News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
Longtime Fillmore resident and noted artist Bill Shields died Wednesday, April 14, just a week shy of his 85th birthday. Shields and his wife Denise in recent years have owned and operated the Artists Inn at 2231 Pine Street. The inn is housed in his former studio, which faces a sunny patio behind their home.…
F loral designer Kaori Imaizumi is preparing for a museum exhibition this month, as she has every spring since she opened her flower shop in the neighborhood in 2006. She’s participating once again in “Bouquets to Art,” the annual extravaganza in which floral arrangements interpret and comment upon works of art in the DeYoung Museum in…
KQED reports on a new dance theater production about San Francisco’s Fillmore District being created by choreographer Jacinta Vlach and saxophonist Howard Wiley.
A local gallery is presenting “Theophilus Brown: Nudes,” spotlighting one of the pioneers of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which helped change the course of art history in the 1950s. Brown, now 90, moved to the neighborhood in 2001. He still works daily in his nearby studio and recently joined a new drawing group. “I…
PHOTOGRAPHY | THOMAS REYNOLDS When Gerald Ratto was a student at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1950s, he would hang out in the Fillmore with his camera and a bottle of brandy, which sometimes made it easier to make friends. “I wasn’t documenting anything,” he says. “I was just photographing the people…
In the late 1980s, while driving down Geary Street in San Francisco, designer Tony Duquette discovered an abandoned and vandalized synagogue. He immediately purchased the building. After thoroughly remodeling and updating the structure [located on Geary near Fillmore where the post office now stands], Tony began creating a new exhibition named the Canticle of the…
Noted French artist Daniel Levigoureux made a visit to the neighborhood last month and quickly found his way to Alta Plaza Park, where he was captivated by these Scott Street Victorians.
Despite an earlier recommendation that it be removed and relocated or put into storage, “Blue,” the public artwork on the bridge at Fillmore and Geary, will remain in place. At a recent meeting, the citizens advisory council was told by officials from the Redevelopment Agency, which commissioned the artwork, that it would be too expensive…
ICONS | LESLIE M. FREUDENHEIM From 1876 to 1910, a group of creative and pioneering men and women in Northern California sought an architectural expression appropriate to the region. They rejected Victorian excess, preferring simple homes of natural materials. Their aspirations went beyond architecture to advocate a sensibility and a way of life. The cradle…
LEGENDARY PHOTOGRAPHER Ruth Bernhard, who lived up a narrow stair in a Victorian flat on Clay Street from 1953 until she died in December 2006 at age 101, was released to “fly with the angels” — her term for death — at a memorial service March 31, 2007, at Calvary Presbyterian Church. Bernhard was remembered…