Robert Brokl

His art belongs to public collections including the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts (FAMSF), the Library of Congress, Oakland Museum and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others. In addition to making art, Brokl has taught, curated shows, and been an activist in the Bay Area for several decades, focusing especially on gay rights and historic preservation in Oakland. He lives and works in North Oakland with his spouse, Alfred Crofts.

• Name — Robert Brokl • Born — 1948 • Birthplace — Marshfield, Wisconsin, U.S. • Known for — Printmaking, painting, drawing, activism • Education — University of California, Berkeley • Spouse — Alfred P. Crofts • Website — Robert Brokl • Awards — Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Kala Institute

Robert Brokl was born in 1948 in Marshfield, Wisconsin to Sylvester Brokl, a farmer and construction worker, and Ruth (Ware) Brokl, a factory worker and nurse's aide. His parents married at the beginning of World War II; after enlisting, his father saw action in the Pacific Theater for which he was decorated. Although interested in art since his youth, Brokl enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 as an English major; his studies were interrupted by his expulsion for antiwar movement activities. He moved to California in the early 1970s, where he met his future husband, Alfred Crofts, at a gay liberation meeting. In 1974, Brokl returned to art, taking classes at Laney College in Oakland and exhibiting by 1976. He then studied art at University of California, Berkeley (BFA, 1979; MA, 1980; MFA, 1982), where he was influenced by the Bay Area Figurative Movement and faculty artists Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Karl Kasten, Sylvia Lark and Mary Lovelace O'Neal. From 1981–3, Brokl served as vice-president and president of the California Society of Printmakers (CSP) and helped organize exhibitions and catalogues, including "Contemporary California Prints" (1982) and "Cutting Edge" (1987), during a time of resurgent interest in printmaking. Brokl built a reputation in the 1980s for figurative and narrative printmaking and painting through group exhibitions at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Ruggiero Henis Gallery (New York), San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, FAMSF and The Haggin Museum, and international shows in Tokyo and Thailand and throughout Europe. His first show in 1983 at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery run by Marian Parmenter began a longstanding exhibition history there that continued until the gallery's closing in 2021. In later decades, Brokl has appeared in group shows at the National Printmaking Symposium (Drake University), Kala Institute, Triton Museum of Art and Kyoto City Museum, and featured exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, Fresno Art Museum, de Young Museum, and Thoreau Center for Sustainability.

The representational style of Brokl's early work in the 1970s reflected his interest in recording and expressing his experience as a gay man, as well as the influence of California, and often depicted naturally lit people at leisure and on the beach. Prior to earning his MFA degree, he frequently drew critical attention for paintings and works on paper in juried annuals and group exhibitions, including notices from Bay Area critics Victoria Dalkey, Cathy Curtis and Thomas Albright and The Advocate for the rawness and "blunt strength" of his figurative work and leisurely, off-guard nudes (e.g., Self-Portrait with Pink Sky and Al and Ludwig – Russian River, both 1980). • Illustration — Robert Brokl, India XIII, woodblock, pastel, stencil and collage, 50” x 38", 1996.

Brokl has been an activist for five decades, beginning with antiwar and civil rights activities in the 1960s and continuing through work on gay rights, historical preservation and sustainable development, and community support. In the 1970s, he and Crofts worked as members of the Committee for a Berkeley Human Rights Law for Gay People for passage of Berkeley's gay rights ordinance (approved, 1978); its introduction spurred passage of similar legislation in San Francisco that year through efforts led by Harvey Milk and was considered the strongest such measure in the U.S. at the time. Brokl has also participated in grassroots preservationist efforts. He and Crofts were core founding members of North Oakland Voters Alliance (NOVA), which published a newsletter and held monthly meetings in the 1980s and 1990s. NOVA battled publicly with the city of Oakland over attempts to demolish North Oakland's Old Merritt College (originally University High School and a key site in the origins of the Black Panther Party) The group successfully placed the building on the National Register of Historic Places, over the City's objections, and sued the City in federal court for "demolition by neglect" in 1992. The nine-acre Merritt site was eventually rehabilitated for use as UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, the North Oakland Senior Center, and a public park and housing; NOVA also successfully placed four Carnegie Libraries in the city on the National Register, bolstering successful bond measures for their refurbishment. In 1996, Brokl joined the board of the Oakland Heritage Alliance, initiating annual "endangered lists" of threatened Oakland landmarks. Among the landmarks rescued were the Art Deco Fox Oakland Theater, which reopened in 2009 after a $75 million restoration; the Floral Depot building; a Sears Roebuck building converted into lofts; and the Cox Cadillac Building, converted into a Whole Foods. He also joined efforts by The League for the Protection of Oakland’s Architectural and Historic Resources to save a 1923 Montgomery Ward & Company distribution center in the Fruitvale District, despite its listing on the National Register of Historic Places; the building was demolished in 2001. Related to his activism, Brokl has been a longtime contributor to the Berkeley Daily Planet and Oakland Heritage Alliance News; his articles are available in the archives of both and at Muck Rack.com.

Brokl's arts writing has appeared in northern California publications including Square Cylinder and the Bay Area Reporter. His art reviews for the latter publication were honored by the California News Publishers Association. He has advocated through essays, lectures and curatorial efforts for the recognition of several under-appreciated artists and movements, including David Park and the Bay Area Figurative Movement, printer and painter Augusta Rathbone (1897–1990), and the figurative painter Richard Caldwell Brewer (1923–2014), who focused on male nudes. As executors of Brewer's estate, Brokl and Crofts have donated his materials and many of his works to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles, respectively. Brokl has also taught art at University of California, Davis and San Francisco State University.

Brokl's art belongs to the public collections of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts (FAMSF), Bates College Museum of Art, GLBT Historical Society, Library of Congress, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and Stockton Art Commission, among others, as well as to numerous private and corporate collections. He has been recognized with an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2006), a Kala Institute Fellowship (1992), prizes from the Berkeley Art Center, Stockton Art League and Bradley National Print and Drawing Exhibition (Illinois), and an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum (2006), among other awards.