Afternoon at CCV

Linda Lieberman

China Camp State Park is located in Marin County, California and surrounds a historic Chinese American shrimp-fishing village and salt marsh. China Camp is situated on the shore of San Pablo Bay and was one of a dozen or more thriving fishing villages in the mid to late 1800s. The village housed the Chinese immigrants who labored for John McNear in his dairy or brick manufacturing plant. In order to provide a better quality of life for their families, the men began fishing for shrimp. The shrimping business was shut down due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and a series of laws that outlawed their bag nets. The final blow to shrimp fishing came in the 1960s with the diversion of the water from the river that flowed into the bay to farms and residents of Southern California.

Linda Lieberman, painter and printmaker, was born in California in 1945 but raised in Chicago, Illinois. By the age of ten years old, she was allowed to take the subway by herself so that she could attend Saturday art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lieberman speaks of becoming friends with various masterpieces that she walked past them on her route to the back of the Art Institute to her classroom.

Lieberman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967 after earning a B.S. in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She traveled extensively, visiting legendary world sites and museums and eventually, in 1987, earned her M.A. from San Francisco State University. Lieberman had a thirty-year career teaching English as a second language at the College of Marin.

Beginning her art career as a painter, Lieberman’s interest turned to printmaking after taking a workshop in 2007. She is equally facile in relief and etching. Her etchings combine various techniques including hard ground, soap ground, and line etching. She prints her matrixes in black and white or, if using color, she employs three plates. Not having her own press, Lieberman has printed at Crown Point Press and extensively at the former City College of San Francisco (CCSF) classes at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

Lieberman is a member of and exhibits with the California Society of Printmakers. Her etching and aquatint China Camp is illustrated on page 190 in California Society of Printmaker: One Hundred Years 1913-2013. She is represented in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.