Renny Pritikin is a San Francisco Bay Area based curator, art writer and poet. He’s been chief curator at New Langton Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. He’s the author of five books of poetry and a memoir. Pritikin lives in Oakland with his wife.
Renny Pritikin, born in Brooklyn, New York, received a BA from New School College, NYC, and an MA from San Francisco State in Interdisciplinary Arts. Career highlights include a lecture series in Japanese museums as a guest of the State Department and as a Koret Israel Prize winner toured extensively in Israel. He was the curator for the United States exhibition at the Cuenca, Ecuador Biennal, presenting the work of Don Ed Hardy, and was a Fulbright Scholar lecturing in museums throughout New Zealand. Pritikin was a senior adjunct professor in the curatorial practice graduate program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco fror twelve years.. The author of five published books of poetry, he was poet-in-residence at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. He is the United States correspondent for the Portuguese art magazine, Umbigo, and a regular contributor to the art review site, squarecylinder.com.
LATEST
At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists, Renny’s memoir, now available
A new memoir by longtime Bay Area curator, contemporary art critic, and poet Renny Pritikin reveals the richness of San Francisco’s dynamic art scene from 1979-2018
Over 40 years, curator, contemporary art critic, and poet Renny Pritikin worked with, befriended, and sometimes almost got arrested with some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most innovative and celebrated artists and writers. As co-director of New Langton Arts, a major American artist-run space in San Francisco, and then Chief Curator at several of the area’s cutting edge museums, Pritikin was an early supporter of such artists as Nancy Rubins, Fred Tomaselli, Nayland Blake, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and others, and was recognized for pushing the boundaries of contemporary art in museum practice with shows such as the first United States exhibition of The Art of Star Wars.
Now, Pritikin shares over 50 personal stories about his encounters from 1979 to 2018 with creative minds in an attractive hard-cover book, At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists. With 50 photographs of never-before-seen images, from Survival Research Laboratories performances to a self-portrait drawing by the New Yorker’s Roz Chast, and 100 pages of text, this important memoir begins the documentation of a cohort of artists in danger of being lost to history. Pritikin hopes that this project spurs further research and additional books.
Artists discussed include Ricky Jay, the late master sleight-of-hand artist, writer, historian, and collector of magic ephemera. Pritikin pays homage to Jay by choosing fifty-two stories included like individual cards in a deck. Also included is Barry McGee, the acclaimed street artist who Pritikin commissioned to paint the construction fence at Yerba Buena, and Nancy Rubins, who installed a forty-foot long wall of concrete and toasters down the middle of 80 Langton Street Gallery.
Reviews
Square Cylinder: Renny Pritikin Remembers by Julia Couzens
Hyperallergic: Renny Pritikin’s Adventures in Bay Area Art by Nancy Zastudil
