But by September it looked like this (photo from mlinksva's Flickr page):
. . . Which is looking close to the artist's rendering on the JMSF page:
They don't open until June 2008, but Jimmy Stamp got an inside tour and posted 14 photos (check 'em out - they may need to provide Dramamine at the door.) This project has been in progress for so long, I thought it was never going to happen, but it's looking good now.
rest of the story hereWHEN the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his shop, Frederick Meyer, a German-born cabinetmaker with links to the Arts and Crafts movement, turned disaster into opportunity. The next year he and his wife, Laetitia, opened the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts with 3 teachers and 43 students. They had $45 in the bank and a vision of providing rigorous training to fine artists and craftsmen alike.
That school is now the California College of the Arts, a remarkable Bay Area institution that while perhaps unfamiliar outside the region has played an important role in shaping the past 100 years of California art.
“From the beginning the unity of arts and crafts was the most important principle at C.C.A., just like it would be at the Bauhaus, which was established 12 years later,” said Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1959, while a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he exhibited two little-known painters with connections to the college, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira.
Both those successful artists are now among the 100 alumni and faculty members whose work is in “Artists of Invention: A Century of C.C.A.,” on view until March 16 at the Oakland Museum of California.
rest of the story hereDear Oakland Museum,
Your idea of trying to offer a showcase for California art is ridiculous. Your holdings are seriously lacking in any substantial numbers of recent work from So Cal.
Phil Linhares told me that the Museum will stand by this policy of claiming to show all of California, while in the same breath he said the Museum simply cannot afford to buy any work from these guys. Okay, if you are gonna stick up for a obsolete idea at least think of way around it – why not work on getting some pieces on long term loan? Or, hey, what about prints? As a matter of fact, San Francisco’s Crown Point Press has some Baldessaris available right now.
Here is a better idea, and one that requires much less work. Why not re-mission yourself and become the only Bay Area spot that shows an in-depth selection of 20th Century and 21st Century Bay Area art? There is no competition for the title. SFMOMA doesn’t show local art. Not with any serious commitment, at least. Rene di Rosa only shows the bargains he picked up in the last four decades. Oakland could be a beacon in Northern California of the best and brightest from the place we call home. I’m not talking about hosting a Roy De Forest retrospective. I’m talking about thoughtfully rehanging a vast selection of work that brings to life our proud, brilliant and freakish art heritage. How many schools began here? Let’s name them -- AbEx, Bay Area Figurative, Funk, the Mission School, and so on. Don’t be shy, throw some video and performance in the mix. Geez, SRL is still around and pumping its testosterone. Put one of their pieces outside for the kids to enjoy.
You probably haven’t noticed it, but in the last three years a self-supporting art scene has sprung up in Oakland. I say you probably haven’t noticed because I’m trying to be positive here. If you noticed it and ignored it, wtf Oakland Museum? And like you, it seems the scene is gonna stick around. As a matter of fact a few galleries are even bringing in work from out of town, trying to get a dialogue going with our scene, tossing in some new ideas. Mills has hopped on the bandwagon and promised to import more international and East Coast works into the mix. The Magnes is getting local artists to rummage through their archives to create fantastic shows. What are you doing to support us? (No, a bike tour of Oakland does not count.)
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.
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.
I don't have a car so I seldom get to Hunter's Point Art Studios. So, I was very pleased to see this show on Hayes St, within walking distance of home. The show itself is in a very large (if bare bones) corner space and is full of very nice work. I didn't bring my camera with me so I wasn't able to take any photos; however, there is a nice selection of small images up at their website. The show will be up until December 29th so it's a great place to buy art for people on your Christmas list.
(Images from "Off the Point" web site, added by Anna L. Conti.)
Hurray! Glitter! Jamie Vasta’s latest series “Mustn’t” is absolutely stunning. Some of the pieces in the show made me experience a funny fluttery feeling inside. Before seeing this show in the flesh, I wouldn’t believe it was possible to make sophisticated, rich, virtuosic paintings in nothing more than craft glitter and wood stains. 
This series “Mustn’t” is based on Angela Carter’s feminist fairytale about two sisters who seduce a hunter and lure him into the woods in order to torture and murder him. Vasta uses her own photography as source material for her paintings, staging her actors like stills from a movie. I’m guessing she goes through a great deal of research, planning and sketches before shooting the photographs and creating the paintings. The care and flawless execution put into this show packs a powerful one-two punch. On the one hand you have splendidly executed images, whose richness and complexity of colors and textures dazzles the eye. On the other hand, you experience the pure joy of gratuitous amounts of girly glitter. 
Clothed in lacey, flowing dresses, the women depicted in this story are seen at various stages of the narrative. In “As White As Snow” we see a woman shrouded in lace, ghostlike and seductive. The viewer plays the role of the seduced. In “Wil O’ the Wisp” and “The Beseecher”, we see a man, irresistibly drawn into the women’s trap. “Scarcely a Leaf Left on the Tree” is a tender but oddly eerie scene of a woman brushing a man’s hair. We start to realize something is amiss in “Cottontail“ and “Feral”, scenes of a woman skinning a rabbit, and of a woman dressed in animal furs, down on all fours in the forest like a wolf. Finally in “The Knife” and “In the Rushes” we see the women on the verge of stabbing the man to death. He is bound by plastic and gasping for air. The narrative of the story comes through strongly in the paintings and I think is successful in part by the photorealistic illusion of Vasta’s detailed work.
Mission Greenbelt Headquarters initiates a new SFAC Gallery exhibition series, Winter Workshop, which is designed to support artists engaged in the creation of long-term projects through providing space, administrative support and funding at an intermediary stage of the generative process. After a call for submissions, the staff of the SFAC Gallery chose Amber Hasselbring’s community-based urban earth artwork project, The Mission Greenbelt.
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