Brett Reichman

Brett Reichman is a painter and Associate Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute where he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he has lived and worked in San Francisco back 1984.

His performance came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into to come exhibitions that standard those formative issues. These exhibitions included Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles, Beyond Loss at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. However, after legislation passed in 1989 that restricted federal funding for art dealing in imitation of homosexuality and AIDS, artists taking into consideration Reichman approached their themes subtly. His And the Spell Was Broken Somewhere Over the Rainbow is embellished following colors of the rainbow and presents three clocks. It references Oz while actually indirectly addressing the new authenticity that San Francisco could no longer be viewed as a house of enchantment due to the AIDS crisis.