Carol Joyce (Kushner) Sideman (1925 – 2020)

Untitled (Likely Carmel – Point Lobos), c. 1950, mixed media on silk, signed lower right, 16 x 20 inches (image)

$1750

Carol Kushner Sideman was a California painter. Born in Oakland to Russian Jewish immigrants, Sideman studied art at the University of California Berkeley, graduating with a BFA degree in 1947. While there, she likely painted under, or at least became familiar with, Chiura Obata who had returned to his long-tenured professorship in October 1945. At Berkeley, Sideman was a member of the Delta Epsilon Art Honor Society and exhibited her early paintings at the University of California Art Gallery. She also pursued graduate studies at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

After teaching art in the Oakland public schools for three years, Sideman worked as an architectural illustrator before pursuing a career in the fine arts for more than fifty years. Newspaper references first note her public exhibitions during the early 1950s. By that time, she had already shown at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. A 1953 article noted that her work consisted in part of “decorative Chinese modern paintings,” likely a reference to works like the present image, which owe a debt to Asian silk painting and in this case, likely to Obata.

During her long career, Sideman had over a dozen solo commercial exhibitions, including at San Francisco’s prestigious Lucien Labaudt Gallery in 1956, Oakland’s Mezzanine Gallery, and Berkeley’s Brickwall Gallery. She consistently participated in group exhibitions across California with many leading artists, including at the Oakland Art Museum, the California State Fair, Civic Arts Center (Richmond, CA), Walnut Creek Arts Center, Jack London Square Annuals (Oakland), Western Museums Traveling Show, Oakland Jewish Community Center, Mendocino Art Association, and Merced Art Alliance. She was a member of the San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco Women Artists, Oakland Art Association, Artists Cooperative (San Francisco), and Arts and Crafts Cooperative (Oakland). She won over a dozen awards for oils and watercolors from the Berkeley Festival Annual, Jack London Square Annual, Marin Society of Artists Annual, Alameda County Fair, Jade Fon Workshop, Delta Art Association Annual, and the Pacific International. In 1967, the US Government purchased one of her paintings for display in the Federal Tax Court in Washington, DC and the New York Graphics published prints of her paintings during the 1970s.

Her work was covered extensively by the San Francisco and Oakland newspapers during the 1950s through the 1970s, with many of her paintings reproduced in connection with solo and group exhibitions. Oakland Tribune art editor, Miriam Dungan Cross, approvingly described Sideman’s work from the mid-1950s as follows: “Underlying her lyric approach to marine scenes is sound construction. Sharp delineation of structural elements is combined with wet washes of lush green trees and skies in clear and stormy weather.” San Francisco Chronicle art critic, Alfred Frankenstein, also admired Sideman’s work from this period. He noted, “Miss Sideman[‘s] . . . watercolors are remarkably well disciplined in color and in every other respect. She . . . is much concerned with the local scene, carefully calculated and rendered, but her planning is seldom laborious in its result; on the contrary, her pictures are unusually vivacious and almost uniformly sound.” In connection with her two-person exhibition sponsored by the Oakland Art Association at the St. Mary’s College Art Gallery, in 1971, the Oakland Tribune’s Cross again favorably reviewed Sideman’s work: “Her paintings are luminous with translucent color, not always related to the forms, and are animated with a spontaneous, calligraphic line . . . Color is light and light is color when it’s not pure white. Fauve colors create reflected sunlight with violet or deep shadows with green-black.”

Sideman is listed in the 32nd Edition of Who’s Who in American Art (2011).