Arthur Monroe

After a stint in the army during the Korean War, Monroe joined the Post-War wave of artists settling in Northern California - landing initially in Big Sur and subsequently migrating to the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Monroe became a key figure in the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements, befriending luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who became a life-long friend after mounting one of Monroe’s first shows of paintings at the seminal City Lights bookstore in 1962. One of Monroe’s key patrons during this period was Dr. Reidar Wennesland, a Norwegian-American physician who had previously treated Edvard Munch and became the leading collector of Bay Area art during the Beat era. Monroe is the most heavily represented artist in the Wennesland Collection, which remains on permanent display at the Agder District College and the Kristiansand Cathedral School in Norway.

During the post-war years, Monroe enjoyed an intermittently peripatetic lifestyle, with intervals spent in West Africa, Central America and South America. He lived for a period in Ajijic Village in Jalisco, where he was immersed in both the local indigenous culture and a community of expatriate artists, writers and musicians. The jazz pioneer Charles Lloyd lived next door and became a close friend for the remainder of Monroe’s life. In 1975, Monroe took over a historic industrial building in East Oakland, the Oakland Cannery, which he converted into a live/work facility for artists, musicians and community-based organizations. The Oakland Cannery became a hub of artistic activity and community activism in East Oakland for nearly four decades, and Monroe resided and maintained a studio in the building until the end of this life.

Monroe spent his later years pursuing his own artistic practice in an intensely personal fashion, while simultaneously working at the Oakland Museum of California, where he served as Chief Registrar for 30 years. Working in a highly deterministic (and largely private) mode, Monroe painstakingly traced his own artistic trajectory. While continuing to expand upon the visual idiom of Abstract Expressionism, Monroe developed a singular process that was highly-considered - almost empirical. Every painting began as rectilinear grid, which Monroe used as a register to formulate the color palette for his work. Stretching back to his tutelage under Hans Hofmann, Monroe’s approach to painting began as an inquiry into the relationships between a set of colors. Over long periods, line and form would emerge in a discursive, iterative process. Although Monroe intended each work to establish a visual context within which viewers could have their own contingent experiences, he also encoded a lifetime of his artistic experience and inquiry within the successive layers of paint - an animating quality which his friend Charles Lloyd characterized as a surpassing knowingness.

Arthur was a great painter, philosopher, sage, and seer. My last visit to his studio is indelibly etched in my memory bank: every corner, every surface of his studio held a layer of his consciousness.  In the pure white light of…the East Bay, his “knowingness” was revealed.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     -Charles Lloyd