Ariel Parkinson: Politics & Theatre

House of Seiko is pleased to present Politics & Theatre, the gallery’s second exhibition exploring the life and work of Ariel Parkinson (1926–2017). Examining two interconnected forces that shaped her practice, her political engagement and her decades-long involvement in American theatre, the exhibition traces how these seemingly distinct worlds repeatedly converged in Parkinson’s creative life.

Ariel Parkinson was a Berkeley-based artist whose career spanned more than five decades across painting, drawing, and scenography. She was one of the few women visual artists associated with the circle of poets and writers known as the Berkeley Bunch. She worked alongside figures including Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Kenneth Rexroth, Jess, and Anaïs Nin. Parkinson studied painting under Hassel Smith at the California School of Fine Arts and exhibited at institutions including the Oakland Museum of California, SFMOMA, and the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, Parkinson lived and worked against a backdrop of profound political and social turbulence. Her engagement with politics existed alongside her work as a scenographer for theatrical productions across the country. Neither operated separately from her life as an artist. Instead, politics, theatre, and a rather private studio practice became overlapping platforms through which Parkinson confronted the events, anxieties, and contradictions of her time.

Theatre offered Parkinson a particularly fertile language for doing so. The heightened realities of the stage often seemed to mirror the political world unfolding beyond it. Likewise, the vicissitudes of contemporary life supplied their own cast of characters and dramatic structures. Fiction could emulate reality, while reality increasingly assumed the qualities of theatre. Within this exchange, Parkinson found a vocabulary capable of addressing subjects that occupied her throughout her life: war, environmental destruction, power, social conflict, spectacle, and the strange comedy of human behavior.

Parkinson’s theatrical life was extensive. As a scenographer, she worked across productions ranging from The Tempest, Ondine, Rilke’s Elegies, and The Enchanted Castle to Madame Butterfly, Otello, Le Cid, and Carmina Burana, drawing inspiration from each work’s distinctive combination of music, drama, movement, and visual spectacle. Her engagement with experimental theatre also placed her within the extraordinary cultural environment developing around Berkeley during the 1960s, where poetry, performance, music, visual art, and political consciousness increasingly intersected. Recalling Daniel Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company and its outdoor performances in the Berkeley hills, Parkinson described a theatre in which the boundaries between performer and audience could effectively disappear. She carried this sense of theatre and its ability to transform quotidian existence through image, ritual, and spectacle into her own visual imagination.

At the same time, Parkinson was deeply engaged with the political and environmental movements developing around her in the Bay Area. She participated in Berkeley’s emerging ecological consciousness through organizations and initiatives, including Ecology Action and the Ecology Center, alongside the region’s early recycling movement and the broader campaign to protect San Francisco Bay. Her political consciousness also unfolded amid the anti–Vietnam War movement centered at UC Berkeley and later in environmental campaigns addressing automobile use, pollution, and California’s Proposition 9 [1972]. For Parkinson, these movements reflected a broader concern with human consequences that entered her art both directly and allegorically.

Politics & Theatre focuses on the places where these boundaries become difficult to distinguish. Parkinson’s theatrical designs reveal concerns that surface elsewhere in her paintings and drawings, while her political imagery frequently adopts the exaggeration, symbolism, staging, and narrative compression of theatre. Seen together, the works suggest an artist continually moving between private observation and public expression, translating the emotional impact of historical events through different creative forms.