BE BOLD For What You Stand For

Historic Odd Fellows Columbarium
1 Loraine Court
Inner Richmond

During the closure of SFMOMA the museum is placing art around San Francisco.  This Exhibition is part of an overall group.  The museum commissioned the four award winners of the 2012 SECA Art Award to create work outside the traditional gallery context.

These three pieces are by Josh Faught and are hanging around the Neptune Society / Historic Odd Fellows Columbarium.

According to an article by Kenneth Baker the San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic: “Partly because its restoration so nearly coincided with the early years of the AIDS crisis, the Columbarium began to take on special meaning for the LGBT community.  Faught’s pieces quietly evoke this fact.

Titled “BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For”  his three connected pieces celebrate and to an extent satirize the practice of adorning the urn niches of deceased loved ones with objects and messages of special significance – to the survivors anyway.

Faught annexes the ready-made sentiments and humor of greeting cards and slogan-blazoned buttons, as if bemused by people’s difficulty finding sincere idioms of expression in a culture of synthetic sentiment.

Beneath the symbols and jokes threaded into Faught’s work …lies a call to authenticity of feeling in a setting of quiet solemnity.”

Faught (born 1979, St. Louis, Missouri) lives and works in San Francisco. He earned his BA at Oberlin College and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco.  His work is included in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art as well as the Rubell Family Collection.