George Washington High School
600 32nd Avenue
Foyer
Washington’s early life as a surveyor, military officer in the French and Indian War and master of Mount Vernon
This twelve-panel mural covers all the walls and the stairwell of the entrance to the main lobby of the school. Depicting the life of Washington it covers 1600 square feet. Painted in the “buon” fresco style, which consists of painting with pigments directly onto wet plaster, Arntauff was able to cover about nine feet of wall per eight to twelve-hour day. This largest WPA-funded single-artist mural took ten months to complete.
Images of major events leading to the revolution: the Boston Tea Party, the burning of stamps, and the Boston Massacre. In the center, five revolutionaries attempt to raise the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
This panel shows the surrender of a Hessian mercenary during the Revolution. Arnautoff researched everything he could about Washington, including the details of uniforms worn during the wars.
Washington as farmer and slave owner titled “Mt. Vernon”.
Washington and his aged mother.
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Part of the panel titled “Westward Vision” “He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans,” Cherny said at a 2018 Board of Education meeting. “That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing.”
This piece of artwork is not without its controversy. Arnautoff was considered a left-wing liberal and communist and many of his works feature themes about class divisions, labor, and undeserved power.
Robert Cherny, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who wrote a biography about Victor Arnautoff, believes the artist was presenting “a “counter-narrative” to the prevailing high school textbooks of the time because his representation of the westward expansion included the slaughter of Native Americans, and he presented Washington as a slave owner, both facts the official narrative back then tended to either ignore or gloss over.” SF Richmond Review
In Cherney’s book, he discusses this “Washington dominates five of the six smaller murals, but the centers of the four largest murals are held by Native Americans, working-class revolutionaries, and enslaved African Americans….Arnautoff’s portrayal of Mount Vernon puts Washington near the left margin and places enslaved African Americans at the center, more prominent than several white artisans on the right side of the mural. At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that “all men are created equal” and yet owned other human beings as chattel.”…Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.
This controversy has risen many times, once in the 1960s when the school countered the problem with new murals in the adjoining hallway by Dewey Crumpler.
The controversy is once again boiling as a result of the process to establish the school as a landmark. The controversy has gone national and covered both in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was born on November 11, 1896, in Uspenivka, Taurida Governorate which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death in Leningrad on March 22, 1979.
Work in the San Francisco Bay Area by Arnautoff includes: work at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic where he had been a patient. The unveiling caused a traffic jam and controversy because the mural showed a doctor examining a female patient whose unclothed breasts were at eye-level. San Francisco City Life in Coit Tower, a mural at the Presidio Chapel and the California School of Fine Arts Library.
The museum resides in a 1938 moderne style building designed by William Peyton Day and George William Kelham. It has also been known as Building 1, as Command Naval Base San Francisco Headquarters, as Naval Station Treasure Island and was once used as a terminal and ticket office for Pan American Airlines. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The lights on this site-specific artwork are sequenced with Villareal’s custom software. The patterns are constantly changing. While these photos, taken during the day, do not show how bright the lights actually are, it is a nice focal point for both walkers and drivers naviagting the crowded situation always found around Moscone.
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Ilana Spector has a background in civics and law and brings a multidisciplinary approach to creating public artwork. She studied government and diplomacy, attending the London School of Economics and graduated from Georgetown University before attending UCLA School of Law. Ms. Spector joined Mr. Grieve in 2006 to complete an award-winning public sculpture. She studied drawing and painting at the College of Marin.
The Bayshore Roundhouse and steel turntable were built in 1910, after E.H. Harriman bought the property to create a more economical route into the yards of San Francisco by allowing trains to avoid San Bruno Mountain. The roundhouse served as a home and maintenance yard for steam-powered freight engines. At one point, there was the freight yard, shop and store buildings, 25 outbound tracks, 39 inbound tracks, and even a hospital for the 3,000 employees. The roundhouse was abandoned in 1982 well after diesel had taken over as a power source for trains. You can read more about the roundhouse 
The large red block is the Stanford Heights Reservoir.
The orange line is the San Mateo County line. The red building, still within the San Francisco City limits is the San Francisco Golf Club.
The stairway at 16th avenue in Golden Gate Heights is covered in tiles and are now a wonderful piece of art.
As are the stairs at 16th and Moraga
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The outer skin of the fish consists of ceramic tiles decorated with texts and images relating to the history of Belfast. According to the Belfast City Council, each scale “tells a story about the city”. Material from Tudor times to present day newspaper headlines are included along with contributions from Belfast school children (including a soldier and an Ulster Fry). The Ulster Museum provided the primary source of historic images, while local schools/day centers located along the line of the River Farset were approached to provide drawings for the fish.
The Big Fish contains a time capsule storing information, images, and poetry on the City.
Chang’s 25,000 square foot terrazzo floor of the Grand Hall of the Transbay Terminal is meant to evoke a lush sunlit Victorian garden. Mined from local ecology, design elements include California poppies and jewel-toned hummingbirds highlighted by mirrored glass. Integrated into the design is a subtle overlay of icons and patterns, which are drawn from the rich tapestry of people and cultures across the Bay Area: flower-like circular rings from an Indian sari, cloud-like curves inspired by Chinese embroidery, Japanese crests, diamonds and chevrons found in a variety of sources including African textiles and Grecian pottery, and star and cross motifs from Islamic tiles.
The Transbay Joint Power Authority (TJPA) committed $4.75 million to fund the acquisition of artwork for the program. The TJPA’s commitment is in the spirit of the city and county of San Francisco’s “Percent for Art Ordinance,” which allocates two percent of construction costs for the inclusion of public art in the civic structures and facilities, and is consistent with policies established by the Federal Transportation Authority encouraging the inclusion of art in transportation facilities.
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Joker’s Chair – Dermot Morgan Memorial (2002)
Éire by Jerome Connor
