“Nothing is more expensive than cheap framing,” says Michael W. Perry.
By FRANCINE BREVETTI
Occasionally people enter Michael Perry’s shop at 1837 Divisadero Street and ask for maps of the Island of California. They’ve come to the right place. Among his treasures, Perry has a selection of images of this popular fallacy of the 16th and 17th centuries — that California once was its own island.
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Jean Halvorsen leads private tours of the SF Museum of Modern Art.
CULTURE BEAT | PAM FEINSILBER
For 35 years, Jean Halvorsen has traveled between her home in the neighborhood and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Back when the museum was in the Civic Center, above the Herbst Theater, she volunteered as a docent. In 2000, once the museum was ensconced in its own building south of Market, she was asked to set up a private tour program and hire the guides.
Now she’s one of 15 private guides on staff, each week leading paying groups that select the focus of their tour — whether paintings and sculpture, photography, architecture or, between now and October 9, the just-opened exhibition Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, featuring 44 paintings by Norway’s most famous artist.
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A crane hoists roofing material to the temple’s historic dome.
ESPECIALLY SWEET MUSIC will rise up into the freshly repainted and retrofitted dome atop Congregation Sherith Israel’s historic home at California and Webster on June 9 at a special Shabbat service celebrating the end of a long-running renovation.
“We did it!” exclaimed David Newman, co-chair of the seismic retrofit campaign. “The Sherith Israel community has risen to the occasion.”
“We are in compliance with all of the city’s seismic requirements,” said former congregation board member Ellen Schumm, who has been involved with the project since its inception. “This building is so stable, it’s awesome.”
The $16 million project to strengthen the 1905 building — which survived the earthquake and fire the next year and served as a temporary courthouse during the rebuilding — was spurred by new standards established after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
The first phase of the project, completed in 2011, included an innovative engineering plan to reinforce the exterior walls of the sanctuary without affecting the elaborately painted interior walls. It also stripped away the salmon-colored paint that had been unwisely applied to the sandstone walls half a century earlier.
The second phase, just completed, involved reroofing, repainting and waterproofing the dome, removing the last vestiges of salmon paint and returning the dome to the color of the sandstone on the base. It also added solar panels on the roof and included work on nearly every other part of the building.
“Our beautiful sanctuary will be here — and be strong — for generations to come,” said senior rabbi Jessica Graf.
EARLIER: In a video from January 2011, the retrofit project was underway.
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Text & Photographs by BARBARA WYETH
Every year in the late spring, we florists at Bloomers, over on Washington Street near Broderick, get to share in the time-honored, all-American ritual of prom.
For 40 years, Bloomers has been providing flowers for families in the neighborhood and beyond. The mother who got her wedding flowers may call for her son’s corsage, the same son whose mom received a sweet bouquet the day he was born. Her daughter, who needs a boutonniere for her date, probably got a charming little nosegay for her ballet recital not that long ago. Or so it sometimes seems.
Now the son and daughter are ordering flowers, perhaps for the first time, to honor this special occasion in their own lives. Some of these high-schoolers are nervous about ordering wristlets and boutonnieres. Others are so self-assured that we marvel at their sophistication.
Making the boutonnieres and especially the wristlet corsages is labor intensive and time consuming, but the results are beautiful. And the parade of young women and young men — many with proud moms and dads — who come to pick up the prom flowers is endearing and great fun.
Flowers for prom — a sweet tradition that endures.
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The proposed view from Pine and Steiner Streets, with new buildings over a parking garage.
LEADERS OF St. Dominic’s Church are embarking on an ambitious building program that would demolish the 1929 school building on Pine Street and add five new buildings atop a 130-car parking garage.
Three of the new buildings would house church administrative offices, a pre-school and a much larger parish hall. They would be built on an above-ground podium over a one-level, mostly underground garage.
The church building, built in 1928, would not be altered beyond completion of an ongoing $20 million restoration project.
“It’s the parish hall that’s driving this whole thing,” said parishioner-developer Bill Campbell, who presented the plans to three dozen neighbors at an April 5 hearing. “This is the most active parish in San Francisco. And there’s a great need for pre-schools.”
The first phase of the “pastoral center and residential project” is expected to cost $10 million and take 18 months.
The church has begun an environmental impact report for a second phase — “We don’t know when or how,” Campbell said — which would build about 120 residential rental units in two buildings on the corner of Pine and Pierce, with two levels of parking underneath.
The rentals will generate revenue to support the church, said Campbell.
“We appreciate that you spent 30 minutes talking about how wonderful this will be for the parish,” one local resident told Campbell. “But it will be a catastrophe for the neighborhood.”
Architectural renderings from Field Paoli, courtesy of SocketSite
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Carol and John Field, longtime neighborhood residents.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD lost two of its outstanding citizens and creative minds in recent weeks when architect John Field and author Carol Field died within a few days of each other.
John Field was noted for the homes he designed in Pacific Heights and especially for his enlightened approach to shopping centers, including the Stanford Shopping Center and downtown Santa Barbara. He was also a filmmaker and a photographer.
Carol Field was a prolific author who became an authority on Italian food, even though she acknowledged she was “the first Italian in my family tree.” After trips to Italy to make The Urban Preserve, John’s first architectural documentary, Carol made it her mission to learn everything about Italian baking. They later owned a home there, and many more books and a novel followed. Earlier she had been a co-owner of the beloved Minerva’s Owl bookstore on Union Street.
Shortly after John died of cancer, Carol suffered a stroke and never recovered.
“She couldn’t make it without him,” neighboring chef and cookbook author Joyce Goldstein told the Chronicle. ”They were a blessed couple.”
“She seemed to listen as much with her eyebrows as her eyes,” wrote Corby Kummer in The Atlantic. He told the Fields he enjoyed visiting them “to observe at close range your utter companionability. You were and will remain my models for the complete and caring civility with which two people can treat each other.”
EARLIER: “Fillmore to Italy and back again“
A younger Carol and John Field: always utterly companionable.
MORE: “She tied tradition to captivating stories”
OBITUARIES:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
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Photographs of Agelio Batle’s graphite sculptures by Jon Batle
ART | CLAIRE CARLEVARO
Twenty-five years ago, I saw a piece of artwork by Agelio Batle at the Hayes Valley gallery owned by the visionary Federico de Vera. I bought the wall sculpture, then went in search of the artist.
Thus began my journey with a man whose creativity is born in spirituality and nurtured by skill: a true seeker, an explorer and a remarkable inspiration. Nature and the human figure are his inspirations. He delights in discovering the potential of unused materials, often castoffs: found photos, plastic milk cartons, discarded reference books.
In addition to his steady creation of unique works, Batle has invented a form of graphite artistry available in many museums and shops, including Hi Ho Silver at 1904 Fillmore Street.
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Paper Tree’s Linda Mihara with a goldfish made of gold paper.
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
If you’re interested in creating a bit of art to make your home the envy of the neighborhood, here’s how: Pick up a 6-by-6-foot piece of paper at Paper Tree, located at 1743 Buchanan in Japantown. Fold it carefully about a thousand times or so in precisely the proper manner and voila — a dragon such as few have ever seen.
You may want to practice on something slightly less elaborate. But a glimpse of “Ryujin 3.2,” the dragon created by one of the world’s most highly skilled origami artists, now on display at the Paper Tree, is definitely an inspiration.
Origami is the ancient art of folding paper into limitless shapes. While other cultures have adapted paper-folding into various traditions, it is most closely associated with Japanese culture and heritage. It was the aspiration to honor and perpetuate this cultural tradition that led Nobuo and Shizuko Mihara to found Paper Tree in 1968. The shop is one of only a handful of family owned and run businesses remaining in Japantown.
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Cassandria Blackmore created a showcase for her work on Fillmore Street.
FOR SEVEN YEARS, people walked by the gallery at 1906 Fillmore, looked in to admire the artwork on the walls, but never found the jewel box of a space open.
That was exactly the idea.
Cassandria Blackmore, who first made her mark in the glass art scene in Seattle, transformed the storefront in 2010 into a San Francisco showcase for her art, which is uniquely her own. She does reverse paintings on glass, then shatters and reassembles them.
“I had used the concept of a small locked storefront in Seattle,” she says. “The space was shallow and easily viewed from the sidewalk. For some it was more comfortable than stepping into a gallery. I found the idea of bringing my art to the street an intriguing one and discovered that it sustained itself.”
Cassandria Blackmore painting on glass.
Blackmore created similar spaces in Seattle, San Francisco and Carmel, and her career flourished.
But she and her husband, the musician Jon Blackmore, and their two kids wanted more warmth and sunshine than San Francisco offered. They found it in Santa Barbara.
“I had always intended to stay in San Francisco,” she says. “But when we came to Santa Barbara, I was struck by the south-facing light. There was a glow to it, nestled between the mountains and the sea.”
Then serendipity stepped in. They responded to a posting on Craigslist for a live-work space built by a pair of photographers in 1907. It turned out to be a neglected historic building two blocks from the ocean with studios that had been used by many other artists — including Diego Rivera, who painted his self-portrait there now gracing the front of Mexico’s 500 peso note.
They bought it, fought back the jungle in the side yard, and created a studio for her, a gallery for her work, a home for their family and a rental unit.
“Fillmore led us to Santa Barbara,” Blackmore says. “It was so special to be on Fillmore as a child and to return to it as an adult. It was the reentry point back to my roots in California. I will always be grateful.”
She gave up her space on Fillmore Street in February. The dream continues in Santa Barbara.
The Blackmores have found an artistic home in Santa Barbara.
MORE: “The Blackmore family’s dream“
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The artist Bruce Conner ran for supervisor in 1967.
ART | JEROME TARSHIS
During the early and middle ’60s, when I was thinking about moving from New York to San Francisco, one of the inducements was that Bruce Conner lived here. My avant-garde film friends thought his first film, A Movie (1958), was an instant classic, followed by one success after another.
The objects he made — assemblage sculptures — were being shown at major galleries in New York, London, Paris, Rome and Mexico City. He was in great collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Not bad for a 30ish artist born and brought up in Kansas.
A more complicated Bruce Conner is the subject of “It’s All True,” his fullest retrospective so far, almost worshipfully received earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and now at SFMOMA through January 22.
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