Designer/Maker:
Russell W. Baldwin - One of San Diego's most important mid-century
artists, Baldwin studied at San Diego State during the late 50s with
Everett Gee Jackson, Jean Swiggett, John Dirks, Martha Longenecker
and Ilse Ruocco. He explored many forms of expression; painting, sculpture,
drawing, ceramics and various constructed art forms and was a member
of the San Diego Art Guild, the Allied Craftsmen and the Contemporary
Arts Committee of the Fine Arts Society. Some of his first one-man
exhibitions took place in La Jolla at the Jefferson Gallery in 1964
and the La Jolla Museum of Art in 1965. He wrote his master's thesis
on sand-casting for sculpture during this period, but quickly moved
on to hard-edge constructions and polychrome mixed-media works that
were exhibited in La Jolla and in his 1966 one-man exhibit at the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1966. He was one of San Diego's earliest
pioneers of conceptual art, working alongside fellow artist-teachers
Bob Matheny and John Baldessari, who taught at Southwestern College,
while Baldwin was at Palomar College. He taught for many years in
the art department there and established the Boehm Gallery while just
beginning at Palomar.
Description:
With "Soft Ruler," Baldwin took his 1971 idea of
having commercial yard sticks imprinted with his motto, Art Is All
Over, in the manner of hardware-store advertising, even further. This
10 inch ruler, an unevenly stuffed envelope of wood grain laminate,
was carefully embroidered with Baldwin's ambiguous phrase in a characteristically
wry example of Post Studio Art. From the estate of Russell Baldwin.
