Roberta Weir and Jerry Garcia exhibit to open at Vallejo Art Walk

VALLEJO — The City Arts Gallery will present a special exhibition featuring the work of Roberta Weir, a Vallejo-based artist whose work reflects a lifetime immersed in creativity and visual storytelling.

Weir was an art mentor to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. This exhibition includes a selection of Garcia’s limited edition prints that reveal a lesser-known dimension of his creative life, displayed alongside Weir’s oil paintings that span four decades of her work.

The exhibition will open during Vallejo Art Walk on Friday, Feb. 13 from 5 to 9 p.m. at City Arts Gallery, 420 Virginia St., Vallejo. Weir said she plans to attend the opening, her frail health permitting. City Arts Gallery is also open Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m to 2 p.m. 

The show is organized by Carmen Slack of the Solano County Arts Council, fiscal sponsor of Vallejo 2^nd Friday Art Walk. Slack said the Weir exhibit will run through March. 

“We are honored to feature Roberta Weir at City Arts Gallery,” Slack said. “Her connection to an important chapter of American music history, combined with her own unique artistic vision, makes this exhibit truly special for our community. It is such an important show we want to give people a chance to appreciate it.”

Weir (who is not related to Grateful Dead member Bob Weir) opened the Weir Gallery in Berkeley in 1987. She and Garcia became friends when he visited the gallery to see her work. 

Weir said that Garcia was pretty much a self-taught artist who used simple materials when they first met. She taught him how to make etchings and other artistic techniques. She and Garcia hired a model and practiced figure drawing. The gallery hosted several of Garcia’s solo shows as he became more involved in his art  

“Jerry was a brilliant, insightful man, and incredibly well read,” Weir said. “That was a wonderful connection. It was a great experience for me, and I think for him too. We were mutual admirers.” 

Weir closed the gallery after Garcia’s death in 1995. 

Weir said she has worked in many media, and began oil painting at age 12. She studied art at Mills College and designed a poster for a successful protest against the school’s 1990 decision to convert the women’s school to co-ed. She was later commissioned by the class of 1900-91 for a 7’ tall large bronze sculpture installed at the school titled “Power of Woman.”

One of the large, 4’ x 6’ paintings in the show titled “Deadheads” depicts a couple surrounded by skeletons. It is a tribute to friends of Weir’s who were killed in an automobile accident on the way home from a show in Los Angeles. “Terry's brother brought me some ashes of his and asked me to put them in the painting, so they're in there. I mixed him in with the black paint,” Weir said.

Weir said that a couple of the other paintings in the show also deal with the imagery of death, which has obsessed her for many years as an artist. Other works’ themes include sex, love and beauty. “These things, what mattered to me, what I wanted to explore, investigate, whatever. Well, you'll see the paintings,” Weir said.