Category: All of SAN FRANCISCO
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Telegraph Hill – Coit Tower
Telegraph Hill Coit Tower WPA Murals * * * * This mural is titled California and is by Maxine Albro. A wonderful depiction of the bounty of the California agricultural industry from Mt. Shasta Almond Orchards to Napa Valley grapes. * * The “gentlemen farmers” are actually the artists friends. Ralph Stackpole is in the…
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Telegraph Hill – Coit Tower
Telegraph Hill Coit Tower WPA Murals The little seated boy looks at a book whose page shows the date of Coit Tower (1933) and the date of the WPA projects at Coit Tower (1934). * Animal Force by Ray Boynton These are the first frescoes that one sees when entering Coit Tower. Boynton chose to portray…
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Telegraph Hill – Coit Tower Murals
Telegraph Hill Coit Tower WPA Murals * This law library has some interesting book titles when one looks closely. There are the usual Civil, Penal and Moral Codes, but also the Law of Fresco Painting, Counterfeiting, and Laws on Seduction. A fun one is Martial Law by Brady, he was the VFW caretaker who watched over…
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Telegraph Hill -Coit Tower Murals
Telegraph Hill Coit Tower WPA Murals * * This is the beginning of a series on the WPA murals of Coit Tower. When the Great Depression hit, like everyone, artists were not finding work. George Biddle, a prominent lawyer turned successful artist, a member of a socially prominent family from Philadelphia, and most importantly, a…
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Telegraph Hill – Coit Tower
Telegraph Hill Coit Tower To understand Coit Tower you must first understand Lillie Hitchcock Coit. A nice tale is told here from the Virtual San Francisco History Museum written by: By Frederick J. Bowlen, Battalion Chief, San Francisco Fire Department. One of the most unusual personalities ever connected with our Fire Department was a woman. She was Lillie…
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Lands End – USS San Francisco Memorial
Lands End 48th Avenue Parking Lot In 1942 the cruiser USS San Francisco attacked a vastly superior Japanese force off the coast of Guadalcanal. It was the most brutal close-quarters naval engagement of World War II. The San Francisco took some 45 direct hits and sustained heavy damage while sinking one Japanese ship and seriously…
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The Fillmore Center – Hard Bop
The Fillmore Center Western Addition * Hard Bop by John Atkin Hard bop is a style of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or “bop”) music. Hard bop incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. In 1942, during World War II, President Roosevelt signed…
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Performing Arts Parking Garage – Dancing in the Curve of the World
Civic Center Performing Arts Garage Gough and Grove Streets * Dancing in the Curve of the World by Josef Norris Josef Norris is responsible for the murals at Kid Power Park. This piece, done in 2003 was paid for by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Fund and the Neighborhood Beautification Fund.
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Western Addition – Blues Revolution Part II
The Western Addition Post and Steiner Hamilton Pool and Rec Center * * * The Blues Revolution Part II by Santie Huckaby This is Part II of the Blues Revolution. You can see Part I here. Santie Huckaby was born in Ohio, and has spent 40 years in San Francisco working as a professional musician,…
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Christopher Columbus
Coit Tower Telegraph Hill * * Columbus by Vittorio Di Colbertaldo – 1957 This statue of Christopher Columbus sits in the center of the parking lot for Coit Tower. The figure of Columbus, the famous Italian explorer, gazes out over San Francisco Bay standing on a concrete pedestal in the center of a circular flower…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEAT Exhibition Notice the QR code on the front Biked by Eddy Joaquim “Biked is a hybrid seat/bike rack with QR codes leading to bicycling maps of the area.” Eddie Joaquim is a product of the many countries he has lived in. An photographer with an architectural background he is a very unique…
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Western Addition – The Blues Evolution
The Western Addition Post and Steiner Hamilton Pool and Rec Center * * * * The Blues Evolution by Santie Huckaby Part I Sponsored by the Blues R&B Foundation. The Blues and R&B Foundation has this to say about the mural. We’ve received a lot of wonderful comments and support from the community concerning our mural.…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEAT Exhibition * * Cirrus by Jeremy Alden “Through use of materials and form Cirrus investigates and celebrates dualities: of earth and sky, power and beauty, time and change.” J Alden Design is dedicated to provocative product, ceramic and furniture design with work ranging from mass-produced products to commissioned pieces for private and…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * * Listen to Jimmy 1953 by Seam Studio “The year is 1953…the place Fort Mason: U.S. Army Port-of Embarkation (1909-1962). Take A SEAT on the footlockers of WWI/WWII/Korean-War soldiers…SIT on transport boxes for goods+ammo…imagine yourself here listening to 1940s/1950s music assigning vocal memory of the once bustling military activity deploying…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * * Life in a Small Place by Paul Zengyu Discoe “Life in a Small Place is a concrete box with trees growing out of its top. These trees will grow and change as the chair ages and blends with its legs.” Founded in 1988, Joinery Structures is a design-build studio…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * Seat 8 by Joel Cammarata “Serpentine bike rack conforms to the existing loading dock providing seating and tables for public interaction.” According to Joel Cammarata’s Etsy site: I am an architecturally trained designer, woodworker, father, and husband using small amount of spare time and garage space to create pieces of…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * Band of Brothers by Malcolm Davis “A trio of salvaged eucalyptus trunks stand together facing the bay As sentinels, they reference the function of this site since the Spanish military in the 1700s”. Malcom Davis (Architecture) is a Bay Area native with an intimate understanding of its regional building styles and…
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The Tenderloin – We Rock Hardest
Polk and Eddy Civic Center/Tenderloin Englishman Ben Eine has many murals around San Francisco. Here is a video of the installation: The piece was done to launch his gallery exhibit at White Walls Gallery. They did a marvelous interview with him that you can read here.
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEAT Exhibition Asana by Christine and James Desser “This Asana, “seat” in Sanskrit, like a big river rock, offers a comfortable pause for meditation, contemplation or to simply notice what is: the sea, the sky, the air, the sounds, whatever is arising in this very moment.”
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEAT Exhibition * The James Caird by Lawrence LaBianca and Robert Buckenmeyer “Bravery and courage saved the open boat journey of Ernest Shackleton and five companions” The voyage of the James Caird was an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean,…
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Chinatown’s Gateway Arch
* * * Arguably one of the most photographed sites in San Francisco is the Gateway Arch (Dragon Gate) on Grant Avenue at Bush Street marking the entry to Chinatown, dedicated on October 18th 1970. This gate is the only authentic Chinatown Gate in North America. Unlike similar structures which usually stand on wooden pillars,…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * Case Study #22: Arboreal Thrones by Kristen Franz A pair of chairs combines site specific lumber and repurposed old chairs, highlighting the juxtaposition of natural and manmade elements. Kristen has a degree from UC Berkeley, B.A. in Environmental Design
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North Beach – Ben Franklin
North Beach Washington Square * Time Capsule 1979-2979 AD Dedicated to The Citzens of San Francisco Cal Seltzer * * Benjamin Franklin – Artist – unknown This statue of Benjamin Franklin is the earliest – still existing – monument placed in San Francisco. It was originally located at Kearny and Market, but was moved to…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition * Last Flight by Bicycle Fabrications “Takes it shape and dimensions from the Saqqara bird, an ancient Egyptian artifact that demonstrates an advanced understanding of aerodynamics” The Saqqara Bird is a bird-shaped artifact made of sycamore wood, discovered during the 1898 excavation of the Pa-di-Imen tomb in Saqqara, Egypt. It has…
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San Francisco – Hugh Leeman
All Over Town Hugh Leeman is an amazing individual. This is taken directly from an article in The Bold Italic. “His tiny studio is a mess of paints, a collection of floor-to-ceiling portraits, and a charcoal-covered MacBook. With no kitchen or bed in sight, I get the sense he’s focused solely on his mission: photographing,…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibition SToP by Cary Bernstein * * “SToP celebrates the decommissioning of Fort Mason – Swords to Ploughshares.” Cary Bernstein graduated from Dartmouth College in 1984 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Russian Literature. She received an M.Arch. from the Yale School of Architecture in 1988. The office of Cary Bernstein…
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Fort Mason – SEATS
Fort Mason SEATS Exhibit JW4 by J. Weiss Design “In WWI & WWII, concrete ship building was pioneered in Oakland. Our dry docked SEAT uses a new high-performing concrete that allows for greater, thinner spans.” Jennifer Weiss has over 18 years of architecture-related experience, including working for the architecture firms Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, KMD…
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The Tenderloin – Boeddecker Park
The Tenderloin Boeddecker Park Eddy and Jones Untitled by Anthony J. Smith This abstract sculpture is a sphere held up by a pair of large hands. Set in niches around the surface of the sphere are fourteen life masks of people who live in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The artist’s face and the…