Jack Hooper, Artist

     Jack Hooper is a celebrated artist: painter, muralist, sculptor, printmaker. He is a prodigious, amazingly inventive, and complex artist who has been creating for over 60 years. Now living in rural Mexico, he paints or draws every day and, while various themes have been reworked and revisited over the years, his work remains fresh and alive.

     Born in 1928, he grew up in Los Angeles. After graduating from high school, he joined the Army Air Corps just at the end of World War II. After his military service, he attended and graduated from Los Angeles City College. As an eager, young artist he was drawn to the vibrant art scene of Mexico. These were the years of intense artistic and political dynamism, dominated by three brilliant painters and muralists: Diego Rivera, Jose Clement Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquierios.

     In Mexico City, Hooper enrolled at the College of the Americas and became a mural assistant to Siquieros. He was there for two years, studying and absorbing the art scene. He recalled, "I became close to Siquieros, though he was in and out of jail a lot of the time I was there." As the leader of the Communist Party of Mexico, Siquieros was subject to frequent arrests by the authorities. Hooper knew many of the artists of the period, including Frida Kahlo who would become the subject of many of his portraits and studies over the coming decades.

     Hooper's painting was never overtly political nor didactic, despite the prevailing ethos of "art for the masses." By the time a new generation of Mexican painters had emerged, with whom he had more in common, he had left to study in Europe. This new movement in Mexican art, called the "Ruptura," challenged the older political generation by asserting that the artist's subjectivity is the starting point for authentic creativity. Hooper shared with the Ruptura artists an attitude that is paradoxically more subversive than the overtly revolutionary art of the muralists; by insisting on a deeply personal expression, he challenged the dominion of all authority that proposes to assign preconceived functions or messages to the artist. This attitude of the Ruptura artists is congruent with many European trends of the middle 20th century. We could think of Hooper, who lived and studied in both Mexico and Europe, as expressing the aesthetic and even philosophical currents of both.

     In Europe from 1952 to 1955, Hooper attended the Académie Julian in Paris, an important art school that is a kind of "alternative" to the official École des Beaux-Arts. Henri Matisse was one of many great artists associated with the school and Hooper considers Matisse to have been an important influence in his development. Another alumnus of the Académie was the cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipschitz. Hooper's heads often have a sculptural quality that is reminiscent of Lipschitz's work. Both Hooper and Lipschitz deconstruct the form, but never dissolve the image into abstraction.

     During this same period, California artists were beginning to challenge the hegemony of abstract expressionism in American art and reintroduce the figure. This was a risky move in that the ideology surrounding abstract art in general, and abstract expressionism in particular, consigned figure painting to conservative or even reactionary trends, or mere illustration. Yet many of the artists associated with this new movement had been prominent abstract painters themselves, and they valued the gains and artistic achievements of abstract expressionism. Hooper returned to the U.S. in 1956, where he found a natural affinity with the Bay Area Figurative movement. The gestural spontaneity and the emotional vibrancy expressed through bold brush strokes, brilliant color, and the incorporation of chance elements dance between abstraction and representation of the subject.

     From 1956 to 1958 he was an Associate in the Art Department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and was a studio assistant to the painter Rico Lebrun. This was a period of intense creativity and recognition. He had many shows in important museums and galleries and continued to receive awards. In 1960 he was invited to become a Visiting Professor of Art at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In that year alone, he participated in, among others, Invitational Shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and UCLA Art Galleries. Only 32 years old, his work was already documented in the Historical Archives of Contemporary Art at Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil.

     After his year in Colorado, he returned to Los Angeles and was appointed Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA and again participated in important shows throughout the US. The following year, he became Assistant Professor Art at Mount Saint Mary's College in Los Angeles and later became the Chairman of the Art Department and the Director of Galleries there. Some of the notable shows he participated in during those years were: Primus Stuart Gallery, Los Angeles, Everhart Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania, La Jolla Art Center, La Jolla, California.

      In 1962, Hooper was featured in the exhibit: Fifty California Artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA, at that time, purchased one of his portraits of Frida Kahlo. The same year, his work as a sculptor was also recognized, he was featured in a special issue of Art Forum on Sculpture in California for his Plastic Relief paintings. Between 1967 and 1969, Hooper revisited his work as a muralist and executed 14 murals in Los Angeles. During this time he co-founded Arts Control with the architect, Frank Gehry to facilitate collaboration between artists and architects. For the next 25 years, Hooper participated in dozens of solo and group shows in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and Mexico. (For a complete list of his credits, go to Career Summary.)

     In the 1980's, Hooper painted a series of portraits of artists; these portraits honor his artistic progenitors and give us a glimpse of his profound knowledge of the history of painting and its aesthetic and emotional concerns. (Some of these portraits can be found on our online Jack Hooper Gallery.) His work lives in a tradition of art as an expression of affects, subjectivity, and emotional truth.

     The end of the decade of the 1980's marked an abrupt change in his life when he left the realm of galleries, dealers, museums and the trappings of the official art world. He and his wife, the painter Melvinita Hooper, returned to Mexico where they now live at the foot of a volcano at the edge of a lake. In the words of an eminent gallery owner of Puerto Vallarta, Jan Lavender, "Jack and Melvinita live as real, old-fashioned artists... by themselves, dedicated to their art and unconcerned with the market and the prices and the trivia of the fashionable art world." Still a vibrant artist, his paintings become increasingly personal and emotionally resonant as he approaches his eightieth birthday.

Career Summary

Jack Hooper Exhibition History

One-Person Exhibitions

University of California at Santa Cruz -20 Year Retrospective
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California (Purchase Award)
David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California (2)
The Arnovick Foundation, Los Altos, California
Primus Stewart Galleries, Los Angeles, California
Canyon Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Singing Stone Gallery, Santa Cruz, California
Re:Vision Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Sabrina Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Rubicon Gallery, Los Altos, California
Los Robles Gallery, Palo Alto, California
Bertha Lewinson Galleries, Los Angeles, California
Vorpal Gallery, New York (30)
Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, California (4)
Vorpal Gallery, Laguna, California
Santa Cruz Gallery, Santa Cruz, California
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, California
Stremmel Gallery, Reno, Nevada
Galeria Artes de America, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Galeria Uno, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Invitational Group Exhibitions

Whitney Museum of Art, New York
Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticos, Mexico City
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California
Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle, Washington
Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, California
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa
Marion Koogler McNary Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas
Walnut Creek Art Center, Walnut Creek, California
Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California
Fresno Art Center, Fresno, California
Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, California
La Jolla Art Center, La Jolla, California
Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Santa Monica Municipal Art Galleries, Santa Monica, California
Everhart Museum of Art, Scranton, Philadelphia
Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina
Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts, Columbus, Ohio
Stanford University Museum, Stanford, California
UCLA Art Galleries, Los Angeles, California
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
Pomona College, Pomona, California
San Jose State College, San Jose, California
University of Redlands, Redlands, California
Chapman College, Orange, California
Valley Cities Jewish Community Center, Van Nuys, California
Eastern Illinois State College, Charleston, Illinois
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska
Texas State College for Women, Denton, Texas
Honolulu Academy of the Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii

Gallery Group Exhibits

Knoedler Galleries, New York, New York
David Stuart Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles Museum of Folk Arts and Crafts, Los Angeles, California
Falk-Raboff Gallery, Beverly Hills, California
Exodus Gallery, San Pedro, California
Behold The Rising Sun Gallery, Carmel, California
Re-Vision Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Vorpal Gallery, New York, New York
Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, California
Stremmel Gallery, Reno, Nevada
Galeria Artes de America, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Galeria Uno, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Representative Institutional Collections

Stanford University Museum, Stanford, California
Long Beach Museum, Long Beach, California
University of California at Los Angeles, California
University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California
The Lannan Foundation, Florida and California
The Arnovick Foundation, Los Altos, California
San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Palace of the Legion of Honor:
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, San Francisco
The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California at Los Angeles

Visit our online Jack Hooper Gallery

Phone 415-355-1010 or e-mail for more information.