Susan Sheehan Gallery presents Sunshine on a Cloudy Day: California Prints 1960 – 1990, a group exhibition that brings together artworks printed and published at some of the most influential printmaking workshops in California. Borrowing from the lyrics of the 1964 song My Girl by The Temptations, the title of the exhibition references the weather on the West Coast, arguably one reason why so many artists established on the East Coast would often retreat to these workshops for extended periods of time and create some of their most significant bodies of work.

Works on view have been produced at renowned printmaking workshops, such as the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, founded by artist June Wayne in Los Angeles in 1960, Gemini G.E.L founded in 1966 and Crown Point Press, established by Kathan Brown in 1962. These workshops were not just working spaces, but rather they function as communal spaces, where dialogue and collaboration between the artists and printers was, and continues to be, a significant aspect.

Highlights of the exhibition include a selection of Ellsworth Kelly’s Series of Ten Lithographs, the first collaboration between the artist and Gemini G.E.L. in 1970. In a departure from the curvilinear shapes and figure-ground compositions that he had cultivated before, Kelly began to pursue a stricter geometric form, with solid-color panel paintings at a large scale. Bruce Nauman’s Raw War (1971) was produced at Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles and continues the artist's multidisciplinary explorations on the combinations of these two words. The word “raw” almost always functions as an adjective, while “war” is generally used as a noun and sometimes as a verb. Nauman’s color choice and positioning suggests that the adjective generates the noun, meaning a “raw” situation can lead to a condition of “war”. Brice Marden’s Ten Days (1971-72) marks his first print portfolio, following a few art school printing experiments in the 1960’s. Printed at the Kathan Brown Workshop in Oakland, this set evokes the context in which they were made: the Bay Area. Marden observed that despite being in an urban area, one could still see the sky everywhere in Oakland. The balance of light and dark in the prints’ grids coupled with Marden’s periodic use of silver, blue, and burnt umber ink speaks spe­cifically to this observation.