Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Ann Weber's Happiest Days of Our Lives #1-6 by SFMOMA for their exhibition Art of California: Greater than the Sum.

Ann Weber with her installation at SFMOMA

About Art of California: Greater than the Sum

Many of the artworks in this exhibition feature common objects: cardboard boxes scavenged from sidewalks, encyclopedias purchased online, and beloved keepsakes inherited from grandparents. Such humble, unexpected origins belie the alchemies that occur in the process of making — and result in artworks inestimably greater than the sum of their parts. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the works in this exhibition bring to the foreground the physicality of the things around us. Along the way, they reveal what is intangible but no less powerful, from private symbols and family lore to forgotten flash points calling for public remembrance.

About Ann Weber 

Ann Weber was born in 1950 in Jackson, Michigan, and earned her BA in art history from Purdue University in 1972. After living in New York, Weber moved to California to pursue her MFA at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she studied with Viola Frey. 

In the Happiest Day of Our Lives series, she focuses on large-scale, multiple-component works in her signature medium of found cardboard. Weber has been experimenting with this unusual material since 1991, creating complex, monumental shapes that often refer to the figure in a way that she describes as neither entirely representational nor abstract, but something in between—allowing viewers to bring their own associations to the work. Originally trained in ceramics (she studied with Viola Frey at California College of the Arts), she turned to cardboard out of a desire to be able to make pieces that were monumental, yet lightweight and maneuverable.