Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis

Conversation with Gabrielle Selz and John Seed

The abstract artist Sam Francis was the original owner and resident of the Mesa Refuge buildings, and he left a deep and creative imprint on the site. Light on Fire is the first comprehensive biography of Francis’ life and work (1923-1994) by award-winning author Gabrielle Selz. With this book, Selz has affirmed Francis’ cultural permanence as one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century, accompanying the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning.

Gabrielle Selz is the award-winning author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction (2014) and Light on Fire: The Art and Live of Sam Francis (2021). Her essays and art reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, and The Huffington Post among others. She makes her home in Oakland, CA. gabrielleselz.com/

John Seed is a professor emeritus of Art and Art History at Mt. San Jacinto College who has written about art and artists for Arts of Asia, The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, The HuffingtonPost and Hyperallergic. He has served on the board of the Sam Francis Foundation since 2013 and is the author of Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World. www.johnseed.com/

Co-presented with Point Reyes Books.

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