Frisco Vista

More than one hundred examples of work by San Francisco artist Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch will be on sale at Tiny showcase at 7:30 EST, July 15. Via San Francisco Art & Design Lover.
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Alton Kelley, one of the pioneers of the SF psychedelic graphic arts movement, has died. Kelley and his longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse helped to fashion a style that featured bold colors, play with figure-ground, allusions to art nouveau, and wildly subversive typography. Psychedelic artists like Kelley were forerunners of the more grunge-oriented illegibility movement in [...]

Victor Arnautoff studied at the California School of Fine Arts before going to Mexico, where he worked as an assistant to muralist Diego Rivera; his subsequent work shows a strong Rivera influence. He created several murals in the Bay Area during the 1930s. Above is City Alive, which is located at the base of [...]

Vicki Saulls does interesting ceramic sculpture. The image above is from the North Beach pool and clubhouse in San Francisco. The work was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission.
I’d like to show you her beautiful California native plant ceramic tiles. But that image is running with a copyright notice, so I can’t. This [...]

The image is from GypsyRock’s photostream. GypsyRock has been documenting San Francisco graffiti for some time, having amassed a photoset comprising 1110 photos.
What has always struck me about graffiti, throughout the world, is how essentially conservative it is. You might expect that such a transgressive medium would give birth to a chaotic range of expressioin, [...]

Gallery 415, located at 49 Geary Street, features work by emerging and mid career Latin American artists. It’s great finally to see a gallery in the city devoted to this large, diverse, and creative region. I think Gallery 415 will be celebrating its first anniversary this weekend. It is currently displaying work by Claudio Roncoli [...]

The Fine Arts Museums presents its 24th annual Bouquets to Art at the de Young March 11 through 15 this year. It’s always a good idea to go early before the flowers start to look a little wilted (prepare for crowds). This year floral arrangers will prepare some 150 bouquets to accompany the museum’s regular [...]

This year the San Francisco Ballet, celebrating its 75th year, will premiere ten ballets by ten choreographers, including Julia Adam, Val Caniparoli, Jorma Elo, Margaret Jenkins, James Kudelka, Mark Morris, Yuri Possokhov, Paul Taylor, Stanton Welch and Christopher Wheeldon. I was interesting in learning more. But when I looked on Google for the ballet’s [...]

Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart is the title of an exhibition at SFMOMA that will feature a performance by Banhart. He will perform 8:00 p.m., January 17, in the Phyllis Wattis Theater. The event is sold out, but the museum is selling tickets for a live simulcast of the performance. Banhart will [...]

This cool San Francisco neighborhood map is currently sold out from ORK posters, but I assume it will be back in print at some point. It’s much more sophisticated from a graphic design point of view than this version.
The typeface appears to be FF DIN Condensed.
(Note that the map is copyrighted by ORK design and [...]

An alternative proposal to the Fisher Art Museum in the Presidio has been put forward by a group of historians and conservationists. The group supports a smaller museum devoted to the local history. Will the proposal get a fair hearing? Doubtful. The Chronicle reports:
Opponents of Fisher’s museum plan complain that the competition sounds more wide [...]

The SFMOMA exhibition page.

In 1940, Friday Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who had been divorced for a year, met on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Rivera was in town to paint Pan American Unity, a large mural commissioned by the Golden Gate International Exposition.

In the mural, Rivera had depicted himself with his back to his ex-wife. In the image [...]

Gap founder Donald Fisher’s announced intention to build a new museum in the Presidio has been widely reported. Namastenancy has posted a good summary. Apparently Mr. Fisher has a fine collection of modern and contemporary art, although it is difficult to tell at this time “whether the Fisher collection has institutional quality, like the Frick, [...]

Yesterday’s mystery image was a detail from a stainless steel “scholar’s rock” by the contemporary Chinese artist Zhan Wang. The example shown is displayed on the patio near the cafe at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park; the green colors were reflections of the trees and plants outside the museum.

It’s a detail from an artwork prominently displayed in an often-visited place in San Francisco. Who can guess what the artwork is? Take a wild stab! Points for artist, style, well, anything really …
Answer tomorrow.

The above image fascinates me. It’s from an exhibition of the prints of Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), currently showing at the Asian Art Museum in the city’s civic center.
Yoshitoshi witnessed a period of great transition in Japan, during which the country essentially went from feudalism to modernism. He works out of the ukiyo-e or “floating world” [...]

A youtuber named Ryan Erickson, whose handle is AlwaysThrowROCK, has posted an interesting video of San Francisco graffiti and street art. The video is “dedicated to those who make San Francisco a city of unbridled love compassion and beauty.” As a local I would have liked to have known the locations of the images; still, [...]

I’ve moved this post to a static html page because it wasn’t formatting properly here.  The new location for the summary of 2007 art exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area is here.

I have in front of me some travel guides to San Francisco. I’m curious to see how they cover the city’s museums, and specifically the Asian Art Museum (hereafter AAM), because I will be putting up a page on the Asian (as it’s commonly known) soon. The results are interesting. Here’s a selection:

Fodor’s barely covers [...]