Neighborhood resident Theophilus Brown — one of the great figures in 20th century California art and one of the pioneering members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement — at 92 is still in his studio every day. A new exhibition opening tonight, “Theophilus Brown: An Artful Life,” presents work from throughout his long and successful [...]
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By Kellie Ell A once vibrant mural on the south side of the Boom Boom Room at Fillmore and Geary is now covered in gold, hot pink and white spray paint and other graffiti. Looming above, the next-door National Dollar store has painted its name and a parade of products it sells — soda, crackers, [...]
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By Wanda M. Corn Alice Babette Toklas met Gertrude Stein in the fall of 1907. She had come to Paris from San Francisco with her next-door neighbor, Harriet Levy, and had enough money to last her a year, although she hoped an inheritance from her grandfather’s estate would allow her to stay longer. Little did [...]
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ART | Jerome Tarshis “The Steins Collect,” the excellent exhibition now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, focuses on Gertrude Stein for understandable reasons: She was one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century and, together with Alice B. Toklas, was also the dominant half of the most famous lesbian couple [...]
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A rt patrons Michael and Sarah Stein lived in the Fillmore, then primarily a Jewish neighborhood, before they joined his sister Gertrude and brother Leo in Paris in the early 1900s. So did Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas. The Stein family owned and operated some of San Francisco’s many cable car lines, which Michael [...]
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Travelers through the swank new terminal two at San Francisco International Airport will find friends from the neighborhood to bid them hail and farewell. Birds from Alta Plaza Park are part of an ingenious new piece of interactive musical art created by longtime neighborhood resident Walter Kitundu for a children’s play area. It’s intended for [...]
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Naturally they’ll have a green living roof on the new eco-conscious assembly building now nearing completion behind Drew School at California and Broderick Streets. But they’ll also have a vertical garden created by Parisian botanist-artist Patrick Blanc — a rock star among gardeners credited with inventing the concept and planting gardens on walls around the [...]
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PHOTOGRAPHY | Thomas Reynolds Singer James Brown may have been the hardest-working man in show business, but David Johnson is surely the hardest-working 84-year-old in the photography business. In recent months he’s had four major exhibitions — mostly photographs from the heyday of the Fillmore’s jazz era — including one in Atlanta and another at [...]
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ARCHITECTURE | Erica Reder Every year thousands of people visit a building designed by California’s most celebrated female architect, Julia Morgan. Some seek out her work by taking a tour of Hearst Castle or the Berkeley City Club. Others have incidental encounters while walking around the Mills College campus, swimming at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Pool [...]
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For months the temple on California Street that is home to Congregation Sherith Israel has been shrouded in scaffolding as the historic building undergoes a seismic retrofit. This week much of the scaffolding came down and the stained glass windows were re-installed — and the temple was no longer pink. EARLIER: At long last, temple [...]
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