Slobodan Dan Paich

Slobodan Dan Paich
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Born	(1945-11-28)November 28, 1945 Belgrade
Died	(2022-11-22)November 22, 2022 Istanbul
Occupation	Artist Curator Theater Director Historian Scholar Lecturer Architect Teacher

Slobodan Dan Paich (28 Nov 1945, Belgrade - 22 Nov 2022 Istanbul)

Paich was a multidisciplinary artist, curator, theater director, historian of art and ideas, comparative cultural studies scholar, lecturer, architect, and teacher. Over his lifetime, he won numerous international awards for his public art and architecture projects. He founded and co-founded several alternative educational and multidisciplinary visual arts and performance initiatives in Belgrade, London, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Istanbul.

Early Life

The only child of a Viennese mother and a Serbian father, both of whom worked as translators, Paich led a dramatic and unconventional life. As a child in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Paich performed in radio, television, and film productions, which included a leading role in the film Prozvan Je i V3. At age sixteen, while attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade, Paich began to organize independent, avant-garde community theater groups. After he was warned that his collaborations with artists and intellectuals who were working to start an alternative political party might lead to his incarceration, in 1967, at the age of nineteen, Paich escaped Yugoslavia and immigrated to Great Britain.

After working as an icon painter in London, Paich met Joan Littlewood, who invited him to work with her on avant-garde projects around London and Liverpool. After winning the first place award at the 1973 GREP (Groupe de recherche et d'education pour la promotion) International Architectural Competition in Paris, Paich was invited to chair and direct the Fano Foundation Educational Village and International Summer School in Apulia, southern Italy. At the Fano Educational Village’s summer school, Paich and five other instructors from England taught traditional arts and community living practices that continued consecutive summers between 1975 to 1980. In 1980, Paich was admitted to the Royal College of Art, where he graduated with an MFA degree in 1983. During his time at the Royal College, he represented England at the Venice Biennale. Paich lived and worked in London until 1985, where he taught various studio art courses, Architecture, and the History of Art and Ideas at several post-secondary schools in London and also lectured at the Glasgow School of Art.

Slobodan Dan Paich immigrated to the United States in 1985, where he taught as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkley, for the next seven years. In the San Francisco Bay Area, he began working with local community members to build collaborative public art projects such as the Urban Intervention in Oakland (1985), the Arbor of Delight Project in Marin County (1986), and the Vertical Sculptures/Poles Project in Oakland (1986–1991). In 1988, he co-founded the Augustino Dance Theater with dancer, choreographer, and designer Augusto Jose Ferriols and musician Kerry Yates. On weekends, Paich taught the subject of architecture to children at the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) in Jack London Square, Oakland. In his role as Arts Commissioner for the City of Oakland between 1991–2004, Paich conceived of and co-curated the Windows Project, which exhibited over five thousand works of original art in the windows of vacant storefronts and other buildings in downtown Oakland, beginning at Jack London Square, which was instrumental in revitalizing Oakland’s urban core.

Artship

By 1993, the success of the Windows Project prompted Paich and the Augustino Dance Theater members to meet at the Waterfront Plaza Hotel in Jack London Square to collaborate and discuss the concept of using Jack London Square as a cultural hub for further art and performance projects, and the idea of an international floating art museum and performance space was conceived. The theater company changed its name to the Artship Foundation and reorganized around the idea of centering community arts initiatives in a decommissioned WWII Merchant Marine ship that would be docked at the Grove Street Pier at 1 Market Street in Downtown Oakland, a short walk from Jack London Square. After years of planning, in 1998, the US Congress and President Bill Clinton authorized the transfer of a former California Maritime Academy training ship, The Golden Bear, to the Artship Foundation. For five years, the renamed Artship was docked at Oakland’s 9^th Avenue Terminal, where it became the center for Artship Ensemble performances, hosted local art exhibitions, and was a hub for the International Peace University, of which Paich became co-director of Arts and Culture in 1995. The ship itself needed significant and costly repairs before it could be seaworthy, however, before the foundation could raise the millions of dollars needed for repairs, the City of Oakland sued the foundation, and in 2004, the ship was forcibly returned to the US Maritime Administration.

After the Artship Foundation lost the ship, Paich relocated to a small studio apartment on Perry Street in San Francisco while continuing to nurture the work of the Artship Ensemble and giving public performances. Between 2001 to 2021, Paich directed twenty-nine original narrative performances. The Ensemble performed at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, intimate urban theater spaces, in public parks, and community centers. Although several performances featured single narratives, most consisted of multiple short pieces, usually presented by different ensemble members, any of whom might combine traditional oral storytelling with dance, music, unconventional or repurposed costumes and props, and/or original visual artworks.

In the autumn of 2012, Paich was accepted to an artist residency hosted by the halka art project, a non-profit arts center in Istanbul. His rich collaborations and connections with the artists and community in Istanbul prompted Paich to return with greater frequency to Turkey, where he curated art exhibitions and organized and nurtured performances and research initiatives with the Istanbul community. Beginning in 2014, Paich annually invited and supported artists and performers from Turkey to exhibit and perform in the San Francisco Bay Area with the Artship Ensemble members in California, and he did the same for international artists to come to Istanbul to participate in performances and exhibitions with his Istanbul ensemble. Beginning in 2020, collaborate in virtual international performances via videoconferencing. The same year, Paich relocated to Istanbul, where he spent much of the year living and working.

Visual Art Practice

In Belgrade and London, Slobodan Dan Paich completed several personal, introspective, almost surreal paintings in egg tempera or oil on panel, but after his move to San Francisco, while directing, researching, and writing conference papers, Paich made a daily contemplative practice of drawing with tea and ink at the Samovar Tea House in the Yerba Buena Gardens and, several years later, at the Amber India Restaurant nearby, where he held a daily Stammtisch. After completing a drawing, he would usually scan it and email the image, with a title, to a friend or associate. While he might send the same image to several people, he never emailed them together, and sometimes he would change the title of the piece for the individual he sent it to. He continued this daily art-making practice until shortly before he died from cancer in November 2022, in Istanbul. At the time of his death, he had completed thousands of daily drawings, sometimes using diverse found media. Selections of his daily drawings were published in small volumes, beginning with Tea & Ink (2013).

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