Rose D'Amato and Jeffrey Sincich: Everybody Knows This Is Someplace

Gallery 16 is pleased to announce two concurrent solo exhibitions with artists Rose D’Amato and Jeffrey Sincich. Both artists have backgrounds in sign painting and share a deep admiration for the often-overlooked handmade characteristics of storefronts and street signs. In their studio practices, D’Amato and Sincich are both drawn to the preservation and veneration of the traditions of handmade vernacular signage. These traditions and use of text are evident in the mentality of California artists like Ed Ruscha. Here in the Bay Area, it was famously linked to artists including Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee, who Gallery 16 worked with in the 1990s. For D’Amato and Sincich, their work is a practice of social observation, craftsmanship, and storytelling. 

Rose D’Amato, a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Art Award recipient, is a second-generation sign painter. Her paintings incorporate elements of airbrush, abstraction, pinstriping, and hand lettering in an intoxicating blend. D’Amato writes, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how the traditions of sign painting and pinstriping could be viewed as inherited languages. I am making an effort to localize the references I use in a way that allows me to honor the present. Painting this personal archive of signs feels like an act of devotion, and although ‘sign-painting’ is often referred to as a dying or dead profession, its representation within my community of friends is very alive.” The intersection of past and present is on view in D’Amato’s Schrumpf Flowers, an elegy to an extraordinary neon sign from a long-gone florist that graced Valencia Street for many decades.

Jeffrey Sincich’s work is made from sewn fabric and integrates traditions of quilting, sign painting, and advertising in his irresistible work. “I have explored how signage interacts with the built environment. I am drawn into the glow of a neon sign coming from under an awning and the shadows that decorative window bars cast onto the sidewalk. I love seeing the layers of paint applied to a fading, painted sign, expertly or not. I am enamored with how words that are used to get a message across in a quick, straightforward way often sound like mini poems: ‘Milk Beer,’ ‘Sales & Service,’ ‘We sell bag/cup of ice.’ I use quilted fabric to translate these messages and images in an effort to memorialize them. I aim to give them a sense of personal history, like a quilt that has been passed down. I find and use discarded materials from around the city to explore their function and to give my work a sense of place.”