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Signal on Treasure Island

Posted by Cindy on October 23, 2019

Oct 232019

699 Avenue of the Palms
Treasure Island

While much of Treasure Island is under construction you must reach this piece via a detour, the road will end on 9th Street near Avenue B.

In 2015, the historic east span of the Bay Bridge was taken down and its remnants granted to 15 artists around the state. One of these artists was Tom Loughlin a San Francisco based conceptual artist who received 36 tons of steel from the bridge.

The piece, Signal, is meant to function like a giant tuning fork vibrating at 35 hertz, the frequency of a foghorn: “You’re gonna feel it more than hear it,” Loughlin stated.

Signal with the Bay Bridge in the background

According to an SFGate interview with Loughlin: “The tactile addition stems from Loughlin’s interest in understanding the way systems connect — the mind and body, as well as “language, religion, nations, and literal infrastructures like tunnels and roadways.” He’s also interested in how systems fail.

For instance, the new span, which was replaced in 2014, only 25 years after it was damaged in the 1989 earthquake, is already beginning to rust. “Was the bridge we built in 1935 better than the one we just built?” He muses, “It’s an open question.” He’s hoping his sculpture, will prompt people to stop and ask: “What tools are we building and how are they serving us?”

Born in Saint Louis, Laughlin received his MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Signal with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background

A sign near the piece helps explain the way in which the piece vibrates:

The sculpture is composed entirely of bridge-building material and weighs more than 22 tons. The steel is vibrating at its natural resonant frequency, like a tuning fork. This vibration is initiated by electronic equipment inside the sculpture and enhanced by the steel. Elastomeric pads between the steel and the concrete bases allow the ring to vibrate freely, a small departure from their intended use – to isolate bridge columns from roadway movement.

Pathways

Posted by Cindy on October 21, 2019

Oct 212019

Chase Center
500 Terry A Francois Boulevard

Adam Eli Fiebelman is a San Francisco based artist who is known best for his stencil and cut paper-based works. His childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico was spent examining and interacting with the surfaces of the city through making graffiti art. His awareness of the structures we use every day but often overlook has become the subject of his current work: the buildings, doorways, fenced trees, discarded buses and chipped alley walls that fill our cities and map our lives. Through an intricate process of hand-cut stencils and enamel painting, he explores the relationship between our perceptions of the temporary and the eternal, uncovering the stories we have transcribed on an urban landscape filled with utilitarian objects. You can find more about Fiebelman on his website.

The sign attached to this piece reads: Pathways traces the movement and beauty of the basketball as it travels, second by second, from the inbounding to the all-important basket. Twelve classic Warriors plays were mapped and meticulously drawn first onto paper, then hand cut and digitally traced and die-cut cast from aluminum. Each circle represents the path of the basketball as it moves through the play, with spacing in proportion with the speed and trajectory of the ball. The use of color-shifting paint creates movement, and the multiple layers of the metal creates depth.

The players and the games were:

Wilt Chamberlain – 81st Point, NBA Record 100 Point Game – 1962
Rick Barry – Fadeaway Jumper, 38 Point Game – NBA Finals, 1975
Mitch Richmond – Two-Hand Baseline and One Dunk – 1990
Jason Richardson – Winning Windmill Dunk – Dunk Contest 2002
Stephen Curry – 3/4 Court Halftime Buzzer Beater – Playoffs 2015
Nate Thurmond – Rebound, Pass, Skyhook 1971
Eric “Sleepy” Floyd – Switch Hand Lay-in 51 Pont Game – Playoffs 1987
Chris Mullin – 3 Pointer, 41 Point Game Playoffs 1991
Šarūnas Marčiulionis– Rebound Full-Court Push – Eurostep Finish, 1993
Baron Davis – Posterizes Andrei Kirilenko Playoffs – 2007
Klay Thompson 14th 3-pointer, NBA Record for 3-pointers in a game 2018

Benny Bufano’s Grave

Posted by Cindy on October 19, 2019

Oct 192019

Holy Cross Cemetery
Colma, California

Bufano’s gravesite is marked by his own sculpture of St. Francis. The statue overlooks that part of the cemetery that holds the unmarked graves of indigent children, the only part of the cemetery that permitted the type of statuary marking Bufano’s grave.

Bufano was a well known San Francisco artist whose work has been in this site many times.

Beniamino Bufano (October 15, 1890 – August 18, 1970) was an Italian American sculptor, best known for his large-scale monuments representing peace and his modernist work often featured smoothly rounded animals and relatively simple shapes. He worked in ceramics, stone, stainless steel, and mosaic, and sometimes combined two or more of these media and some of his works are cast stone replicas.

The tile work on this Saint Francis was done by Alfonso Pardiñas. Alfonso Pardiñas created a number of mosaics in San Francisco, including several for BART stations. His firm was called Byzantine Mosaics.

Saint Francis – Prince of Peace
To the human congregation of the United Nations
-A message to live by-
Lord
Make me an instrument of thy peace
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy

O Divine master
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be understood as to understand
To be loved, as to love
For it is in giving that we receive
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life

Beniamino Benevento Bufano
October 15, 1890
August 18, 1970

Marina Airfield

Posted by Cindy on October 12, 2019

Oct 122019

Marina District

This plaque marks the site of the MARINA AIR FIELD. The First terminus of the UNITED STATES POST OFFICE DEPT. TRANS-CONTINENTAL AIRMAIL SERVICE The first scheduled mail-plane landed her September 9, 1920. Presented by the Air Mail Pioneers Inc.

This airfield was originally part of the 1915 Pan Pacific International Exhibition (PPIE). During the 266 days the Exposition ran the field was used several times a day.

Lincoln Beachey flying over the PPIE

Aviator, stunt pilot, and native San Franciscan, Lincoln Beachey had been a main attraction of the fair, however, he was tragically killed performing at the fair.

From Disciples of Flight.com:

“On March 1915, a crowd of 50,000 gathered in the fairgrounds to watch Lincoln J. Beachey’s spectacular flying stunts, with another 200,000 spectators packed into the surrounding hills for a free viewing. This event would unveil Lincoln’s latest and most powerful plane yet, the Beachey-Eaton Monoplane, capable of flying at over 100 mph. The event began successfully, with Lincoln guiding the monoplane high over Alcatraz Island and the San Francisco bay, completing a loop the loop or two to get the crowd going.

Amongst the deafening cheers of the onlookers, Lincoln turned the plane onto its back in possible preparation for an inverse loop, just 3,000’ over the water. The plane began to sink in the air, and Lincoln attempted to salvage the situation by turning the plane 180 degrees onto its belly, but the strain of the maneuver cracked the rear spars, and the force of the air against the wing of the monoplane cracked it down the middle with a bone-rattling sound, allowing the wind to rip the wings completely from the body of the plane.

Now, locked in a nose-dive from which he could not escape, Lincoln and his mangled monoplane crashed against the surface of the bay, quickly sinking into the freezing water.

It would take rescuers nearly two hours to find the body of Lincoln, still strapped tightly to his monoplane, which was discovered close to the shore of the bay near Fillmore Hill, bringing him back to where his fatal love of flying began.”

Lincoln Beachey had a fascinating career, which has been documented very thoroughly at DisciplesofFlight.com

After Beachey’s death the organizers of the Exposition weren’t sure if this type of entertainment should continue. Then Art Smith strapped fireworks to the back of his bi-plane and took off at night for the first of a series of spectacular performances defined by his aeronautical prowess in his execution of looping-the-loop, rolling over sideways, and a startling series of spins, drops, and dips.

From September 9, 1920 through 1944, Marina Green served as Montgomery Airfield named in honor of pioneer aviator and native Californian, John J. Montgomery and also as Marina Airfield when it was the first terminus of the United States Post Office celebrated in the plaque found on the green.

The field was one half mile west of Fort Mason along the edge of the bay. Its was unpaved and ran 1500′ east/west by 500′ north/ south and had gas and oil available on the field.

A September 11, 1920 article in the New York Times stated: “Carrying 700 pounds of mail,the first transcontinental postal airplane to leave San Francisco cleared from the Marina Field at 6:15 A.M.
Raymond Little was the pilot.”

This site was abandoned within 2 years and mail service was moved a short distance away to Crissy Field.

On the other side of the pedestal can be found this plaque

“At this site on 8/30/44, Stanley Hiller Jr., pioneer helicopter designer, made the first sustained & successful public flight of a helicopter in the western United States. His single-place rotorcraft, the XH-44, was the first helicopter designed & built in the west, and America’s first successful co-axial helicopter. Presented by San Francisco International Airport Flight Festival Committee, August 1954.”

The Marina Green served as the location for the first flights of the Hiller XH-44 helicopter, the first coaxial helicopter to fly in America, an aircraft currently in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The first actual trial of the Hiller was in Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California, just across the Bay.

The Hiller-Copter being tried out by its owner and another San Francisco native, Stanley Hiller Jr.

The plaques are on the flagpool pedestal that can be seen in the distance on the right at approximately 435 Marina Boulevard.

Wentworth Alley Mosaic

Posted by Cindy on October 6, 2019

Oct 062019

Wentworth Alley
Chinatown

This new mosaic, found on Wentworth Alley off of Washington is titled Dragon Boats Chasing Moonlight and was created by the youth program attached to the Chinatown Community Development Center.

The piece was installed in September of 2018 to commemorate the Autumn Moon Festival. The inspiration for the piece stems from an ancient Chinese legend, where teams traditionally competed against each other racing dragon-shaped boats.

Designed by the students with the help Rita Soyfertis, the mural, which contains more than 30,000 tiles, is said to “represent the connection of hard work and dreaming big,”

Photo from Hoodline.com

Marina District Lighthouse

Posted by Cindy on October 4, 2019

Oct 042019

1 Yacht Road
Marina District

Once there was a grand plan to construct two of these stunning stone lighthouses at the harbor entrance in the Marina District.

The harbor itself was originally built as a lagoon for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915.

The lighthouse was the idea of Captain B.P. Lamb of the Park Commission, who also suggested the general design of the tower. The design followed that of Roman military watchtowers built for the Punic Wars.

Captain Lamb was quoted as saying, “Yachtsmen have been forced to rely on shore lights in making the harbor at night.”

The city moved the harbor entrance in the 1960s, but left this lighthouse in its original position. Sadly this one has not been lit in years and can easily be missed on your walk to the San Francisco Yaht Club, or better yet, the Wave Organ.

According to San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department historian Christopher Pollock:

“This is not even a lighthouse by normal standards,” … “It’s squat, unmanned, and intended to be a beacon just for the yacht harbor, not necessarily to keep ships from crashing onshore.

“Think Alcatraz lighthouse or Point Bonita lighthouse,” he continues. “These are working lighthouses that are large, manned, and up high, to guide mariners in the fog.”

The park commission built the lighthouse in 1931 using cobblestones salvaged from the city streets as the seawall and paving around the structure, but the ornamental stones for the lighthouse walls came from the 35-room home of George A. Pope which once stood at Pacific and Divisidero and burned down on December 4th, 1929.

The lighthouse once had a teak door made from a ladder from the USS Matsonia, today that door is cemented shut, as are the windows.

It is possible that the lack of the second tower can be explained by an article found in the 1980 Civil History of the GGNRA Volume 2 Page 170: “In May 1931, construction of a twenty-five-foot high stone lighthouse on “the Saint Francis spit” to mark the entrance of the yacht harbor was completed, most likely under the same relief program sponsored by the city in cooperation with local business men. The depression, however, soon thereafter made it impossible for the city to finance further improvements at the Yacht Harbor

Apparently, there are stairs inside, but no grand spiral staircase as can be found in most lighthouses, and the light once held green and red colored glass.

According to the Park Commission, the 1,000-watt fixture was automated when it was first turned on, on October 22, 1931.

The lighthouse was seen briefly in the 1951 film noir, The House on Telegraph Hill.

The lighthouse in 1930

Forest Hills Muni Station

Posted by Cindy on September 21, 2019

Sep 212019

Where Dewey Blvd and Laguna Honda Blvd. meet

The Forest Hill Station is a Muni Metro station in the Forest Hill neighborhood across from Laguna Honda Hospital.

Built in 1916-1918 the station was originally built as part of the Twin Peaks Tunnel. It is the oldest subway station west of Chicago.

Scenes from the films Dirty Harry (1971) and Milk (2008) were shot inside of this station.

The Forest Hill Muni Station is the deepest station in the San Francisco system.

Forest Hill Station was built in a “restrained classical revival style which has remained largely unaltered to the present. There are also a few decorative features suggestive of an Art Nouveau aesthetic.

The station was the result of a 21-acre donation by Newell-Murdoch who was developing the Forest Hill neighborhood at the time. This donation made sure the new neighborhood was linked to the Twin Peaks tunnel.

At the surface level, period pilasters and archways remain.

At the platform level subway tile in white, black, check pattern is some of the finest in the muni system

Rumor has it that during the height of the Cold War, a plan was allegedly proposed to build a vault in the station in order to protect city records from nuclear attack.

The station was originally named Laguna Honda; lettering with that former name is carved on the station headhouse.

The station in 1921. Photo courtesy of opensfhistory.org

The station in 1926. Photo courtesy of opensfhistory.org

Noguchi at Chase Center

Posted by Cindy on September 12, 2019

Sep 122019

Chase Center
Plaza
Waterside
Dogpatch

Isamu Noguchi, Play Sculpture, c. 1975, fabricated 2017; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

Play Sculpture by Isamu Noguchi is on loan from SFMOMA to the Chase Center. This author has an issue with the loaning of art from a public museum to a corporate entity, and for that reason, I would like to directly reprint an article from ArtsJournal.com

“Chase Center was responsible for [SFMOMA’s] logistical expenses” for this program, according to the museum.

In response to my query, SFMOMA’s spokesperson told me that it had entered into this partnership with a sports venue in order to “inspire and encourage new audiences to connect with contemporary art, visit the museum and experience our larger program.” But another way of looking at this is that the museum is depriving its core audience of on-site access to two key works, for the benefit of a commercial enterprise.

Part of this could be money-driven: Whiting of the Chronicle was told that there was “no rental fee for the pieces borrowed from SFMOMA.” But in response to my query about compensation, the museum’s spokesperson revealed to me that SFMOMA would receive an “honorarium [that] will support exhibition and education programs at the museum.” Its spokesperson didn’t answer my emailed question about the amount of that compensation.”

The second piece, referenced in the article, is a mobile by Calder that once hung in the museum’s atrium, and now hangs in the sports arena lobby.

The article goes on to say “For me, the bottom line is that nonprofit art museums shouldn’t be lending their works to for-profit enterprises—not to commercial art galleries and certainly not to sports arenas. It will be interesting to see how this breaching of boundaries sits with other museum professionals, audiences and donors. Another of my questions that SFMOMA didn’t answer was whether the Fisher heirs and the Noguchi estate had been consulted about these unorthodox arrangements.” Something this writer agrees with completely.

Isamu Noguchi (November 17, 1904 – December 30, 1988) was a Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.

After high school, Noguchi went to Connecticut to work as an apprentice to Gutzon Borglum, best known as the creator of Mount Rushmore National Memorial. At summer’s end, Borglum told Noguchi that he would never become a sculptor.

In 1924, while still enrolled at Columbia, Noguchi followed his mother’s advice to take night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. Three months later, Noguchi held his first exhibit, a selection of plaster and terracotta works. He soon dropped out of Columbia University to pursue sculpture full-time.

Isamu Noguchi died on December 30, 1988, at the age of 84. In his obituary, The New York Times called him “a versatile and prolific sculptor whose earthy stones and meditative gardens bridging East and West have become landmarks of 20th-century art”

Alicia McCarthy at the Proper Hotel

Posted by Cindy on September 10, 2019

Sep 102019

Market Street and 7th Street

This mural, covering an entire wall facing Charles J. Brenham Place (extension of 7th Street) is by Alicia McCarthy.

McCarthy’s work has a tendency towards the Naïve or Folk character and often uses unconventional media like house paint, graphite, or other found materials. McCarthy is best known for her weave paintings such as this.

McCarthy was born in 1969 and grew up in Oakland where she presently resides. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993 and an MFA from UC Berkeley in 2007. In 1992, the dean of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) addressed an angry letter criticizing her campus graffiti, claiming that her art “looks like shit”. Ironically, McCarthy is now featured as a part of SFAI’s notable alumni

McCarthy was a key member of the Mission School movement, a punk artistic movement born in San Francisco. At that time she painted graffiti under the names Fancy and Probe and was a member of underground punk and LGBT movements in San Francisco in the early 1990s.

The mural came about after the Luggage Store Gallery, which McCarthy has worked with for years, partnered with the hotel to remake the wall.

Seeing Spheres at Chase Center

Posted by Cindy on September 6, 2019

Sep 062019

Chase Center
1 South Street
Bayside Entrance
Dog Patch

Seeing Spheres by Olafur Eliasson

This work, which consists of five 15-foot polished steel balls arranged in a circle was created in Berlin, fabricated in Amsterdam, then shipped through the Panama Canal for installation.

Created using ten tons of polished steel the piece arrived by barge at the Port of San Francisco and was then trucked to Mission Bay. The work had to be done in the middle of the night as pieces were so large the moving process required temporarily removing overhead Muni wires.

The mirrored surfaces all point towards each other creating an environment of multilayered, reflected spaces in which the objects and people appear over and over visible from various unexpected angles. Standing at different places in the center of the circle of spheres will give the viewer a unique view of either themselves or of the mirrors reflecting into each other.

The mirrored front of each sphere is flat and framed in LED light, so they will faintly glow at night.

Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin is a full-service shop with architects, artisans and technicians, and he estimates that 120 people have worked on “Seeing spheres.” Each 15-foot orb weighs 2 tons and was formed by a hydroform process that uses water pressure to create the shape, a process popular in auto manufacturing. Eliasson says these are the largest spheres on Earth to be created by hydroform.

Eliasson was born in 1967. He grew up in Iceland and Denmark and studied from 1989 to 1995 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today comprises more than one hundred team members, including craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialized technicians. As a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Eliasson led the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments from 2009–2014.

This art piece is just one of ten pieces that were funded by the owners of the Chase Center through the 1% for art program, where 1% of the construction costs must go to public art. The arena cost $1.4 billion dollars.

Point of Departure

Posted by Cindy on September 3, 2019

Sep 032019

Masonic and Geary Streets

The intersection of Masonic and Geary was completely redevloped by the city as part of a streetscape project.

The art work chosen for the project was Point of Departure by Scott Oliver.

Where are you going right now?

To get inspiration for the signs Oliver stood on the corner for five days asking three questions of passers by. The three questions, stamped into the poles, were: “Where are you going right now? Where and when were you born? Where do you want to go that you’ve never been before?”

Some respondents answered in their native languages, which is why some signs are in Russian, Tagalog, Spanish or Chinese.

Where do you want to go that you’ve never been before?

About the piece Oliver said “I’m trying to make something that people using this space can connect with on some level,” “The place isn’t really connected to a neighborhood. It’s a transitory spot that people use to get elsewhere. I wanted to bring form to that. The significance of the space right now is where you are headed next, not the spot itself.”

Where and when were you born?

The piece was commisioned by the San Francisco Arts Commision at a cost of $117,000. It was paid for by the Department of Public Works, under the “2%-for-art” program.

Tompkins Stairs

Posted by Cindy on August 7, 2019

Aug 072019

Tompkins Avenue
Between Putnam and Nevada
Bernal Heights

Andre Rothblatt, was the architect responsible for the design of the Tompkins Stairway Garden. The zigzag tile design was inspired by the Steps to Peace painted by youth in the Syrian town of Deir Atiyah.

Children of Syria painting the Stairway of Peace. Photo from Designboom.com

According to a 2019 article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The park “won a $15,000 community challenge grant from the city to landscape the hill, but with no water, the unaccepted bit of Tompkins fell back into disrepair during the drought.

They tried again with additional neighbors in 2016, this time applying for and receiving a water meter for irrigation from the Public Utilities Commission. They partnered with the San Francisco Parks Alliance to win a variety of grants, including another community challenge grant from the city, this time for $100,000.”

Even though :”The block remains unaccepted (the City of San Francisco takes no responsiblity), and its upkeep remains firmly on the shoulders of its neighbors.”

ATSF Car Ferry Slip

Posted by Cindy on August 5, 2019

Aug 052019

The Atchison and Topeka Car Ferry Slip
Between Piers 52 and 50
Mission Bay

Built in 1950, not much remains of the ATSF Car Ferry Slip. What does remain consists of a large, fork-shaped pier covered in wood decking. Near the mid-point of the structure is a large, steel-frame freight tower consisting of a pair of smaller metal truss towers, each capped by a pulley wheel.

The structure served the fleet of tugs and barges that carried freight cars between the railroad’s main railhead in Richmond and San Francisco.

Photo from Wikipedia

Transport to and from the docks was mostly by rail. Rather than make a long trip down the San Francisco Peninsula, railcars were barged around the bay, both by the Santa Fe and by the Southern Pacific railways.

Most traffic would be taken across the bay to Oakland or Richmond for connection with the major transcontinental rail lines, with a small amount of traffic for California’s northern coastal region passed through a slip at Tiburon on Richardson Bay.

The ATSF Car Ferry Slip, closed in 1984, does not have any formal historic status at the national, state, or local level but does appear to be a potential historic resource as a rare physical remnant of the infrastructure built by the ATSF to transport train cars from its main East Bay railheads to San Francisco.

A loaded train ferry approaching a Car Ferry Slip on Lake Michigan

Sculpture Garden of the Woodstock School of Art

Posted by Cindy on July 12, 2019

Jul 122019

The Sculpture Garden of
The Woodstock School of Art

In 1996, Pascal Meccariello, from the Dominican Republic, Alan Counihan, and Colm Folan, from Ireland, and husband and wife Hideaki and Eiko Suzuki, from Japan, were part of the Woodstock School of Art Sculpture Residency. They each picked various sites in the woods behind the school and created beautifully intricate sculptures, mostly of stacked bluestone.

*
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OPUS 40

Posted by Cindy on July 8, 2019

Jul 082019

Opus 40
50 Fite Rd
Saugerties, NY

Opus 40 is the work of just one man, Harvey Fite (December 25, 1903 – May 9, 1976). The sculpture, made of bluestone from the local quarries, covers 6 1/2 acres

Fite created Opus 40 by hand. The work, which he said would take him 40 years (thus the name), consisted of ramps, stairways, pools, moats and other configurations carved in the bluestone. Fite died three years prior to the slated 40 year timeline.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,Fite grew up in Texas, where his family had moved early in his childhood. As a young man he attended evening courses in law for three years, before deciding not to pursue it as a career. At that point he moved east to study for the ministry at St. Stephen’s College, a small Episcopal institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York’s Hudson Valley. Once there, Fite was drawn to the stage at the campus theater, and at the end of his third year he dropped out. He joined a traveling troupe of actors, and later moved to Woodstock, where he performed with a local theater. According to an anecdote that his stepson, Tad Richards, relates, Fite discovered his passion for sculpting suddenly one day when, while sitting backstage during a performance, he absentmindedly pulled out his pocketknife and began whittling on a seamstress’s discarded spool that had rolled under his chair.

Mr. Fite, went on to study art at St. Stephen’s College and in Florence, Italy, where he studied with Corrado Vigni.

Fite is also known for founding the fine arts program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

His works are on display in the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Albany Institute of History and Art. In 1938 Fite was commissioned by the Carnegie Institution in Washington to restore ancient Mayan sculpture in Copan, Honduras. His work was shown in 1953 and 1954 as part of the Department of State traveling group shows in Europe and Africa.

Opus 40 was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and has been described in Architectural Digest as “one of the largest and most beguiling works of art on the entire continent.” * *

Woodstock Artists Cemetery

Posted by Cindy on July 8, 2019

Jul 082019

Woodstock, New York

The Woodstock Artists Cemetery is officially operated by the Woodstock Memorial Society, the original 80 foot by 100 foot plot of land was purchased by John Kingsbury following the tragic death of his son. Additional land was purchased and the Woodstock Memorial Society was incorporated on November 4, 1934.

In an effort to preserve the natural beauty of the landscape, the founding members sought to limit traditional symbols of grief. As a result, conventional tombstones and other visual intrusions were prohibited. As is still the case today, graves are marked only by ground-level stones, many crafted from native bluestone.

The Penning sculpture stands at the highest point of the hill. The poem, penned by Dr. Richard Shotwell reads: “Encircled by the everlasting hills they rest here who added to the beauty of the world by art, creative thought and by life itself.”

Tomas Penning was president of Woodstock Artist Association

Called the “Bluestone Master” because of his bold sculpture carvings, Tomas Penning was born in Glidden, Wisconsin and studied in Duluth, Minnesota, the Art Institute of Chicago and with Alexander Archipenko in Woodstock, New York.

In Woodstock, he and his wife ran the Sawgill Gallery with several other couples. During the Depression, he designed the craft-training center run by the National Youth Administration, and the Woodstock School of Art (once called Byrdcliffe) was later housed there.

Penning sculptured a Memorial for Thomas Edison, and has works in schools, and collections across the Country

Shotwell was a Columbia professor, who attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I and helped draft the United Nations Charter after World War II.

The only other above ground structure permitted is the memorial honoring the life of Byrdcliffe founder Ralph Whitehead and his family. Woodstock became a draw for artists in 1902 because of Byrdcliffe, which was one of the country’s first intentional arts communities.

The Della Robbia on the memorial was brought to the United States, and finally Woodstock by Whitehead himself.

The cemetery is the final resting place for artists as diverse as Robert Koch, the Academy-Award-winning screenwriter of Casablanca; American modernist painter Milton Avery; WPA muralist Ethel Magafan, children’s book author Paula Danziger; and pianist Richard Tee, who played on Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away.”

The legacy of some artists buried there has endured while the names of others, once well known, have become obscure, such as this grave of Clinton Woodbridge Parker.

Gertrude Ross Jarvis owned an art gallery in Woodstock

Bolton Brown, carved his own birth and death years (as he felt the end approaching) into a boulder for his grave marker.

Brown was an artist, Lithographer, and Mountaineer. Brown was one of the founders of the Byrdcliffe Colony. He attended Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, where he received his Master’s Degree in Painting. In 1891 he moved to Stanford, California to create the Art Department at Stanford University and was head of the department for almost ten years, but was dismissed in a dispute over his use of nude models in the classroom. Mount Bolton Brown in the California Sierras, is named in his honor.

Fern Street’s New Look

Posted by Cindy on July 1, 2019

Jul 012019

Fern Street
Fern Street at Polk Street

Fern Street is part of the Polk Street Improvement Project

Beginning in 2011 the City of San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority has worked with numerous residents, merchants and community groups to help create a safer streetsape design for Polk Street. The proposed conceptual design includes many improvements, the following three helping to explain the changes on Fern Street.

Pedestrian safety features such as corner “bulbouts”, daylighting, crosswalk upgrades and traffic signal improvements
Transit enhancement such as bus stop consolidation, relocation and bus bulbs
Public realm improvements such as landscaping, street lighting, and alley enhancements

Fern Street is part of the vibrant SF First Thusday Art Walk Project, so the improvements on Fern Street represent the streets place in this movement.

Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti-like work grew out of the New York City street culture of the 1980s.

Angela Isadora Duncan Born in San Francisco on May 26, 1877 or May 27, 1878 (died September 14, 1927) was an American and French dancer who performed to acclaim throughout Europe.

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (October 1870 – July 1966) was a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen (Chan) and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin (and Far Eastern philosophy in general) to the West.

Cesar A. Cruz is an internationally renowned poet, educator and human rights activist.

Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher.

Shirin Neshat (born 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

William Saroyan (August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film adaptation of his novel The Human Comedy.

Vitreous Bench

Posted by Cindy on June 28, 2019

Jun 282019

Millenium Tower
301 Mission Street
The public entrance

Vitreous Bench by Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner is an American conceptual artist. She was born in San Francisco on January 31, 1953. She received her BA and MFA from San Francisco State University.

Although Ms. Wagner has spent her life living in California, she is an active international artist, working photographically, as well as site-specific public art, and lecturing extensively at museums and universities. In 2001 Ms. Wagner was named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year.

The artist’s statement regarding the piece: “I have chosen to install a sculpture in the shape of an ellipse, cast from clear resin, that calls to mind the image of a frozen pond. Floating inside the piece are cast acorns that appear jewel-like. The work is a response to an existing wall piece depicting a California oak grove. This serves both as sculpture and as a functional seating element. At night, the illuminated sculpture will act as a beacon from the street to passersby.”

This piece is part of the Millenium Towers 2% for Art requirement. The collection within the tower features artists with significant relationships to art schools and institutions in the Bay Area.

Digital Oaks

Posted by Cindy on June 27, 2019

Jun 272019

Millenium Tower
301 Mission Street
Public Entrance

Digital Oaks by Amanda Weil (2009)

Amanda Weil founded Weil Studio in 1993. The studio’s specialization with large scale photographic glass is an outgrowth of Weil’s interest in the intersection of photography and architecture.

Weil has a BA from Harvard College and spent a year at The Whitney Museum Independent Study program.

Digital Oaks by Amanda Weil

This installation is an abstract collection of squares in multiple greens that lend light, calm and beauty to an overly large lobby. Eventually the squares sort themselves out and become a grove of California oak trees.

This piece is part of the Millenium Towers 2% for Art requirement. The collection within the tower features artists with significant relationships to art schools and institutions in the Bay Area.

California Mission

Posted by Cindy on June 26, 2019

Jun 262019

Millenium Tower
301 Mission Street
Public Entrance

White by Yoram Wolberger

On the day I visited this piece it was hard to see as the restaurant has used the wall to stack extraneous furniture. The piece is titled California Mission and is made of Reinforced Fiberglass and Steel covered in a polyurethane paint.

The artist, Yoran Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres Department.

The artists statement regarding the piece:

“The goals for this work were to inspire conversation about a complex Californian past, which encouraging tower residents to engage with one another about their own histories. An over-sized translucent fiberglass model of a mission model is suspended upon the atrium wall, creating a ghostlike structure that retains the flashing and flaws indicative of mass-production. These artifacts allude to the faults of manufactured idealism as well as the mythic romanticism behind a shared convoluted history. Says the artist, “The ‘CA Mission’ project is connected to my previous work in how it exposes the imperfect faces and icons of cultural ideals. While my enlarged plastic miniatures and chrome sports trophy figurines exaggerate the essential ideas of heroism, patriotism, physical prowess and beauty that drive our economy, ‘CA Mission’ taps into similar concepts through a more discordant narrative. California students are instructed to build models of these missions in elementary school; these models inherently refer to a painful period in the history of Native Americans, despite the shrouded treatment of their stories.”

This piece is part of the Millenium Towers 2% for Art requirement. The collection within the tower features artists with significant relationships to art schools and institutions in the Bay Area.

923 Folsom

Posted by Cindy on June 25, 2019

Jun 252019

The artists of this striking piece on Folsom Street are Lisa Levine and Peter Tonningson. Levine holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in Photography from Brooklyn College. Peter, a native Californian earned both his BFA (San Francisco Art Institute) and MFA (San Jose State University) in photography.

While easily viewable while on the sidewalk, the piece is very difficult to photograph on a nice sunny day

The two met at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley where they were both artists-in-residence. They live in Alameda and teach fine art photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Lisa and Peter have been collaborating for several years utilizing their unique method of repetitive shooting and exchange of film to create layered imagery depicting multidimensional perspectives of time and place.

Their collaborative company is called Counterpoint Studios

Photo from Counterpoint website showing the mural from the interior of the building

The photo mural is infused in glass using Dip/tech printing technology. The piece consists of 6 panels 48″ x 86″ each.

Tapestry of Life: The Warp and Weft of Care

Posted by Cindy on June 22, 2019

Jun 222019

CPMC Cathedral Hill Campus
1101 Van Ness Avenue

Deanna Marsh began by photographing medical gauze and digitally manipulating the image. This horizontal sculpture is metal and kiln-formed glass intended to “echo the woven tapestry beneath, becoming abstract Petri dishes of our individual biology with circulatory flow and beauty in each glass ring”.

Deanna Marsh earned her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design. After a successful career in graphic design, she went on to spend four years studying metalsmithing at Sierra College.

Marsh works primarily with glass and metals, recycling wherever possible, and utilizes solar energy in her studio, to power the long kiln-fired annealing process for each piece of glass.

CPMC Cathedral Hill is not open to the general public, with the exception of the lobby. This piece can be found in the atrium at the Van Ness Street entrance.

Conservatory of Flowers Photo Montage

Posted by Cindy on June 21, 2019

Jun 212019

CPMC Cathedral Hill Campus
1101 Van Ness Avenue

This photograph, by Stephan Bay, is a collage of CPMC employees. This Giclee on canvas was done in 2018.

Stephen Bay is a landscape photographer. Born in Canada, Stephen studied engineering and computer science while learning photography on his own.

After earning his Ph.D., Stephen moved to Silicon Valley to work as a data scientist. He married and became a US Citizen in 2008. In 2014 Stephen and his wife quit their jobs and began exploring the United States photographing as they went along. They eventually settled in San Diego where Stephen is an active member of the photography community.

The newly complete CPMC on Cathedral Hill is closed to the general public with the exception of the lobby. This piece is in one of the hallways leading to the cafeteria.

Split Button

Posted by Cindy on June 19, 2019

Jun 192019

University of Pennsylvania
Front of the Van Pelt Library

Split Button by Claes Oldenburg cost $100,000 with $37,500 coming from the University, $375,000 from NEA and the remaining raised through contributions. It is made of reinforced aluminum, weighs 5000 pounds and meashures 16 feet in diameter.

A legend exists, mainly circulated by students at the University of Pennsylvania, that attributes The Button to the university’s founder, Benjamin Franklin. A monument of a seated Franklin stands near the sculpture; legend has it that when this man of considerable girth sat down, his vest button popped off and rolled across the University’s Locust Walk. It eventually came to a stop and split into two—hence becoming today’s sculpture.

Oldenburg, however, presents an alternative view. He once said “The Split represents the Schuylkill. It divides the button into four parts—for William Penn’s original Philadelphia squares.

Paint Torch

Posted by Cindy on June 1, 2019

Jun 012019

Pittsburgh, PA
Lenfest Plaza

Installed in August 2011 at a daring 60-degree diagonal position, the 51-feet high Paint Torch sculpture by Claes Oldenburg in Lenfest Plaza honors the act of painting—from the classical masters in PAFA’s museum to the students in PAFA’s School of Fine Arts. Paint Torch, commissioned by PAFA, stands on the point of its handle in a gravity-defying gesture. Nearby on the plaza floor is a six-foot high “glob” of paint, part of which the brush has lifted into the sky in a depiction of the act of painting a picture. The “glob” and “blip” at the tip of the brush are both illuminated from within at night.

Paint Torch also alludes to the history of Philadelphia through its iconographic reference to a torch, which, according to David R. Brigham, PAFA’s President and CEO, symbolizes Philadelphia’s significant role in the country’s history “as a leader of the American Revolution.” Its resemblance to a torch is also significant for functioning as PAFA’s connection to the “Museum Mile” that comprises a slew of cultural destinations along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It now literally lights the starting point for this museum trek that ends at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which coincidentally also happens to be home to another Oldenburg piece: Giant Three-Way Plug, located in the museum’s sculpture garden.

Covenant by Alex Liberman

Posted by Cindy on May 30, 2019

May 302019

University of Pennsylvania
Locust Walk

Weighing over 25 tons, Covenant, the creation of Alexander Liberman (1912-1999) was commissioned as part of the university’s fulfillment of the Redevelopment Authority’s Percent for Art requirement.

Alexander Liberman’s sculpture has been described as so “wildly asymmetrical” that every change in the viewer’s angle of perception alters the apparent axes. During his long career, his sculpture became increasingly monumental, and he characterized his larger works as a kind of “free architecture” that should have the impact of a temple or cathedral. In Covenant Liberman specifically intended to convey a feeling of unity and spiritual participation. The installation in 1975 was assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman (September 4, 1912 – November 19, 1999) was a Russian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. He held senior artistic positions during his 32 years at Condé Nast Publications.

Liberman was born in a Jewish family in Kiev. When his father took a post advising the Soviet government, the family moved to Moscow. Life there became difficult, and his father secured permission from Lenin and the Politburo to take his son to London in 1921.

Liberman was educated in Russia, England, and France, where he took up life as a “White Émigré” in Paris.

After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Condé Nast Publications, rising to the position of editorial director, which he held from 1962 to 1994.

Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, and such), often painted in uniform bright colors. In a 1986 interview concerning his formative years as a sculptor and his aesthetic, Liberman said, “I think many works of art are screams, and I identify with screams.”

Grumman Greenhouse

Posted by Cindy on May 26, 2019

May 262019

Grumman Greenhouse
Lenfest Plaza

This crashed and artfully crumpled full-size airplane is titled “Grumman Greenhouse,”. The creation of 27-year-old Jordan Griska was installed in 2011.

The plane is a U.S. Navy Grumman Tracker S-2E, built in 1962. It flew from aircraft carriers. Mothballed in the 1980s, it had a second career helping to fight forest fires in California. Jordan bought it on eBay for about the same price as a cheap used car.

Inspired by origami, Jordan folded the Grumman to look like it had nose-dived into the ground. He then replaced its cockpit innards with a working greenhouse, lit from within by LED grow lights, powered by solar panels on the wings. “The light tells people there’s something more going on, inside,” said Jordan, who hopes it will attract people who might otherwise run away from a crashed airplane. The magenta color is a serviceable spectrum for plant growth, and Jordan liked it.

The artist, who sees his work as a metaphor for recycling and repurposing, picks up seedlings from a local nursery, raises them in the airplane for a month, then delivers the herbs, peppers, and kale to City Harvest, which feeds poor families in the region. “It’s been a learning curve to get the temperature, light, and water right,” said Jordan. “I’m not gonna let my project not survive.”

Jordan says, “It’s not anti-military, it’s not anti-firefighter,” he said. “It’s about the plants growing in the plane.”

Jordan Griska is now based in Brooklyn having moved from Philadelphia in 2012. Jordan received a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Certificate in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he was awarded the Cresson Scholarship and Governor’s Award. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Esther Klein Gallery, Fleisner Ollman Gallery, Scope Art Fair in Miami, and Philadelphia Contemporary. Jordan has created public installations at Eastern State Penitentiary, the Governors Island Art Fair and Socrates Sculpture Park.

WFT at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

Posted by Cindy on May 21, 2019

May 212019

Polk Street
Between Hayes and Grove

Photo from Hoodline.com

Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s is the artist behind this neon work on the western side of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Kosuth’s work was selected by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) in 2015, to be the first public art project funded through the Public Art Trust with the contribution made by The Emerald Fund.

The Emerald Fund was responsible for two residential buildings that have views of this art piece. The Public Art Trust provides private developers with projects in various zoning districts options regarding the use of their 1%-for-art requirement. Developers may contribute all or a portion of their requirement to the Public Art Trust to be used at the discretion of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Joseph Kosuth (born in Toledo Ohio, January 31, 1945), is an American conceptual artist living in New York and London. He studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design at the age of ten and continued there until 1962, during which time he studied with the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1963 and studied drawing and painting there for a year. After traveling abroad for a year, he moved to New York City in 1965 and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where he studied painting until 1967. Kosuth was one of the originators of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s, which became a major movement that thrived into the 1970s and remains influential to this day.

Kosuth pioneered the use of words in place of visual imagery. His series of One and Three installations (1965), in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged photographic copy of the dictionary definition of it, explored these relationships directly. His enlarged photostats of dictionary definitions in his series Art as Idea as Idea (1966-68) eliminated objects and images completely in order to focus on meaning conveyed purely with language. Since the 1970s, he has made numerous site-specific installations that continue to explore how we experience, comprehend, and respond to language.

According to Kosuth, “The essence of this building and the historic plaza of which it is part is what I have tried to address in this public artwork. The basis of this project is language itself. It is a work that is both a reflection on its own construction as well as on the history and culture of its own location…

The structure of this installation has two parts: the etymology of the words ‘Civic’ and ‘Auditorium’ in white neon on the western façade. The word ‘Civic’ is intricately connected to the long history of civil rights activism that has taken place (and continues to take place) in the plaza–from Gay Rights to Black Lives Matter. The word ‘Auditorium’ on the other hand is more specific to the building itself, referring to the collective audience assembled by Bill Graham, who found a way, as a concert promoter to not only promote concerts but also community. It is only in the present when a word is used, as it is with a work of art being experienced, that all which comprises the present finds its location in the process of making meaning. Here, in this work, language becomes both an allegory and an actual result of all of which it would want to speak.”

Kosuth believed that images and any traces of artistic skill and craft should be eliminated from art so that ideas could be conveyed as directly, immediately, and purely as possible. There should be no obstacles to conveying ideas, and so images should be eliminated since he considered them obstacles. This notion became one of the major forces that made Conceptual art a movement.

“Modern and Ancient Science” by Gordon Langdon

Posted by Cindy on May 6, 2019

May 062019

George Washington High School
600 32nd Ave

Over the door to the library at George Washington High School is this Gordon Langdon mural titled Modern and Ancient Science.

On the left is Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Robert Andrews Millikan, who is recognized for measuring the elementary electronic charge. The center panel, apparently, represents Academy Award-winning actress Claudette Colbert, a popular French-born American actress of the 20s and 30s. Ancient Science is shown on the right.

Photo taken before the pipes went up courtesy of https://www.newdealartregistry.org/artist/LangdonGordon/

Photo taken before the pipes went up courtesy of New Deal Art Registry

Above you can better see the Pythagorean Theorem in a book sitting above Claudette Colbert.

Gordon Langdon was born in San Francisco, on March 9, 1910. Dropping out at Stanford, Langdon went on to study at the CSFA. During the 1930s he shared a studio with Ralph Stackpole another mural artist with murals at both Coit Tower and George Washington High School Library. Langdon’s family ranch in Olema, California was the subject of his Coit Tower mural where he inserted a likeness of himself. After service in WWII, Langdon abandoned his art career and moved down the peninsula to Palo Alto where he worked in wholesale hardware until he died of a brain aneurysm on March 8, 2963.

His fresco works in San Francisco include: Coit Tower (Timber and Dairy Industries); SF Art Institute Library (The Arts of Man) and this one at the George Washington High School Library

“Advancement of Learning through the Printing Press” by Lucien Labaudt

Posted by Cindy on May 3, 2019

May 032019

George Washington High School
600 32nd Avenue

This mural, by Lucien Labaudt resides on the east wall of the library at George Washington High School it was completed in 1936 as part of the WPA.

In this mural you will find such notables as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Junipero Serra, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Labaut’s intent was to give an expression of mankind’s knowledge through the printed word by showing portraits of literary men, scientists, statesmen, and religious teachers, all grouped, with symbolic attributes surrounding the central figure of Gutenberg, patron saint of printed books.

Lucien Labaudt was a painter and a muralist. Born in Paris, France on May 14, 1880, he was educated in France but was essentially a self-taught artist. As a young painter, he was influenced by Cezanne and Seurat. After coming to the U.S. in 1906, he worked in Nashville, Tennesee as a costume designer while painting in his spare time.

Labaudt settled in San Francisco in 1910 into a studio at 526 Powell Street and is credited with introducing modern art to California. In 1919 he began teaching at the CSFA and later, with his wife Marcelle, founded his own school of costume design. A pioneer in modern art in America, he experimented with various idioms including Surrealism and Cubism. Labaudt died on December 12, 1943, in an airplane crash in Assam, India on his way to paint the war in Burma.

Labaudt is best known in San Francisco for his murals at the Beach Chalet.

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The Sculpture Garden of The Woodstock School of Art

Opus 40 50 Fite Rd Saugerties, NY

The Sculpture Garden of
The Woodstock School of Art

Opus 40
50 Fite Rd
Saugerties, NY