Donna Anderson Kam currently lives and works in San Francisco. She received her
BFA in art history from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her BFA in
design from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. She has
exhibited widely including in 2012 when she was artist in residence at Recology
San Francisco. Two of her works were selected for the 2020 exhibition
The deYoung Open, including
(08-07) 16:22 PDT Trona, CA (AP)--, which is featured in the exhibition
Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present.
Kam’s artistic practice is centered on the pastel medium, primarily dry pastel (also called chalk pastel), She finds it rewarding to work with the large chunky sticks for the luminous qualities they impart when applied to a white sheet of paper. Kam also enjoys the challenging feature that dry pastels can not be mixed on a palette like oil paints, and consequently must be layered to show variations in color.
In 2008 Kam began working on large-scale pastels, and the following year she began the “dateline” series in which she utilized images taken from news sources. She created her own narratives for the images and restaged the stories with actors. Photographs taken at those reenactments are then referenced in the resulting drawings. According to Kam, this multistep method distances her final work from it’s original source, creating works that are ambiguous and open.
In the example acquired by the Museums, the COVID-19 face coverings worn by the three women identify the scene as from 2020, and other accessories (including a smartphone and earphones) and detritus surrounding them (a blue tarp, a computer keyboard, and an empty potato-chip bag) also indicate contemporary times.
Kam sees her commitment to pastel as her contribution to it’s continuity as an artistic practice since the sixteenth century. This timeline is explored in Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present, on view at the Legion of Honor from October 9, 2021, through February 13, 2022.
Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
Donna Anderson Kam, (08-07) 16:22 PDT Trona, CA (AP)-- , 2020. Pastel and colored pencil on paper, 50 x 90 in. (132.1 x 243.8 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts Endowment Fund and gift of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council, 2020.51
