Aug 282012
 

Washington and Kearny
Chinatown

Diligence is the path

Up the mountain of knowledge

Hard work is the boat

Across the endless sea of learning

This is the Washington street side of the new Chinatown campus of San Francisco City College.  This particular window is the library.  The archival photograph is by San Franciscan Arnold Genthe.  This young immigrant girl in traditional Chinese dress gazing out at the city is the cover photograph for the book Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown.

She is framed by a couplet, in English and in Chinese calligraphy, metaphorically extolling the cultural virtues diligence and hard work as the “path up the mountain of knowledge and the boat across the endless sea of learning.” For years this poem has been displayed on the student bulletin board at the Filbert campus, but no one is quite sure of its origin.

Genthe’s autobiography, As I Remember (1936), is the chief source of information about his life. In it, Genthe recounts a cosmopolitan upbringing in Berlin, Frankfurt, Korbach, and Hamburg. His father, Hermann Genthe, was a professor of Latin and Greek and, later in life, founded and served as director of a gymnasium or preparatory school.

Under his father’s tutelage, young Arnold grew up well versed in topics from poetry to classical literature

In 1895 he accepted an offer to tutor the young son of Baron F. Heinrich von Schroeder when the family moved to San Francisco. Thus began a new life for Genthe in America.

Genthe’s first photographs were made while in the employ of the von Schroeders to illustrate his letters home.

Genthe became involved in photography at a crucial juncture in the history of the medium. The introduction of the hand-held camera and easier methods for development and printing encouraged many people to try photography.

Genthe opened his first portrait photography studio in San Francisco in 1898 and became very active in the city’s cultural and social milieu. At the socially prominent Bohemian Club, he mingled with artists, writers, theater people, community and business leaders, and entertained famous out-of-town visitors. Through contacts at the illustrated weekly The Wave, he met Frank Norris, Jack London, and Mary Austen.

Even as the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed Genthe’s studio, equipment, books, and art collection, he used a borrowed camera to document the events as they unfolded. Genthe and Ashton Stevens, drama critic for the San Francisco Examiner, toured the ruins with visiting celebrity Sarah Bernhardt.

Intrigued by San Francisco’s Chinatown, he shot a series of photographs documenting life there before the destruction of the city in 1906. About 200 photographs in the series survive.

William Wareham at SF City College

 Posted by on June 14, 2011
Jun 142011
 

San Francisco City College
Ocean Avenue Campus

 This piece at City College San Francisco, Ocean campus, is titled “Wyoming Coup” by William Wareham.  It was installed in 1972 on the West Lawn of the Science Building.
William Wareham graduated with an  MA and MFA from UC Berkeley in 1971, he did his undergraduate at the Philadelphia College of Art. He has always had a strong metal theme in his work.
Since his stint as the first Artist in Residence at the Norcal Solid Waste Systems facility in 1990, where he set up the studio and wrote the safety manual, Wareham has been using recycled steel as the primary source for his sculpture, but he goes far beyond what most artists do with recycled materials these days. It is the “pre-used history that the material inherently holds”, he says, that inspires him. “These worn-out metal things will continue to have a life by gathering, refocusing and rejoining into a collective other life”.   He is extremely prolific, that can be seen at the website of a gallery that reps his work.

San Francisco City College Mosaics

 Posted by on June 13, 2011
Jun 132011
 

Two polished marble mosaics stand at either end of the Science Hall on the City College of San Francisco Campus.  These mosaics are by the Swiss-born artist Herman Volz and represent fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics in tiny tiles.

Completed on site, the mosaics took two years to install with a staff of eight workmen. Each tile is of varying thickness, resulting in shadows that emphasize their shape. Each marble tile was carefully polished, cemented onto the façade of the building, and then polished again. Begun during “Art in Action” at the Golden Gate International Exhibition (1939-1940), they were restored in 2005.  They are absolutely huge, and it is very difficult to get a good enough photograph to convey the message.  This is taken from several yards away, just to give you a sense of the massiveness of the project.

Volz was educated in Europe and came to the US in 1933, where he became well-known as a painter, lithographer, and mosaic/ceramic artist for the WPA. He exhibited at San Francisco’s Museum of the Legion of Honor from 1937-1941 and won the San Francisco Art Association prize in 1937.

The color palette of the mosaic is also difficult to photograph, I have broken out some of the more easy to photograph pieces for you here.

The quote in this detail photo reads “Give me a base and I move the world.”

Olmec Heads in San Francisco

 Posted by on June 12, 2011
Jun 122011
 

San Francisco City College
Ocean Avenue Campus
Frida Kahlo Garden

 

The giant Olmec head, “El Rey,” San Lorenzo #1 was carved by Ignacio Perez Solano, also know as “il Maestro.” The head is an accurate reproduction of the original piece from San Lorenzo in Veracruz, Mexico. The 3,000 year old original basalt head is believed to be a portrait of a ruler from this ancient civilization. The stone originated some 50 miles from where the statue was discovered.

The piece was given to City College of San Francisco in 2004 by then Vera Cruz Governor Miguel Alemán Velazco  in honor of the new Pan American Center at City College. It is now the centerpiece of the proposed Frida Kahlo Garden next to the Diego Rivera Theater. Placing Olmec replicas in major cities had been a personal endeavor of Governor Aleman. These heads, of enormous size, demonstrate the power, scale and majesty of the Olmec culture, which was centered in the State of Veracruz.  At the presentation the governor closed his remarks with wry humor. He mentioned that in November his term of office was up and therefore the presentation had to be in October. Then he said, you may “lose your heart in San Francisco, but never the head.”

The Art of Concrete at CCSF

 Posted by on June 10, 2011
Jun 102011
 
San Francisco City College
Ocean Avenue Campus

This is called “Sculptural deck and Bicentennial Wings” by Jacques Overhoff.  It was done in 1979.  It is typical of Overhoff work, cast concrete with ceramic tile.  Jacques Overhoff was born in 1933 in the Netherlands and studied at the Graphics School of Design and the University of Oregon.  He moved to San Francisco in the 1950’s.

His civic sculptures range in style from symbolic figures to structural abstractions, as well as, in this case, entire sculptural plazas.  This particular piece has suffered from abuse by skate boarders and taggers and was restored in 2008 by Karen Fix.  Apparently, Overhoff visited from Germany and was happy with the work she did.

I have shot this looking through the wings, over the plaza and into the city.  The next shot is of the “sculptural deck” looking back onto the “wings”

 

Looking up into the “wings”

This sculpture is outside of Batmale Hall at San Francisco City College, just off of Ocean Avenue.

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