In what has become a tradition, this year we again visited the de Young Museum for its Bouquets to Art, in which flower arrangers present displays inspired by artworks in the museum’s collections.

Each year distinct trends can be identified. This year the popular color schemes were blue and white, as above, and combinations of orange and pink or peach, as below.

Time for blogging has been hard to come by lately, but I’ll try to post some more photos from Bouquets to Art soon, as many of the arrangements really were spectacular.

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Back in the 1990s I ran a publishing company called Mercury House. One of the free-lance copy editors and proofreaders who worked on many of our books was Hazel White. I always admired her judgment and balance. Since that time she edited an edition of the Sunset Garden Book and wrote several books for Chronicle Books, as well, no doubt, as working on many other excellent projects. Now her picture will appear around town as part of a campaign to end racism. The reasons for this are explained at SFMOMA:Open Space. Bravo Hazel!

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This photo shows visitors exiting the Planetarium at the recently opened Academy of Science building in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The building was designed by Renzo Piano. I’ll be running some more photos from this building over the next few days as I try to get caught up on my blogging.

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The Exploratorium has a pretty cool roof cam. It is set to shift its view every fifteen minutes, or you can select from several presets.

If several people are visiting the site at the same time they queue up to take turns controlling the camera. When you are in control of the camera you have the ability to scroll right/left and up/down. You can also zoom out or in, between 1x wide angle and 25x telephoto).

The presets include:

Golden Gate Bridge

Wind Surfing Area

Alcatraz

Golden Gate Bridge Approach

Palace of Fine Arts Lagoon

Weeping Women at Palace of Fine Arts

The Exploratorium’s Weather Station

Another Bridge View (this is the one shown above)

And the Wave Organ (an Exploratorium project with artist-in-residence Peter Richards)

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Construction has begun on a new rooftop garden at SFMOMA. Making a virtue of the necessity of providing parking, the museum will install the garden atop the parking garage adjacent to their galleries.

I suspect the space will often be used for fundraising parties.

The image shows the glass walkway that will connect the garage garden with the museum. More images like this one at wallpaper.com.

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This unusual view of the walkbridge at SFMOMA was from jasper’s photostream. Foreshortened figures are silhouetted by the skylight overheard.

I posted quite a few photos of the 2006 Bouquets to Art but, although I took photos the next year, I don’t think I ever managed to find the time to put many of them on the web. The light level in museums is always low, and this is a case where a digital SLR would be a real benefit. Instead, I still shoot with my Canon A620 — without a flash of course; it pains me to see people ruining their photos that way! — and then fix the images in Photoshop. Because of the low lighting I keep the aperture wide open and the zoom at the wide extreme (I just move the camera closer if I need to zoom in). Since I can’t bring myself to post raw images, my photo prep work is a little time consuming

Here are a couple of images from last year’s event.

From February 23 through May 18, SFMOMA will presents an exhibition of photographic works by Lee Friedlander (the show was organized by organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York). B in the D, when photography was getting a little full of itself, Friedlander infused it with irony and energy. His B/W photos often have remarkable immediacy, and they are always cunningly framed. The SFMOMA show will present some 500 of his photographs.

Shown:
Lee Friedlander, Nude, 1982, Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 x 12 1/16” (20.4 x 30.7 cm). Purchase The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2006 Lee Friedlander

Music was a consistent source of inspiration for Paul Klee, spanning the arc of his career and informing much of his practice. This exhibition features works by Klee that reveal his affinity for music, as well as new drawings by Devendra Banhart, a musician and visual artist, made in conjunction with his most recent album, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. Part of an ongoing presentation within Matisse and Beyond, the exhibition highlights the synesthetic relationship present in both artists’ works on paper, drawing on Dr. Carl Djerassi’s gifts and extended loans to SFMOMA of more than 150 works by Klee.

Here is a video of a performance by Banhart.

The donors receive tax breaks because their donations are made to an organization with nonprofit status. According to the Los Angeles Times, “the governor’s aides and the foundation say the arrangement takes a financial burden off taxpayers while allowing Schwarzenegger to serve as an ambassador for the state. Watchdog groups contend it has the potential to allow moneyed donors to wield undue influence without public scrutiny.”

Among the donors whose names were recently revealed is Don Fisher, founder of the Gap clothing stores, who is attempting to create a museum in San Francisco’s Presidio for his personal art collection.

LINK:
Donors to secret nonprofit named – Los Angeles Times