Norm Maxwell: Made In The Ghetto (1969-2016) honors the life and body of work of the recently-deceased urban contemporary artist and long-time Luna Rienne Gallery collaborator.

Born in Philadelphia, PA on January 25, 1969, Maxwell and his two brothers had a rough upbringing in a broken home. He was fully susceptible to and influenced by street life, finding his expression in writing graffiti as “Ice”. His mother’s artistic inclinations, frequent visits to the Philadelphia Museum Of Art, and encouragement from teachers led him to pursue an academic degree in art.

After art school, Maxwell moved to downtown Los Angeles (AKA Skid Row) to pursue his art career. There, he met his two life-long peers, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Clarence Williams and urban art visionary Doze Green. Scraping by on their creativity and wit, they pushed each other to evolve into working artists. Maxwell and Green cultivated their fine art painting while also beginning to design graphic tees and street wear.

Several years later, Maxwell and Green made their way to San Francisco, which at the time was busting at the seams with underground culture. Late-night venues like the Kennel Club (now The Independent) hosted live and DJ music events with artists selling their wares. There, Maxwell began hawking his “Made In The Ghetto” t-shirts and met his Revolution Clothing partner Shinobu Funahashi.

San Francisco in the mid-1990s boasted not just an unstoppable cultural output in music, nightlife, and design, but also the birth of the World Wide Web. In addition to showing his art in Upper and Lower Haight, creating club flyers and hip hop album covers, and designing clothing, Maxwell partnered with fledgling Internet start-up fabric8 (now Luna Rienne Gallery) to build an animated, ecommerce website that garnered numerous design awards.

Maxwell took that newfound skill, along with his wife and young daughter, back to Los Angeles to establish roots for his family. He became the art director for a music video production company whose high-profile clients included TLC, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Snoop Dogg, and Destiny’s Child. Maxwell also produced and directed his own short film, titled The Osiris Project.

In 2007, Maxwell decided to focus on his fine art career and opened Norm Maxwell Studio Gallery in West Los Angeles. The studio moved twice before finding its final location in Fairfax Village. Through his studio gallery, which he ran for 6 years, Maxwell created a vast and diverse body of work, including commissions for patrons in Los Angeles, Paris, Seoul, Berlin, and Dubai.

At the time of his passing in July 2016, Korean patrons had recently opened Norm Maxwell Gallery Seoul and Maxwell was hard at work on a series entitled Voyage Through The Void.

Maxwell was a prolific artist whose skills and subject matter spanned the extremes of painting. From acrylic spray to oil brush, street life to ancient myth, and urban strife to family life, Maxwell addressed both the evil and beauty of humanity – a duality that he personally struggled with during his short and magnificent life. He is survived by his wife and two children.

The extreme behavior of the current Presidential administration has left many people shocked and frustrated. March Forth! addresses those feelings, as well as presents the positivity that can emerge from them, including creative expression, activism, unity, and exercising our hard-fought-for civil rights.

20% of sales to benefit the Immigrant Legal Resource Center

Featuring different manifestations of his working style, Parallel Projections explores Huxley’s interests in humankind’s place in the cosmos, the effects of technology on society, and the pursuit of rendering them artistically. Continuing his motif of the space traveller, several paintings feature isolated figures, void of context, afloat in a "neon afterlife" with pops of color and geometry.

Huxley also revisits a cinematic series featuring mutant toys set against picturesque cityscapes. Goliath monsters, made from hacked-together toy parts and animal bones, burst from covert experimentation chambers into the streets while their caretakers flee for their lives. The inspiration behind this series is the ludicrous projects that the military industrial complex embark upon with little thought about the potential effects on society and the environment.

War Paint is a collection of portraits and figurative paintings that reinterprets historic Native American imagery through stylized freehand manipulation. LeBrun illustrates the unique aesthetic details of the handcrafted garments of various indigenous tribes through the heavy use of line, deliberate brush strokes, and a bold primary color palette. The subject matter is associated with life and death, as well as artifact studies and animated still life.

War Paint is a tribute to American Indians, Native American culture, and indigenous American ideology. LeBrun, who is part Iroquois, salutes their historic example and continued respect for the Earth and all things natural. Growing up in the United States, he had little education about the severe atrocities suffered by the original occupants of the land he calls home. Thus the pride that accompanies his citizenship is offset by a sense of shame in the knowledge that his country was stolen and claimed by foreigners. Even today, the heritage and rights of American Indians are exploited, as exampled by Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their peaceful protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Sacred Alchemy is a series of paintings and murals inspired by the delicacy of Sacred Geometry and its intricate weaving into the Alchemy of Life. June 2017 marks the one year anniversary of Lynn beginning a very powerful and life changing process. Having undergone a personal transformation of body and mind, she would like to share the positive energy that has been awakened inside of her through illustrative depictions of feminine strength, beauty, and symbols of the natural and surreal world.

A benefit group show for The Homeless Prenatal Program, inspired by Amandalynn's personal transformation as well as the amazing art community of San Francisco, the current state of our country has highlighted problems that still run deep in our society. She has thus put together a roster of local artists who create beautiful and inspiring works that engage in supporting the important feminine energy of this city. Proceeds from this exhibition will support women and children, and help them grow to create healthy positive futures.

Familiar Places features Tan’s latest body of work, including fine art canvases depicting in San Francisco’s Mission District. Coming from a background in graffiti art and lettering, Tan’s style has grown to include series of cityscapes that document the changes in the city through a native’s perspective. In particular, the postcard image of Thrift Town laments the loss of a long-time retail instititution.

Luna Rienne Gallery is pleased to present Mission Lake, a solo exhibition featuring San Francisco artist Anthony Holdsworth.

Mission Lake showcases Holdsworth’s recent series of small-scale plein air paintings depicting San Francisco’s Mission District. The show title is taken from his image of the vacant lot at the corner of 22nd and Mission Streets where, until last year, there was a massive mixed-use building that housed 62 long-term tenants and nearly a dozen small local retail businesses.

A fixture on the San Francisco and Oakland streets since the 1980s, Holdsworth strives to paint things that represent the reality in which we live. In the past five years, he has focused on the Mission because he truly appreciates and wishes to celebrate the neighborhood’s strong sense of community as well as its roots in Latino culture, having painted in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

Fillmore Poster Art is a curated collection of show souvenirs created by San Francisco artist, Reuben Rude.

Continuing the tradition begun by Bill Graham in 1966, The Fillmore has constantly created and distributed to concert attendees a complimentary 12 x 19 poster of each show presented at their live music venue. For nearly a decade, Rude has been one of just a few artists that designs these posters.

This pop-up exhibition will showcase about 35 show posters that Rude has created throughout his career.

Started in June 2017, Stattmiller created the Summer Series as a break from his usual art-making process. Coming from an illustration background, his paintings had always been planned out in sketchbooks and then painted with precision. With this show he loosens up his process and experiments with different materials, compositions, and colors.

Each of the works is done freestyle aside from the parameters of scale and time – they are all 8 x 8 inches and completed in one day. Painting materials included tube acrylic, latex, fluorescent, markers, metallic ink, and enamel. Stattmiller began each one by laying down a random color and medium, and then let each piece evolve on its own.

Visions Collide explores the sources of dreamlike visions that stir the creative conscious. Some are encountered as we move through the world through serendipity, gifts of life and points of interest as we move through our lived experiences. Some are products of the mind, that visit us both invited and unannounced, revealing themselves at varying rates of consciousness whether or not they are welcome.

Bowen, Guy, and Loucheur manifest these multifarious visions in their own unique styles with this exhibition. Each of these artists takes disparate elements and puts them together in some sort of union that speaks metaphorically and emotionally to the viewer via inclusion, juxtaposition, and exploration.

Crossed Lines blurs the boundaries between art and design, as well as between mediums, through a heavy use of line by each of the artists. While born, raised, and based in different cities their styles speak to each other and to a contemporary international aesthetic.

Invisible Places explores two artistic directions that Ording has pursued in her body of work. First is her signature line work, which she evolves with the use of brighter hues as well as color washes over coffee-dyed paper. Ording’s other series focuses on abstract landscapes, which render dreamy ethereal places that may not really exist. With these latest pieces, she explores weather and movement.

Wildflower Child is an homage to both the Victorian fairy illustrations and paintings that Ursula Young grew up with in England and the colorful free-spirited love vibrations that were present 50 years ago during San Francisco’s Summer of Love. She provides a modern-day interpretation of the whimsical drawings against a Northern Califorinia background with an emphasis on the wildflowers abundant after the wettest winter in recent history.