I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
From the second the Supreme Court handed down its decision overturning Roe last week, anti-abortion politicians began stripping away people's access to care.
But the ACLU will not allow this to end with SCOTUS, and we're bringing everything we have to the fight for abortion access. Abortion is a human right – and every day that clinics can remain open will save countless people from the life-altering consequences of forced pregnancy.
That's why our attorneys have been working non-stop over the past several days, alongside our coalition partners, to protect people's rights, dignity, and health in this urgent moment.
Since last Friday's destructive Court decision, here's where we've moved fast in litigation to stop extreme abortion bans and restrictions from taking effect:
These new legal developments are just the latest in our fight to defend abortion access and we expect things to unfold very quickly. You can click through each state above to read more on the cases – and know that we'll be filing litigation across the country in the coming days, weeks, and months ahead.
At the same time, the fierce advocacy efforts of our national and affiliate teams are moving forward swiftly in the streets, statehouses, and – especially with key elections happening – at the ballot, to protect and expand abortion wherever possible.
Kenneth, we know it's hard right now. We know SCOTUS has gone after even more than our reproductive freedoms in the last week. But we also know that the Court cannot and will not take away the power of the people.
Together, we're going to fight like hell for each other – and we will achieve a future where the bodily autonomy and rights of all of us are safe and equal.
The ACLU is here for the long fight and we're not going to let up. So thank you for being with us and be sure to watch your inbox for more critical updates soon.
A Video I made today about a show that I'm having and the costs involved in having it, followed by the visual aids I made for the video followed by an essay I wrote around 2016 about working with galleries versus self representation on the web.
An Essay I wrote in 2016 about working with galleries.
There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
It’s whether or not I should work with galleries. I really don’t want to sound
like sour grapes but I do believe that for most artists it’s a bad idea to work
with galleries. There are exceptions to this rule and I want to explore them
here. Let me begin by saying that I’m going up start with the negative aspects.
The three main reasons why I think working with galleries might not work for
most artists are economic, emotional, and career building.
The most rational thing to base my decision on is money.
However, I want to point out in the beginning that the main reason is really
economic. I’m 52 years old and I’ve been showing with galleries for around 25
years or so. With the exception of two or three incidents I have never made
back the majority of the money that I’ve invested in any one gallery show. This
includes group shows.
Let me lay out the finances for you in my situation. For the
last 10 to 15 years each year I’ve sold somewhere in the range of $20-$30,000
worth of artwork. In the last two years I’ve been able to say that I’ve been
able to pocket two thirds of this money. This is because in the last several
years I started selling my work on line through several venues which include,
etsy.com, eBay, Amazon, and several other venues. I’ve found that the most
successful venue has Etsy.com.
Before this, I’ve had shows in some really reputable
galleries that include, Karen Jenkins Johnson in San Francisco, Klaudia Marr in
Santa Fe, as well as several galleries in Dallas and other parts of the
country. Those are just the most reputable. I don’t want to trash talk the
galleries that’s not what this is about. I do however have tons of horror
stories about working with galleries.
The empirical evidence is that whenever I’ve had a gallery
show I have ended up spending almost all of the money that I made from sales in
that gallery on the following, shipping the art, helping with gallery
promotions such as catalogs and postcards, and travel expenses. I am leaving
out the costs that involve making the art including the art supplies. In each
instance I usually sold between 2 to 7 works of art and sometimes these works
of art went for as much as $5000. So my art was not cheap and sometimes on a
show I would sell around $10-$15,000 worth of work. Sounds good doesn’t it? But
it wasn’t. The gallery, which is standard took 50% on each sale. I don’t
begrudge the gallery because they are paying overhead expenses and their
investing in me. That would leave me with around $7000 left. Shipping art to a
gallery especially out-of-state can cost as much as $1000-$2000. So now I’m
down to about $4000 that I’m putting in my pocket. Next factor in airfare if
it’s out of town and hotels. I think you get the point. At the end of the year
I got hit with taxes.
I want to bring up one notable exception to this. It took me
about five years of work but I completed a graphic novel and each one of the
panels was a separate watercolor. Just after I retired a community gallery in
Tracy California, whose directors named Will Wilson, contacted me and offered
me a show. Included in the show was a stipend, which was pretty considerable,
as well as extra money for painting a mural and they took care of most of the
other costs. This even included a hotel if I wanted. So I walked away from that
show with a considerable profit. Thank you William Wilson!
So even though it looked like I was a successful selling
artist I was only really pocketing at the most, and this includes studio sales
around $8000 at the end of the year. I am so lucky I had a tenured teaching
position at a community college. In fact, I use my art career as a write-off at
the end of every year to decrease the taxes I pay. At the time, I was making
about 110,000 year teaching at a community college. My wife and I are not big
spenders and I managed to put aside the ton of money in retirement which I
won’t touch till I’m 62 or 63 in 10 years. At the age of 52 now I have
“retired” and I paint full-time because for the last five years or so I was
able to figure out my finances well enough by selling work online that I can
afford to paint full-time.
Okay so I think I’ve laid out my more pragmatic or economic
reasons for not working with galleries. Your company emotional ones.
Again I don’t want to sound like someone who’s overly
negative or complaining about specific galleries, although I could tell you
some horror stories but that would make me look like an kind of Dick. So let me
talk about it in the most general ways I can.
In the most basic way working with the gallery is a
collaboration between the artist and the gallery director. Gallery directors
have a different point of view about what kinds of art the artist should make
and also what kind of shows should be offered in the gallery. It’s their right
they own the gallery. This kind of stuff, and it really makes a lot of artists
very bitchy, can really add up by the time you get to the opening reception.
Especially if the artist is bit of a prima donna. I also know this from
personal point of view because I ran a gallery for about five years at Ohlone
college in Fremont and believe me artists are really tough to work with often
have an attitude that far exceeds the quality of their work. So this is not a
slam on any particular gallery director it’s just pointing out that
collaboration is really hard and can lead to a lot of hurt feelings and
conflict.
Emotionally, I’ve also personalized the lack of sales at
galleries because I have seen the gallery director what I consider to be fumble
a sale or not make enough effort. Whether or not this is true, in my subjective
perception that is how I felt. And you have to think that most artists are
going to personalize the experience of showing their work because the artwork is
themselves. So let me just say I feel that a lot of gallery directors have not
sold work when I thought they could and I’ve had a strong emotional reaction to
that. Many of the artists that I’ve talked to often describe an angry or
irritable relationship with the gallery directors who represent them. Often, I
am surprised by the vitriol and anger that some of the artist will express
about gallery directors even though I think the gallery director has worked
really hard and is a good person. They mean you no harm in fact they’d like to
help you but often we as artists have bad reactions to stuff.
Here’s another kind of drag emotionally about galleries and
that has to do with gallery receptions. Unless you really like a party and you
like art receptions and find it really easy to talk to people, gallery
receptions are a nightmare for people who have a hard time being the center of
attention and or have any kind of social deficits and problems. That type
person is me. You wouldn’t know about it reception because I appear to be very
outgoing and I also know how to schmooze people. However, inside I am just
crawling with anxiety. My armpits are soaked my suit jacket. My little bald
head is sweating. The experience is a total freak out for me and I really don’t
like it.
That brings us to the next and final idea of why I think
what you shouldn’t work with the gallery. I’m in a basic on my experiences and
I will also bring in the experiences of two or three other artists and their
stories. I will not name the artists to protect the innocent.
Case study number one. This artist is way better than me and
managed to wrangle an exclusive contract with a very important gallery that
worked with some other “blue-chip” types of artists. The experience that this
artist described in terms of whether or not that gallery built this artist
career is that it didn’t. The gallery had promised to promote this person’s
work, take care of expenses, and you have the artist really did have some nice
shows and was able to do some cool stuff at the gallery but according to them
they didn’t: a profit and over coffee the artist was constantly complaining
about the lack of promotion and the lack of empathy gallery had. In short, the
gallery promised to represent this artist and to really promote them and make
them into being is important artist and they didn’t. I’m not blaming anyone,
this gallery actually have to shut down even those pretty famous.
Case study number two. During the studio visit to an artist
studio while I was director of the school’s art gallery, again over coffee and
during the visit, one artist complained about the gallery that they’re working
with for nearly 2 hours. I don’t begrudge the artist, the I guess I do a little
bit, but the gallery according to this artist didn’t sell enough of the artists
work even though they sold everything they made and often cock blocked them
when they had studio sales and wants as a percentage of the profits from the
studio sale. I don’t really know what the reality is because my experience of the
gallery in general was pretty positive because I also showed with them.
However, I understood how the artist felt.
Both of these artists, in my opinion, are top shelf artists.
Honestly, they are so good that I’m jealous of their work and yet the gallery
itself didn’t really, or wasn’t able to because they didn’t have the juice, to
make their career. In fact one of the artists has gone off on their own and has
been getting shows all over the world and has started their own organization
and is doing fairly well by promoting their own work. They are still going to
gallery root however, they don’t have an exclusive contract with a so-called
important gallery again. I think they’re happier for it.
Okay, I have a lot more experience and a lot of anecdotes
that I could share to back up all of my observations, but I do want to make one
sort of positive comments about working with galleries.
Occasionally, galleries really to make an artist’s career.
Historically, there artists like Picasso and Basquiat who have had very
fruitful and excellent experiences working with impresarios and art galleries
that have given them salaries and promoted them as artists and literally made
their career at times. Art history is full of these notable exceptions. Perhaps
some of the artists that I really appreciate, such as Bo Bartlett and Malcom
Liepke, have had some really good experiences with galleries and have had come
out to be a career building experience for them. I do think that in the
contemporary world now, because of the egalitarian nature of the Internet and
the fact that people can buy stuff online, this might be less possible. I’d
love to hear your opinion.
Image: Barbara Hammer, On the Road, Big Sur, California, 1975, 2017
Barbara Hammer Women I Love Opening: Friday, June 24, 5 – 8pm June 24 - August 18, 2022 Ratio 3, San Francisco more info
Ratio 3 is pleased to present Women I Love, an exhibition of Barbara Hammer’s early photographs and films. The exhibition, like the film after which it is titled, offers an immersive introduction to the distinctive combination of technical experimentation and earnest intimacy that defined Hammer’s singular vision of lesbian identity and authorship in the 1970s. Featuring artworks made while Hammer was living in San Francisco, Women I Love comprises the most extensive presentation of Hammer’s work on the West Coast to date.
Hammer’s black and white photographs appear throughout the exhibition, beginning with a selection of vintage silver gelatin prints made by Hammer herself, and continuing with a suite of recently editioned photographs printed from Hammer’s archived negatives. From self-portraits to candid shots of women—alone and in groups—in various states of repose and reverie, each photograph provides a glimpse into Hammer’s evolving life and work. Whether unflinchingly erotic or deliberately obscured by lens flares and double-exposures, Hammer’s photographs are invariably generous. In many regards, these stylistically varied photographs of the artist and her friends and lovers mark the beginning of the iconoclastic course Hammer would chart through subsequent decades.
While the judicious use of optical effects in her photographs attest to Hammer’s embrace of technical experimentation, her inventive command of her media is most apparent in her moving images captured on 16mm film. A monitor in the second gallery presents two of Hammer’s most iconic short films Dyketactics and Menses (both 1974), in a continuous alternating loop. Accompanied by soundtracks of synthesizers and distorted voices, the films present surreal images of uninhibited women congregating in groups, playfully satirizing womanhood and femininity into scenes that are equally touching and absurd.
Further into the exhibition, another pair of short films, Multiple Orgasm (1976) and Haircut (1978) demonstrate the breadth and continuous growth of Hammer’s filmmaking practice. Despite being made only years apart, these two silent films are strikingly distinct; where one is overtly erotic and composed of densley overlaid color footage, the other documents a quotidian scene in black and white. Together, the films demonstrate Hammer’s consistently inventive approach to experimentation, and the range of visual styles through which she explored and celebrated the nuances of different kinds of intimacy—from the autoerotic to the subtler domestic acts of nurture.
The final gallery features three longer films, screened successively in an hour-long sequence; Women I Love and Superdyke, two of Hammer’s most celebrated films, followed by Superdyke Meets Madame X, a collaboration between Hammer and Max Almy. The films and photographs comprising the exhibition highlight Hammer’s singular ability to recognize and capture the nuances of intimacy and sexuality in lesbian relationships and communities. Hammer’s work of the 1970s was pioneering both in its influence on contemporary filmmaking and in its representation of lesbian love and life.
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, CA and died in New York, NY in 2019. Recognized as an influential figure in experimental film, Hammer exhibited extensively throughout her career. Her work has been the subject of film retrospectives at major institutions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern, and the National Gallery of Art in DC.
This exhibition is accompanied by a brochure with a commissioned essay by Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ratio 3 thanks the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Company, New York, for their contributions and collaboration in presenting Women I Love.
COMPANY
145 Elizabeth Street, New York NY 10012 Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm
I'm having a show in San Francisco at the LONE STAR SALOON BEAR BAR USA https://www.lonestarsf.com/ It's a smaller kind of intimate and completely friendly venue. I'll only be showing 8 or 9 paintings.
Paintings by Kenney Mencher: It's All About the Bears Lone Star Saloon 1354 Harrison St, San Francisco, CA 94103 Reception Thursday June 30th from 6-8 Show runs from June 29th to July 27th
Male torso sculpting is the art of making things happen in real life. It's completely another realm than graphic design. Its claim to be the most sublime of all the visual arts has a serious foundation that has been virtually unquestioned since Michelangelo, owing to the fact that it is extremely difficult.
