[Zoom Service] Beneath the Beauty of 17th Century Dutch Masters

Due to the Annual Antiques and Modernism Show at the Community House, when we do not have access to Room 101, our service this week and next will be via Zoom.  You will receive the link in the weekly email.

Hugh Leeman will speak on the topic, Beneath the Beauty of 17th Century Dutch Masters.  From within the structured still-lifes and group portraits of the world’s second superpower, shadows of darkness and reflections of light form a new reality.  Traders, boat builders, and risk-takers wander across the canvas while we examine symbolism, realism, and the backstory that gave birth to globalization.  As the new economy booms, spirituality comes into question amidst the ethics woven within a blossoming superpowers cultural fabric.

Hugh Leeman is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator, teaching art history and technique in English and Spanish.  Leeman’s artwork and projects focus on community collaboration and social interaction.  While living in the Caribbean at a young age, Leeman imagined himself remaining there for the rest of his life.  Yet, as a teenager, he began to meet visiting cruise ship passengers from the Americas and Europe.  Their stories would change the course of his life, inspiring a multi-year journey.  He traded his paintings for rent while working his way around the world.  He learned to draw from books he couldn’t read while teaching English in China.  Leeman moved to the U.S. from the Middle East, where he had picked up trash in the desert.  He has developed his social practice for more than a decade, living on San Francisco’s “skid row.”  Leeman first collaborated on a self-empowerment project with the homeless in San Francisco. He co-founded Aetatribes.org to bring clean water projects to the indigenous Aeta Tribes of the Philippines. Now he is creating impasto paintings and sculptures. They address environmental destruction, mythology, and the history of inequality.