Category: All of SAN FRANCISCO
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The Seed in Jane Warner Plaza
Castro District “The Seed” is part of a complete redo of the intersection of Castro and Market. It was created by Los Angeles-based Aphidoidea, a multi-disciplinary design, architecture and art collective. “The Seed” was inspired by the Castro District’s culture and human rights movement in a form of a seed. This art piece is an…
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Solar Totems
Glen Park Canyon Rec Center This unique installation is by Charles Sowers. Three reclaimed redwoods receive the “writing” of the sun as its rays are focused by a spherical lens to lightly burn into the wood. As the sun moves across the sky, the burn becomes a line; preserving a record of sunshine periodically broken…
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Treasure Island Artwork Spread Far and Wide
Sometimes you are given an opportunity to peek behind the scenes and today I had just one of those magical moments. Anne Schnoebelen, the passionate author of the website TreasureIsland1939.com asked me to come see the Pacific Fountain and bring along my friend Deborah Blake of Sullivan Masonry, to see about the restoration of the fountain.…
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Frank Stella at 222 2nd
222 Second Street Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. He studied painting at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and at Princeton University. After graduating, he moved to New York and began his career with his renowned series, Black Paintings. These two pieces by Stella are titled “Riallaro”; a 1997, pixel painting. “The Pequod Meets the…
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Glass Goddesses
Trinity Plaza Market at 8th April 2017 Trinity Plaza falls under the 1% for Art program. Although the project began construction several years ago, the public space areas are not yet complete. The concept for the public space (titled “C’era Una Volta” – Once Upon a Time) was developed by artist Lawrence Argent. The overall…
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Nature of Medicine
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill Main Lobby of the New Wing When you enter the lobby of the new wing you are overwhelmed by color. The two glass mosaics and the terrazzo floor are all done by Oakland artist, Rupert Garcia, done in 2015 they are titled Nature of Medicine. The floor art…
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Archipelago
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill Titled Archipelago this piece is based on the concept of a river as a metaphor for life. It was created by Anna Valentina Murch and sits in the plaza connecting the old and new buildings of the hospital complex. An important feature of the installation is a…
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Breath Between Sky and Ocean
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill Roof Garden of the Acute Care Building 7th Floor Breath Between Sky and Ocean by Masayuki Nagase was created in 2015 and consists of two hand-carved granite boulders (4 ft. by 4 ft. by 4 ft.), five polished and carved granite benches (5 ft. by 6…
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River of Time
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill Acute Care Building 7th Floor This piece, titled River of Time, is in three pieces. The above piece is at the end of a short hallway on the 7th floor. The other two, however, are behind locked doors. I was able to snap a photo of…
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Ringold Alley’s Leather Memoir
Ringold Alley Between 8th and 9th Streets Harrison and Folsom SOMA Prior to the AIDS crisis, Ringold alley served as one of the go-to places for gay men to rendezvous after the numerous gay bars along Folsom Street (the “Miracle Mile”) closed for the night. Until the 1990s, Ringold Street continued to play a major…
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Ethereal Bodies
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill Parking entry on 22nd Street Titled Ethereal Bodies, this piece, done in 2015, is by Cliff Garten. It consists of nine undulating stainless steel sculptures lit by multicolored LED lights. The installation’s stainless steel rods range in height from 14 to 22 feet tall. The surface…
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Healing Hearts
San Francisco General Hospital 1001 Potrero Avenue Potrero Hill The pieces were all created by sculptor Tom Otterness who was born 1952 in Wichita, Kansas. He is a prolific public art sculptor who has been creating whimsical satirical pieces since the 1970s. * Otterness employs the “lost wax” process to cast his bronze figures, which range from…
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Moscone Park
Moscone Park 1800 Chestnut Street Marina District This Leatherback Sea Turtle and the Pink Short Spined Starfish in the playground of Moscone Park were gifts to the San Francisco Arts Commission from the Friends of Moscone Park These bronze sculptures were the work of Jonathan Roberson Beery. Jonathan Beery is a California native and studied…
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Birds in the Mission
In Chan Kaajal Park 17th and Folsom Mission District There are two California birds represented in this Mission district park. They are painted water-jet cut steel panels created by Carmen Lomas Garza. San Francisco-based artist was born in 1948 in Kingsville, Texas. She attended Texas Arts and Industry University (now Texas A&M) and received a BS in…
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Esmeralda Slide Park
Winfeld and Esmeralda Bernal Heights April 2017 In the 1970s a group of volunteers, with some help from the city, conceived and created Esmeralda Slide Park. That volunteer organization later became the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. A New York Times article published in 2010 noted that “At the park’s dedication party in 1979, a shrieking Mayor Dianne Feinstein…
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Woodward Garden
Woodward Gardens Duboce and Woodward Street Mission/South of Market On January 19, 1873, 12,000 people showed up at Woodward’s Garden in the Mission District to watch Frenchman Gus Buislay and a small boy soar aloft in a hot air balloon. The man who made it happen was Robert B. Woodward. Woodward had made his fortune…
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Shadow Kingdom
16th at Missouri Potrero Hill The plaque at the site reads: This artwork is inspired by the history of Mission Bay, a 5,000 year-old tidal marsh that was once the habitat of a rich array of flora and fauna. Growth of the city in the 19th century brought shipyards, warehouses and railroads and this part…
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Mosaics of Balboa Park
Ocean and San Jose Avenue Mission Terrace/Outer Mission There are several mosaics throughout the new Balboa Park Playground. This bench sits on the exterior of the playground and explains about the restoration of the park, it also lists all the donors that helped to make the project possible. The mosaic work is by Rachel Rodi. …
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Balboa Park’s Art Fence
Ocean and San Jose Avenue Mission Terrace/Outer Mission Balboa Park became part of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department in 1908. In the 1950s a swimming pool and baseball fields were added. Then in 1953 a 3,000 person soccer stadium was included in the park. The 1970s brought a tot park, and then age and…
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Monarch
1600 Owens Mission Bay, San Francisco Cliff Garten Studio is internationally recognized for creating integrated public art projects which collaborate with urban design, architecture, landscape architecture and engineering to challenge the assumptions of how public places are built and used. Through a diversity of materials, methods and scale, the studio is committed to exploiting the…
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The Park Emergency Hospital
811 Stanyan Golden Gate Park The Park Emergency Hospital is part of a system of Emergency Hospitals that existed in San Francisco during the early 1900s. There were four of them. Park, Central (in Civic Center and still functioning), Alemany and Harbor (since torn down). This particular hospital has been designated City Landmark #201. Built in…
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Anima by Jim Sanborn
1700 Owens Street Mission Bay, San Francisco This piece, in Mission Bay, is titled Anima, and is by American Sculptor Jim Sanborn (1945 – ). Sanborn is best known for creating the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a piece of work that has captured the imagination of cryptologists around the world for years. He…
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Central Emergency and Detention Hospital
50 Dr. Tom Waddell Place previously 50 Lech Walesa previously 50 Ivy In the alley, somewhat behind the Public Health Building that dominates the corner of Polk and Grove in San Francisco’s Civic Center is a small building that was once the Central Emergency and Detention Hospital. According to the 1918 Municipal Record Volume 11…
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Overflow X
1500 Owens Street Mission Bay, San Francisco Overflow X is a stainless steel sculpture by Jaume Plensa. Jaume Plensa was born in 1955 in Barcelona, where he studied at the Llotja School of Art and Design and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Art. He has been a teacher at the École nationale supérieure…
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Elevators and Marine Engines
235 First Street Foundry Square This wonderful building, sitting amongst all of the surrounding high-rises brings joy to the eye and a question to the mind. The City of San Francisco has labeled this the H.N. Cook Belting Company designed by Ward and Blohme. However the American Architect and Architecture Magazine, Volume 113 disputes that…
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The Metropolitan Laundry Company
7 Heron South of Market, San Francisco The lovely trumpet vine on this building is hiding a lot of the detail of the brick work, but the buildings history is the real charm. Built around 1907, this was once part of the Metropolitan Laundry Company and Power Plant. According to the January 8, 1910 Journal of…
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The Bethlehem Steel Building
Pier 70 Dog Patch The Bethlehem Steel Office Building, also known as Building 101, was designed by San Francisco architect Fredrick H. Meyer. The building anchors Pier 70, sitting at its entry on the corner of Illinois and 20th Street. Built in 1917, the building is Classical Revival in style. The three story building consists of 56,268…
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1176 Harrison
This 9,796 square-foot building is actually two: the east section was constructed in 1912 and the west section was constructed in 1929. The buildings were unified by the present façade in 1929, This 1-story, steel and reinforced concrete industrial building was designed in the Art Moderne style. The interesting architectural details include an incised sign that reads…
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1140 Harrison Street
This nondescript industrial building is about to be torn down for a giant condominium project. I thought it time to get it documented before it disappeared. Part of the SOMA Light Industrial and Residential Historic District, the building has been marked historical due to its age, but that does not prevent it from being torn…
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The Lost Art of Leo Lentelli
San Francisco Main Library Now the Asian Art Museum Sometime between 1915 and 1917, Leo Lentelli was commissioned to design five large sculptures for the facade of the Main Public Library, now the Asian Art Museum. In a March 1918 article titled “An Expression of Decorative Sculpture – Leo Lentelli,” published in The Architect and…