• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Glen Park Association

Up-to-the-minute news from Glen Park

  • Home
  • Glen Park Association
    • About the Glen Park Association
    • Join the GPA
    • GPA Board Contacts
    • Bylaws
    • Neighborhood boundaries
    • Financials
    • GPA Meeting Minutes
  • News Stories
    • Glen Park News
    • Glen Park News archive
  • Greenway
    • About
    • Greenway Plan
  • GPA Grants Program
  • Crime & Safety
  • Contact
    • Contact
    • Volunteer Sign Ups
    • Event Submission
    • Author Submissions

Surrey Street’s J. John Priola show at Dog Patch gallery

February 22, 2019 by Murray Schneider

J. John Priola at his show at the Anglim Gilibert Gallery

J. John Priola, who lives on Surrey Street only blocks from Glen Canyon Park, was born on a five-acre farm in Colorado where his parents put up field corn for silage and grew sweet corn for more than just their Thanksgiving table.

“My mother sold the corn from a stand,” Priola told the Glen Park News, “but she also cultivated a tree farm. She’d buy blue spruce and ash maple seedlings, plant and prune each and then sell them to landscaper designers.”

Priola spoke soon after a February 7 opening of his Dogpatch show Natural Light,his new photography exhibit mounted at Anglim Gilbert Gallery at 1275 Minnesota Street.

Natural Light remains at Anglim Gilbert through March 9.

Priola’s rural childhood was surrounded by mountains and prairies and they inform his art.

“I was raised around growing things and have always been conscious of nature” said Priola, who has lived in San Francisco since 1985 and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1996.

Channeling his youth, he continued.

“Plants are an extension of oneself.”

Grid of J. John Priola’s foliage images.

And Priola’s photographs of plants abound in an urban neighborhood, Dogpatch, once rife with meatpacking plants and now boasting an up-and-coming art scene.

“I borrowed house plants from friends or obtained them from estate sales,” said Priola, who then photographed numbers of them beneath his Glen Park studio skylight.

His images and arrangements of synthetic flowers, subtly anthropomorphic, are imbued with human characteristics and offer opportunities to discover people through the objects they cared for.

Priola’s previous body of work consisted of streetscapes where objects were either cast aside on front lawns or are set out as charitable donations.

J. John Priola image: Foliage – Magnolia.

These photographs refer to individuals who place them there.

Natural Light, his sixth gallery solo exhibition, has done nothing less.

Anglim Gilbert has curated Priola’s photographs around themes.

“Grow,” “Poises,” “Foliage,” and “Parasite.”

The photos are mounted individually or in a grid.

J. John Priola – Grow
Houseplant Portraits

“Foliage” is one such a grid, taking up an entire gallery wall.

Each of Priola’s nearly two dozen “Foliage” images are tempered with pathos, consisting of a delicate wreath of branches, leaves, or flowers set against a deep black background that centripetally grabs the observer.

“The 20 photographs are born out of beauty and have a sense of deeper feeling of loss and projection,” emailed Priola, who has lived on Surrey Street for 18 years and shown earlier works at the Fraenkel Gallery in the City.

All are haunting in their own peculiar way, softly-lit with deep shadows, entreating the viewer forward, beckoning the onlooker inward.

“I lived through the AIDS crisis and it informs my work,” said Priola, whose influences are Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Lissette Model. “I lost friends to AIDS and when you look at each photo in the grid it’s the black space, the void, that is meaningful.”

“Posies” and “Grow” take matters to another place, playful even whimsical.

J. John Priola – Parasite

“The synthetic flowers in “Posies” are kitch and funny,” said Priola, who used a digital camera to capture their essence. “Each is a mix of humor, trickery, beauty.”

“Grow” is composed of numbers of subjects culled from friends, one photograph coming from a Surrey Street neighbor.

“The plants can be seen as a portrait of the person through something he or she cared for,” said Priola. “Each is evocative of the habits of people and how things effect people.”

Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” wrote about portraits, offering this: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter.”

Experiencing John Priola’s Anglim Gilbert Gallery exhibit, an art aficionado might find it difficult to argue with the nineteenth century English novelist and playwright.

Priola’s largest photograph is a stand-alone. “Parasite” takes him to his own backyard, Glen Canyon, and, arguably, back to his mile-high, rustic roots where nature morphs Scaramouche-like, both entertaining yet edgy, both friendly yet fierce in its vagaries.

Anglim Gilbert Gallery

Past the Recreation Center, several yards beyond the owl tree that has intrigued neighborhood parents and children, then half way along Alms Road one can find a lifeless willow limb immersed in quilts of California blackberry. The willow branch is contorted, coated with scabrous lichen, the crust like fungus gnawing at the dormant limb.

Priola passes it each morning, his dog, Harold, a 14-year old Chihuahua-mix in tow.

“The parasite is killing the willow in order to survive,” he offered. “It is just what nature does, what nature is.”

“The colors are soothing, intoxicating, yet something is being choked out.”

Priola’s image seems to encapsulate his fascination with the ever-contrary natural world, both its quirks and somber impassivity, yet he sees “Parasite” working as a bridge connecting his Minnesota Street gallery oeuvre.

J. John Priola photographs at the Anglim Gilbert Gallery.

“The polarity of “Parasite,” he explained, “is what is running through the work of this show.”

John Priola’s photography has shown at the University Art Gallery, Berkeley and at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, and his work is held in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and SF MOMA.

Natural Lightremains at Anglim Gilbert Gallery through the first week of March.

Art lovers can attend, then determine for themselves if the satirist who penned “The Importance of Being Ernest” was correct or not.

Is John Priola’s catalog more about the photographer or about the plants?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Primary Sidebar

IMPORTANT UPCOMING DATES

Arlington Path Beautification
Saturday, July 19, 10 a.m. to noon
Meet at 300 Mateo (x Arlington) for an exciting day of weeding, watering, seed collecting.
Tools, gloves and good company provided.


2025 Glen Park Night Market poster


 


Monthly cleanup on the Greenway
First Saturday of the Month (usually)
Click here to learn more


Friends of Glen Canyon’s
Glen Canyon Habitat Restoration
Every third Saturday 9:30 a.m to noon
Sign up here

Subscribe to this Newsletter

Sign Up for Glen Park Association News Updates:

* indicates required

Check It Out at the Glen Park Library

Click the above button or here to see all upcoming Glen Park Branch Library events. Subscribe to the Glen Park Library monthly newsletter to get events highlights in your inbox.

Glen Park Rec Center

Glen Canyon Park sign
Click the above button or here to see
the latest Glen Park Rec Center schedule.



Saturdays 3-4:45 p.m.
Questions? Call 415-239-4007


 

Renew Your Glen Park Association Membership for 2025

Join the Glen Park Association and help promote our community’s interests. Together, we can secure improvement funds, publicize neighborhood concerns and strive to speak as one voice on neighborhood and city issues.

Membership in the Glen Park Association is only $10 annually and can be purchased online.

Glen Park Association Advertising Sponsors

JE_Digital Small Space Ad
Diamond Heights Digital Ad
GPA Ad- Perez Construction ad 6.27.22 v Glen Park
moroco
Center for Creative Exploration - adult
JE_Digital Small Space Ad
Diamond Heights Digital Ad
GPA Ad- Perez Construction ad 6.27.22 v Glen Park
moroco
Center for Creative Exploration - adult
previous arrow
next arrow
Shadow

Current Weather & Air Quality

Glen Park featured on…

FacebookSF ChronInstagramTwitter

Join the Glen Park Association on Facebook

Comments Box SVG iconsUsed for the like, share, comment, and reaction icons
Glen Park Association is at Glen Park Greenway.
3 days ago
Glen Park Association

Saturday’s Glen Park Greenway Work Party is Cancelled.

“I’m very sorry to say that
we have cancelled our Work Party for this Saturday July 12, along with all organized volunteer activity on the Greenway until further notice.
As you may have read in the news, our fiscal sponsor, San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA), has shut itself down. Just as SFPA has shut itself down, the Greenway, as an organized part of SFPA, has also been “shut down.” We are busy looking for a suitable alternative fiscal sponsor that is willing to replace SFPA. That search is going well but it is a slow process. We had hoped to find temporary ways to enable the Greenway project to function responsibly as a community activity without a fiscal sponsor. Sadly, despite our best efforts and the help of many others in Glen Park, we have failed. That is why we must cancel our Saturday Work Party and discontinue future work parties and other organized volunteer activity on the Greenway (like weeding and watering) until further notice. We recognize that the Greenway is public open space and that the organizers of the Greenway project have no control over the activities of you or of anyone else on the Greenway. However, if you do venture onto the Greenway to satisfy your urge for outdoor recreation, please be aware that your activity is not in any way organized or sanctioned by the organizers of the Glen Park Greenway project. I’m well aware of the efforts that many of the
Greenway’s supporters are making to get the Greenway organized with a new fiscal sponsor and I’m confident that this will be arranged within weeks or perhaps a few months.
However long it takes, I will contact you with news of our progress.
Many thanks for all that you do for the Greenway.”

Nicholas Dewar, volunteer Project Director

#glenparkgreenway #glenparksf #sanfrancisco @rafaelmandelmand8 @danielluriesf @crosstowntrail
#crosstowntrail #sfparksalliance #publicspace #nature
... See MoreSee Less

Play
View on Facebook
· Share
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email
View Comments
  • likes love sad 8
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 1

1 CommentComment on Facebook

Wonder what’s stopping just organizing it separate from that non-profit. It seems like the volunteers largely come from Glen Park.

Glen Park Association is at Laidley Street SFO.
6 days ago
Glen Park Association

It was a beautiful day for the annual #july4th celebration on Laidley street!

📷: Photos courtesy of Michael Waldstein

#glenparksf #sanfrancisco #laidley
... See MoreSee Less

It was a beautiful day for the annual #july4th celebration on Laidley street! 

📷: Photos courtesy of Michael Waldstein 

#glenparksf #sanfrancisco #laidley
View on Facebook
· Share
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email
View Comments
  • likes love 13
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 0

0 CommentsComment on Facebook

Blog Roll

Coyote Yipps
Friends of Upper Noe Recreation Center
Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project
Open SF History
Sunnyside Conservatory
Sunnyside History
Sunnyside Neighborhood Association
Tramps of San Francisco
Upper Noe Neighbors

Copyright © 2025 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in