Gale Antokal

Gale Antokal Biography

Gale Antokal was born in New York, New York, and received her BFA (1980) and MFA from the California College of the Arts in 1984. She is a Professor Emerita at San Jose State University in the Department of Art and Art History and was Coordinator in the Pictorial area. Antokal held several visiting artist positions and teaching positions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor of Art History at the Lehrhaus Institute, and the American College in Jerusalem. She was an affiliate faculty member in the JSSItaly program in Civita Castellana, Italy in 2015. In 1992 Antokal received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is represented by Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA, Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Tayloe Piggott Gallery in Jackson Hole, WY, and Amy Simon Fine Arts in Westport Connecticut. Her work is included in public, private, and international collections.

Gale Antokal Statement

The ordinary yet delicate nature of my drawing materials underscores the unsettling images and important ideas they describe.

Flour, ash, graphite, and chalk mix into fragile dusty surfaces that show the trace elements we leave behind when subject to catastrophe, or displacement, the initial moment as things begin to move or take flight: crashing waves, smoke, and ash…

My images have two significant threads: the consequence of identity, its’ location, and the way memory and history are forged from everyday moments. The evanescence of all that is, has been a theme in my work for twenty years and is now entwined with current events.

The fleeting nature of my powder media, one brush against the paper and the image I draw with only one fingertip, vanishes.

We are reminded how quickly the lessons of history can be forgotten.

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