Jennifer White Kuri THE DINNER CLUB by Peter Frank

Jennifer White Kuri s willing embrace of the feminine of women-associated objects, and ultimately of women themselves is circumspect subjectively, if no less visually brash: while it centers on her own life and experiences, Kuri s art asserts not her own life and experiences, Kuri s art asserts not her presence, but her experience. We see the world through her eyes, as if perusing her diary. Kuri s viewpoint is cinematic to a great degree, but she does not star in her own painted movies so much as script and direct them (the self-portrait that completes the Dinner Club cycles a notable exception). Call it auteur painting. The history of portraiture is of course dotted with depictions that describe their subjects alone, Kuri maintains a tradition; indeed, she quite willfully extends its specific practice in the context of the Bay Area Figurative School. A product of the San Francisco region, Kuri earned her Masters in Painting at the University of California, Berkeley under Elmer Biscoff and Joan Brown, both of whom contributed crucially to the practice of stylized figuration associated with the Bay Area.