Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Absorption
488 Folsom Street San Francisco Absorption is the first permanent public art installation in the United States for Berlin-based artist, Alicja Kwade. According to Kwade’s artist statement, Absorption (2018), is a sculptural abstraction utilizing mirrors and stones to produce an optical illusion that plays with viewers’ perceptions of dimensionality. The installation was included as a way…
-
Signal on Treasure Island
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…
-
Pathways
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…
-
Benny Bufano’s Grave
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…
-
Marina Airfield
Marina District 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. 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…
-
Wentworth Alley Mosaic
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…
-
Marina District Lighthouse
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,…
-
Forest Hills Muni Station
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…
-
Noguchi at Chase Center
Chase Center Plaza Waterside Dogpatch 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…
-
Alicia McCarthy at the Proper Hotel
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…
-
Seeing Spheres at Chase Center
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…
-
Point of Departure
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. To get inspiration for the signs Oliver stood on the corner for five days asking three questions of passers…
-
Tompkins Stairs
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. According to a 2019 article in the San Francisco Chronicle: The park…
-
ATSF Car Ferry Slip
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…
-
Sculpture Garden of the Woodstock School of Art
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…
-
OPUS 40
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…
-
Woodstock Artists Cemetery
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…
-
Fern Street’s New Look
Fern Street Fern Street at Polk Street 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.…
-
Vitreous Bench
Millenium Tower 301 Mission Street The public entrance 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…
-
Digital Oaks
Millenium Tower 301 Mission Street Public Entrance 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. This installation…
-
California Mission
Millenium Tower 301 Mission Street Public Entrance 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,…
-
923 Folsom
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…
-
Tapestry of Life: The Warp and Weft of Care
CPMC Cathedral Hill Campus1101 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…
-
Conservatory of Flowers Photo Montage
CPMC Cathedral Hill Campus1101 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…
-
Split Button
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…
-
Paint Torch
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…
-
Covenant by Alex Liberman
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…
-
Grumman Greenhouse
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…
-
WFT at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
Polk Street Between Hayes and Grove 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…
-
“Modern and Ancient Science” by Gordon Langdon
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…
Got any book recommendations?