The Strange World of Artist Donna Mae Montgomery

Donna Mae Montogomery (11/10/1943 -01/09/2010) was a fascinating character and a uniquely visionary and highly skilled artist who worked in a wide variety of media including performance, photography, jewelry, drawing, painting, poetrty, collage and computer generated art. Whatever the medium, her strong visual aesthetics, absurd humor and refined craftmanship resulted in consistently high quality work. She grew up in Texas and New Mexico and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area after arriving in 1965. Per a listing at digitalconsciousness.com "In 1972 she took her first art class in the "art of experimental drawing" with Norman Steigelmeyer, known at the San Francisco Art Institute as the "father of visionary art" Donna Mae soon found herself indulging her creative spirit by showing her "visionary" art collages, hand-colored photography, and jewelry designs in a number of galleries in the bay area and across the country. She also performed "stand-up performance poetry" at the various clubs and art theaters in the bay area. She would say the one given in whatever art-form she is creating is her "tongue and cheek" since of humor and the influence of the Dada Artists."

Donna Mae was featured in an Alameda Magazine profile by Susan Kuchinskas (one of the Bay Area's best writers who is also an artist and long-time friend of Montgomery):

"Montgomery is incredibly prolific and seems to be able to put her hand on any medium and make it new. During the faux finishing craze, she painted vintage furniture with unnatural color combinations that magically worked, often adding decorative symbols and patterns inspired by traditional African art. Before the glaze-your-own ceramics fad took off, she dropped into a seedy neighborhood studio and came out with eye-popping urns and bottles that seemed to have been decorated by space aliens with a bebop fetish. In the 1980s, Montgomery was a part of the neo-Dada scene, a sort of punk art genre that mixed political and cultural commentary with surrealism, pop art and performance...

...In fact, the breadth and extent of Montgomery’s output may have made recognition more difficult. While there’s a clear aesthetic thread woven through her body of work, from her earliest hand-colored black-and-white photographs through her neo-primitive drawings and kooky ceramics to today’s intricately layered digital imagery, she’s hard to pin down into a single, sellable commodity..."

Montgomery's work has been exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in the collections of Whitney Museum, NY in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, NY San Jose Museum of Modern Art Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland Eye Gallery, SF Folk Art Museum (Fort Mason), SF Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and many other galleries and museums.

Sadly, her web page is gone but some of her work can still be found in her blogs and by searching Google Images for "art by Donna Mae Montgomery."

The first five images below are from the Rancho Freekucho collection and have never been publicly displayed until now.



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