The collection of UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department faculty Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson. Manny Farber was an American painter and writer, best known for his film criticism. Patricia Patterson is an American painter and writer, whose work was greatly inspired by her time in Inishmore, Aran Islands, Ireland. The collection documents their artwork, teaching and writings, as well as their life and collaboration.
Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson Collection, 1942-2016 (MSS 791)
Extent: 25 Linear feet (44 archives boxes, 1 shoe box of photographs, 17 flat boxes of artwork, 23 map case folders, 5 rolled drawings in tube storage and 5 art bin artworks), + .5 GB of digital files
Digital Content
This collection includes a small number of born-digital files, described in the finding aid.
Biographical Note: Manny Farber
Emanuel "Manny" Farber was born in Douglas, Arizona in 1917. He was educated at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, California School of Fine Arts, and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco.
His journalistic career began in New York City where he wrote on films and art for The New Republic, replacing Otis Ferguson in 1942, until 1946; in 1949 he became Time's film critic. He also wrote about film for The Nation, from 1949-1954; The New Leader, 1957-59; Cavalier, in 1966; and Artforum, from 1967 through 1971, among other publications. A collection of Farber's writings on film, Negative Space, was published in 1971, with a Da Capo Press Expanded Edition, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, edited by Robert Walsh released in 1998, and Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America), edited by Robert Polito was published in 2009.
Farber's film criticism is often described as iconoclastic. He coined the term "underground film" and his essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art", published in Film Culture in 1962, influenced a generation of film critics. In Roger Ebert's "Manny Farber: In Memory," for the Chicago Sun Times, he recalled their first meeting at the Venice Film Festival in 1972, where Ebert called Farber "…the most important film critic in America."
Farber met artist Patricia Patterson, whom he later married, in New York City in 1962. They often collaborated on articles and frequently attended film festivals.
He joined UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department in 1970 where he taught art and film studies and criticism until his retirement in 1987. Concurrent to his art and film criticism and teaching, Farber began painting. When asked about the connection between his paintings and film criticism, Farber is quoted as saying, "The brutal fact is that they're exactly the same thing." In Farber's "Auteur Series" he paints a collection of work as homages to the films and filmmakers he admired – R.W. Fassbinder, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpaw, Jean Renoir, and Wim Wenders among other auteurs.
Farber exhibited his artwork in several galleries, in group exhibitions as well as many solo shows. Some highlights of his one-person exhibitions include: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now MCASD) A retrospective exhibition of 20 years of his work, in 1978; Manny Farber, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1985; About Looking: Manny Farber Paintings 1984-1993 at Brandeis University; the first exhibition of his black and white paintings at the Mandeville Gallery, University of California, San Diego in 1992; and new work at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1994. Several posthumous exhibits include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, MOCA; Distant Light, at the Quint Gallery, in 2018; and Manny Farber Works on Paper, 1968-1980, also at the Quint Gallery, in 2022.
Farber won several awards and fellowships throughout his career, including Guggenheim Fellowships and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships from 1976-1979, the Los Angeles Critics Association award in 1982, the Telluride Film Festival Award for Contribution to Film in 1990, a Pen Center Literary Award in 1995, a National Society of Film Critics, Special Award for the reprinting of an expanded edition of Negative Space in 1999, a special 65th Annual New York Film Critics Circle Award in 2000, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, Mel Novikoff Award in 2002.
He continued painting and drawing the remainder of his life. Farber died at age 91 in 2008. He has a daughter Amanda Farber, also an artist, from his first marriage.
A good chronology and retrospective of his life and work is published in Manny Farber, About Face by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2003, with foreword by Hugh M. Davies, and essays by Jonathan Crary, Stephanie Hanor, Sheldon Nodelman, Robert Polito and Robert Walsh.
Biographical Note: Patricia Patterson
Patricia Patterson was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1941. In 1958, Patterson began a three-year program in studio design at the Parsons School of Design, in New York City. She met Farber in New York and began a writing collaboration with him in 1966. Their writings appeared in Artforum, Film Comment, and San Francisco's City magazine in 1975, during Francis Ford Coppola's reign as publisher.
Prior to joining the faculty in UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department in 1975, Patterson taught art in Catholic grammar schools in the Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan, and at the New School for Social Research, and for six months taught drawing classes for UC San Diego's Extension program.
Patterson first visited the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland in 1960, and returned several times throughout her painting career. Her experience living in the Aran Islands, its people, farm life and scenery greatly influenced her painting.
In addition to teaching, Patterson took part in various public art projects in the 1990s, including installations with InSite, a collaborative contemporary art organization that produced public art in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Her first project was Union Market Island Front for InSite94. Highlighting her love of color, Patterson reimagined, renovated, and oversaw the painting of four city blocks, including The New Children's Museum of San Diego. Patterson also collaborated with graphic designer Leah Roschke on the redesign of the museum's logo. In 1997, Patterson's designed the La Casita project "La Casita en la Colonia Altamira Calle Río de Janeiro No. 6757" for InSite97. Patterson's La Casita project transformed a small home in Tijuana into a vibrant space for the surrounding community.
She retired from teaching at UC San Diego in 1999 to focus on travel and other large installation projects. Patterson's An Enclosed Garden which she designed and planned from the ground up, was chosen for The Color Project in Carlsbad Ranch's Flower Fields in 2000, which became a permanent garden space.
In 2003, the Atheneum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, California celebrated the works of Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson with their first exhibition together called Two for the Road: Sketchbooks of Patricia Patterson & Manny Farber. A keepsake book was produced for the event.
A good chronology of Patterson's work is published in Patricia Patterson: Here and There, Back and Forth, organized by the Center for Performing Arts, in Escondido, California in 2011, which celebrated Patterson's work with an exhibit, and includes a collection of essays by Patterson, Kent Jones, Carol Mavor, Robert Polito, and Sally Yard, as well as two interviews conducted by Robert Walsh in 1989 and 2010.
Two video interviews with Patterson were produced by UCTV. "Robert Polito and Patricia Patterson: Farber on Film" in 2010, and "Patricia Patterson: Aran Canvas" in 2019. Link here: https://www.uctv.tv/speakers/Patricia-Patterson-87926
The collection of UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department faculty members Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson. The materials document Farber and Patterson's professional careers and include biographical information, writings, course lecture notes, notebooks, sketchbooks, preparation for exhibits, photographic material, correspondence with friends and colleagues, and art works such as drawings, sketches, and some oversized sketches and some small paintings.
This content is organized in three groupings: Manny Farber's material, Patricia Patterson's material, and oversized artwork by both artists arranged by size and type.
Farber's collection is arranged in seven series: 1) BIOGRAPHICAL, 2) CALENDARS, NOTEBOOKS AND SKETCHBOOKS, 3) CORRESPONDENCE, 4) FILM SUBJECT FILES, 5) WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT FARBER, 6) EXHIBITS, INSTALLATIONS AND MISCELLANEOUS, and 7) PHOTOGRAPHIC MATERIALS.
Patterson's collection is arranged in six series: 8) BIOGRAPHICAL, 9) CORRESPONDENCE, 10) NOTEBOOKS AND SKETCHBOOKS, 11) EXHIBITS, INSTALLATIONS AND WRITINGS, 12) PHOTOGRAPHIC MATERIAL, and 13) PROJECTS AND SMALL ARTWORKS.
OVERSIZED ARTWORK is arranged in four series by size/housing type and includes: 14) MAP CASES, 15) TUBE STORAGE, 16) ART BINS and 17) FLAT BOXES. This collection makes up the bulk of Farber and Patterson's art material and includes sketches, drawings, exhibition and installation plans, oversized calendars, posters, some archival prints of their work, and a selection of their paintings. The material spans the breadth of their respective artistic careers from early work in 1960s through 2000s, however many drawings, sketches and artworks are undated.