“Trip Wire” Review
June 2019
by DeWitt Cheng
Inez Storer’s new exhibition, “Trip-Wire,” features thirty mixed-media paintings that allude to our crisis-riddled times while still succeeding as satisfying aesthetic objects that portray dream-like, non-narrative states of consciousness. A trip-wire is, of course, the trigger to set off a bomb or trap. Storer uses the term in a slightly different sense: as an obstacle that makes us stumble (trip), but not to the point of falling: ”That is HOPE and SURVIVAL!” We should be so lucky in real life.
Arts & Ends: Sonoma State Celebrates University Art Gallery at 40
October 29, 2018
By Jesse Hamlin
One of Ronald Reagan’s last acts as governor of California was to sign the 1974 bill giving Sonoma State University $2.3 million to build the graceful redwood-and-glass Art Building on the bucolic Rohnert Park campus.
Before the conifer-shaded complex and its spacious University Art Gallery opened in ’78, faculty artists put up shows in the lobby of Darwin Hall. It was less than optimal but provided a place in the North Bay to see work by notable local and international artists like Wally Hedrick, Nathan Oliveira and Christo, whose 1976 “Running Fence” wove across the brown Sonoma hills into the Pacific Ocean.
The show documenting that celebrated piece was co-curated by painter-printmaker Inez Storer, who taught at Sonoma State and organized the gallery’s inaugural show, “Northern California Artists.”
San Francisco Chronicle Arts Section
December 3, 2017
Eastside View
November 1, 2015
by Charles Shere
A corner of the bleak Gatchina Palace, outside St. Petersburg, as painted earlier this year by the California artist Inez Storer. And this is just a corner of the painting, too — or, rather, a detail taken from nearly the center of the painting, the entirety of which I’ll set at the end of this post.
Before going further I should mention that I’ve known Inez for more than forty years, and that over that period she and her husband Andrew Romanoff have become friends. We don’t see them often: They live in their corner of the area, we in ours; we’re all busy; we all travel… but they’re good friends, the sort with whom there can be silences, even quite long ones, and then the conversation resumes.
True Stories: Inez Storer’s Art Often Reflects the Real-Life Dramas of her Family History
by Paul Libaratore
“Some wonderful mysteries. Startling disclosures. Strange secrets. The phrases are written in childlike script across a recent work by California artist Inez Storer. To the casual observer, they may seem like promotional pitches from the dust jacket of the latest page-turner. Spend time with Storer, though, and it’s soon evident that the phrases directly relate to her life and art, which are influenced by everything from World War II to Hollywood’s early film days to the Russian Revolution. At 73, Storer, more than many artists, has an intimate knowledge of the way history turns the world as well as individual lives upside down…”
Painting in the Subjunctive Mode: Inez Storer and the Art of Possibilities by Andrea Pappas; Theatrical Realism: The Art of Inez Storer
“Inez Storer delivers heavy messages with a light hand. Clothing the profound in blithe garments, she contributes to a tradition shared with many other artists on the West Coast. Consonant with that California tradition, her artistic enterprise both joins with the mainstream of contemporary American art centered in New York and emphatically departs from it…”
Allow Nothing to Worry You; recent publication of a survey Storer’s work including images from the mid-fifties to the present and also essays from various art critics and publications. Designed and produced by Griff Williams, Gallery 16, San Francisco. Essay by Bill Berkson.