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 of each is finely worked to achieve the most interesting interaction with sunlight and the LED lights at night.
Garten received a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, his studios are in Venice, California.
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Photo courtesy of CliffGartenStudio.com
Cliff Garten has another piece in Mission Bay of San Francisco that you can view here.
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 of the bay was eventually filled with sand and dirt from nearby development, as well as debris from the 1906 earthquake. The five panels that form Shadow Kingdom evoke this layered history. Ship masts intersect with topographical and architectural references. Some of the plants and animals that once lived here, like elk, beaver, salmon, sandpipers and pickle weed are also depicted. When viewed from a distance the sculpture takes the shape of the California grizzly bear, a species that last roamed San Francisco in the mid-1800s. As the sun arcs across the sky, these once endemic species are projected as shadows onto the terrain they once inhabited.
Adriane Colburn was the selected artist for this project. She holds a BFA in Printmaking, from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997 and a MFANew Genres from Stanford University, 2001.
Colburn describes her work: In my practice I seek to reimagine maps and photographs of places (and networks) that are obscured by geography, scale or the passing of time. At the core of this is a fascination with the way that our attempts to make sense of the world around us through maps, data and images result in abstractions that are simultaneously informative and utterly ambiguous. I create my installations by transforming images through a system of physical removal, cutting out everything except imperative lines, thus creating constructions that are informed by voids as much as by positive marks. Through this cutting and display, an intricate array of reflective shadows results. All of my projects are based heavily on research and have a strong connection to place. My work tends to have a fragile appearance, however, my recent projects are constructed primarily of steel and aluminum, giving them a high level of permanence while maintaining their delicacy.
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The San Francisco Art Commission budget for this project was $193,000. The piece sits at the entry of a 453-unit development by Equity Residential, on the edge of what is now called Dagget Park.
Themes in his work have included “making the invisible visible”, with many sculptures focusing on topics such as magnetism, the carioles effect, secret messages, and mysteries of atomic reactions.
On the piers flanking the entry to Frank Lloyd Wrights 1898 architectural studio in Oak Park, Illinois, sit these two pieces, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and executed by Richard Bock.
Bock spent three years at the Berlin Academy studying and later at the Ecole des Beaux Arts School in Paris. In 1891 he returned Chicago to establish a permanent sculpture studio. Almost immediately upon Bock’s return to America, he received three major commissions and for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he sculpted major architectural works for the Mining and Electricity Exposition Halls.
Architect, Stanford White, of the New York firm of McKim, Mead and White, designed the monument’s base. He added the long, curving exedra bench to encourage visitors to sit and enjoy the statue,
According to the Chicago Parks Department:
This whimsical fountain is known as both the Eli Bates Fountain and “Storks at Play”.
The figures for the fountain were cast by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company of New York.
In 1888, Stanford White helped MacMonnies win two major commissions for garden sculpture, a decorative Pan fountain sculpture for Rohallion, the New Jersey mansion of banker Edward Adams, and a work for ambassador Joseph H. Choate, at Naumkeag, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In 1894, Stanford White brought MacMonnies a commission for three bronze groups for the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.
With this sculpture Lorado Taft has Columbus standing, arms crossed, facing the Capitol. He is flanked by an American Indian, representing the “New World” facing West and a bearded elderly man representing the “Old World” facing East. In front of Columbus is Discovery leading the way, and above Columbus is a globe of the world surrounded by American Eagles.
In May 1907 a commission was formed for the memorial fountain headed by prominent members of the Senate and William Howard Taft (no relation), who was Secretary of War at the time and served as committee chairman. Upon agreeing on the location for the fountain, a call for designs was requested by artists from America, Italy and Spain. The reason for the three countries stemmed from the committee idea that “if it should be from the hand of an American, the land which Columbus gave to the world; from an Italian, the land which gave Columbus to the world, or from Spain, the land which made Columbus’s achievement possible.”
Lorado Taft initially conceived a sculpture carved from granite or Georgia marble, however, the trust only allotted enough funds for a concrete structure.
Lorado Zadoc Taft was born in Elmwood, Illinois, in 1860 and died in his home studio in Chicago in 1936.
Taft’s body of work is impressive. Some notable sculptures around Chicago include Eternal Silence and The Crusader both at Graceland Cemetery, and Fountain of the Great Lakes at the Art Institute. He also sculpted the Columbus Fountain at Union Station in Washington DC.
The Eternal Silence, (also called Eternal Silence or Statue of Death) marks the grave of Dexter Graves, who led a group of thirteen families that moved from Ohio to Chicago in 1831, making them some of Chicago’s earliest settlers. Graves died in 1844, seventy-five years before the creation of the statue, and sixteen years before Graceland Cemetery was founded; his body was presumably moved to Graceland from the old City Cemetery. The funds for the monument were provided in the will of his son, Henry, who died in 1907. The will provided $250,000 for a Graves family mausoleum, they received the statue instead.
The statue was sculpted by Lorado Taft and cast by a Chicago foundry owned by Jules Bercham.
I visit the Adams Memorial whenever I am in Washington D.C. This hauntingly beautiful sculpture is one I can never tire of. It is by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
These four bronze plaques sit above the entry doors of the Marquette Building in Chicago. They were done in 1895 by Henry MacNeil (1866-1947). At the time MacNeil shared a studio in the building with painter Charles F. Browne.
After attending one of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows at the Worlds Fair he began depicting the American Indian throughout his art.
Perhaps his best known work is as the designer of the Standing Liberty quarter, which was minted from 1916 to 1930, and carries his initial to the right of the date.
The sculptures were removed when the building was remodeled into the Asian Art museum and sold to a private collector by the City of San Francisco.
