated in wood, found metal, or cast bronze, for which she has received critical acclaim and several grants and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1980, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1980 and 1995. Butterfield’s work has been widely collected in public institutions throughout the United States.

Andrea ZittelAndrea Zittel was born in 1965 in Escondido, California. She received her B.A. from San Diego State University in 1988 and her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. She is currently Professor of Art at the Roski School of Fine Art at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. Zittel has been included in many solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Zittel began her career by starting the one-woman mock corporation A-Z Administrative Services, which the artist describes as an “institute of investigative living” and which is the source of her critically acclaimed installations and sculpture.