New Bay Area Art Museums in Presidio and Napa

From the SFGate Art Page:

Proposed Presidio museum would be modern addition to historic military site, by John King

Gap founder Donald Fisher has unveiled the design of the museum he wants to build in San Francisco's Presidio - a sedate but glassy modern building bearing little resemblance to the historic military structures that would be its neighbors.

The two-story, 100,000-square-foot structure would occupy the crest of the Parade Ground of the former military base that in 1994 became a national park. It would resemble a long stack of overlapping cubes, with white masonry walls broken by stretches of clear glass to allow views of work inside by artists such as Alexander Calder and Richard Serra.

If the proposal is accepted by Presidio officials, there also would be a network of terraces where sculptures could be displayed - including Serra's monumental "Sequence," a 14-foot-high, 65-foot-long maze of coiled steel that was the centerpiece of his acclaimed career retrospective during the summer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
. . . rest of the story here.

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Art collector couple builds museum-size cave in Napa for collection, by Carolyne Zinko

San Francisco couple Norah and Norman Stone, already renowned in jet-set circles for their playful personas and modern art collection, created even more of a stir when they unveiled the cave - and a new experiential water and sky sculpture by James Turrell - to the art world and friends at a splashy party over the last weekend of October.

Like other homeowners who outgrow their residences or amass too much stuff, they needed an add-on. In their case, it wasn't a new bedroom attached to their Pacific Heights mansion or their Wine Country farmhouse, but a 5,700-square foot cave in which to display the vast number of oversize works they have purchased through the years. Most are simply too big to display in a home and require a museum-sized space to be seen. And with cost as no deterrent - Norman Stone's father was the late billionaire insurance magnate W. Clement Stone - the sky was literally the limit.

"It's a private gallery," Norman Stone said. "It's not big enough for a museum."

. . . rest of the story here.

(Images from SFGate - top photo by Gluckman Mayner Architects; bottom photo by Drew Altizer)