Treasure Island – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Treasure Island Museum Mural

Posted by Cindy on March 30, 2019

Mar 302019

Treasure Island Museum
Former Administration Building
Treasure Island

This mural resides in what was originally called the Navy Museum inside the GGIE’s Administration Building. The museum opened October 3, 1975 with exhibits representing the Navy and Marine Corps from the early 1800’s to the present.

Eventually the collection grew to include the Coast Gaurd and then the Golden Gate International Exhibition, the Bay Bridge, which runs through the island, and the island itself. Once the museum began covering far more than the Naval history the name was changed to the Treasure Island Museum.

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 museum closed in 1997 when the Navy began to close down their base on the island and viewing the mural is limited. Dates and times can be found on the TI website schedule.

This mural, by Lowell Nesbitt, is 251 feet long and 26 feet high and was commissioned for the opening of the museum. You will find scenes showing the history of the Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific since 1813.

Lowell Blair Nesbitt (October 4, 1933 – July 8, 1993) was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor.

Nesbitt was a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and also attended the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England, where he created a number of works in the mediums of stained glass and etching.

Bliss Dance

Posted by Cindy on June 6, 2013

Jun 062013

9th and Avenue of the Palms
Treasure Island

This piece, by Marco Cochrane , was featured at Burning Man in 2010. According to the supporting art group Black Rock :

The sculpture, of a dancing woman, stands 40 feet tall, weighs 7000 pounds and is ingeniously constructed of triangulated geodesic struts. By day, the dancer’s ‘skin’, made of stainless steal mesh, shimmers in the sun. By night, it alights brilliantly with a complex array of 1000 slowly changing l.e.d. colored lights. Viewers may interact with and manipulate the lighting effects with an iphone application. The dancer’s delicate, graceful form precariously balances on one foot, adding to the astonishing impression of imminent movement and lifelike presence.

Marco Cochrane was born to American artists in Venice, Italy in 1962. He was raised in California in the midst of the political and cultural movement. As a result, Marco learned respect for oneness, balance, the sacred, and the imperative to make the world a better place. In particular, he identified with the female struggle with oppression, and he saw feminine energy and power as critical to the world’s balance. Supporting this change quickly became Marco’s life’s mission, although, it never occurred to him that art would be the vehicle. On a dare, he explored sculpting people and found a talent he was unaware of…the ability to re-create a person’s essence in figurative form. When Marco started sculpting, he realized he was pursuing the mission he’d set out to do…to empower women.

Photo by David Yu, you can view more photos of Bliss Dance at Night here:

Edison and DaVinci by Olmsted

Posted by Cindy on April 23, 2013

Apr 232013

CCSF Ocean View Campus
50 Phelan
Sunnyside

According to CCSF’s website “Archibald Cloud, the Chief Deputy Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, began in 1930 to vigorously articulate a long held educational dream: that the “premier” county in the State—San Francisco—must have the same educational “jewel” as did 38 of the State’s 58 counties. That is, it must have a junior college! Cloud hired world prominent architect, Timothy Pflueger. The two rapidly moved ahead with the design and the construction of the gymnasiums as well as Science Hall, a building they were determined to make into “a showplace of monumental architecture.”

As Vice Chairman of Fine Arts at the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, Pflueger was able to have transferred to the College, at no cost , several of the culturally significant projects created by artists during the fair. These include these two sculptures carved by Fredrick Olmsted. They are 7 feet high, four foot square, and 9 tons of granite, representing Leonardo DaVinci and Thomas Edison. (In researching these two pieces I have also found reference that they are limestone or Tuff stone, my personal opinion is that they are limestone.)

The sculptures were carved for the WPA exhibition “Art in Action”. Art in Action was an exhibit of artists at work displayed for four months in the summer of 1940 at the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) held on Treasure Island. Many famous artists took part in the exhibit, including Dudley C. Carter, woodcarver and Diego Rivera, muralist.

Frederick Olmsted (April 10, 1911-February 14, 1990) was born in San Francisco. A collateral relative of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Olmsted studied science at Stanford and art at the California School of Fine Arts, where he met and married Barbara Greene. In 1937, the couple visited fellow student Helen Phillips in Paris and spent time working at Atelier 17.

Olmsted worked in the WPA, assisting John Langley Howard and George Harris in the Coit Tower, creating his own mural on a three-foot panel above the main entrance. He also assisted Diego Rivera with his mural at the Art Institute in San Francisco. Olmsted created numerous murals and sculptures for public works in San Francisco, including the Theory and Science mural at San Francisco City College. He taught art for a while at Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

After Barbara and he divorced, he continued to work as a sculptor, moving to Cleveland where he designed medical equipment for the Cleveland Clinic. It was there he developed a machine to shock the diseased heart of one of his dogs, a prototype for today’s pacemaker. Olmsted then worked at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, designing equipment and machinery for the Oceanographic Institute. He died in Falmouth, Massachusetts.