John Frederick Turner, a Berkeley resident whose four-decade media and museum career spotlighted outsider and folk art, died July 3 in hospice care in Oakland. He was 78.
Turner’s death removes a visible local presence from the Bay Area arts community. For residents who watched his documentaries or visited exhibits he curated, the change will be in the absence of a curator and storyteller who connected television audiences and museumgoers to self-taught artists.
Regional career and cultural impact
Born July 25, 1947, in Kansas City, Missouri, Turner grew up in Okemos, Michigan, and spent part of his youth overseas in Vietnam and Taiwan. After earning his degree from Michigan State University, he moved to the Bay Area and began a long tenure at KGO Channel 7 as a news editor and arts producer, a position he held for 32 years.
While at KGO he produced documentaries and interviewed numerous artists and musicians. One of his productions earned an Emmy in 1996, a recognition that reflected his role in presenting arts coverage to a broad television audience.
Collections, curation and film
Turner was also a collector of 20th-century work by self-taught artists. His collection was exhibited widely; packaging and artifacts from it appeared in more than 60 venues, including the Smithsonian, the American Visionary Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
As a curator at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, Turner went on to organize exhibits for the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. One noted milestone was a show devoted to the work of Howard Finster.
"One of the highlights of John’s career was the show he curated of Howard Finster’s work."
In addition to curatorial work, Turner wrote several books and co-directed the documentary Korla in 2015, a film later shown on PBS. In his later years he continued to produce visual art—sculptures, drawings, collages—and to write about the artists he admired.
- Media career: 32 years at KGO Channel 7, Emmy-winning producer (1996).
- Museum roles: Curator at Museum of Craft and Folk Art; exhibits at major national and international institutions.
- Art and scholarship: Author of books on Howard Finster and other self-taught artists; co-producer/director of a PBS-featured documentary.
Turner is survived by his brother, Richard Turner; his sister, Georgia Portocarrero (Cesar); and four nieces, Elisabeth Portocarrero, Jennifer Brasile, Adrienne Zreik and Andrea Eisele. His family noted he kept producing art daily in retirement.
| Year | Notable activity |
|---|---|
| 1970s–2000s | Producer and arts editor at KGO Channel 7 |
| 1996 | Emmy for documentary work |
| 2015 | Co-directed Korla, shown on PBS |
Berkeley and the wider Bay Area lose a persistent advocate for outsider and popular art whose work helped bring nontraditional artists into museum and broadcast spaces. Local cultural organizations that benefited from his curation and scholarship will continue to display the kinds of objects he championed.
