Art & Design

Making a mark on Pacific Heights

Posted on March 2, 2012 by editors

John Field designed the six shingled row houses at 2641-63 Union Street.

ARCHITECTURE | JOHN FIELD

Although I’ve lived in Pacific Heights for many years and designed homes here, I never thought of myself as a Pacific Heights architect. When I was asked recently how many houses in the neighborhood I have designed, I had to stop and think. I’d never counted them.

There must be 20 or more, most of them published in Sunset or House and Garden. Alas, they aren’t easy to pick out. There’s no unique window style, no striking modern minimalism; San Francisco wouldn’t stand for such statements in the 1960s and 70s. I designed gracious modern housing, most of it blending in with shingles or hiding behind a Victorian exterior. Even then some of the matrons of Pacific Heights thought my designs were out of place.

They may have had a point. I used bay windows in designs that weren’t Victorian, shingle walls as if they were white plaster, and glass wherever there was a view. I turned a ballroom for a mansion into a three-story home and carved parking out of many existing residences, one of them still with a fireplace, mantle and marble trim in the garage.

The real art of designing in San Francisco has always been capitalizing on whatever view there is, while concealing the exposures that aren’t so good. That’s true for city living everywhere.

Within three blocks on Broadway, I designed three completely new houses that are visually related only by their proportions. On the surrounding blocks are eight or 10 irreverently remodeled Victorians, two of them for my own family.

Probably my best known local project is a group of six shingled row houses at 2641-2663 Union Street. The design provoked a storm of protest from neighbors, who feared their property would be devalued by these houses only 16 feet wide — not realizing their own Victorians were often no wider, although built on wider lots. The design was published in several magazines and won many awards, including a special governor’s award for contemporary California design.

As in all cities, the housing stock is limited in Pacific Heights. New owners want to make their houses their own, so they remodel. People live differently now than they did before, and their houses reflect the changes. But I still harbor a hope that some of the simple elegant spirit of the places I have designed will live on.

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Still modern after all these years

Posted on January 7, 2012 by editors

Photograph of Vasilios Kiniris at Zinc Details by Drew Altizer

Q & A | VASILIOS KINIRIS

Zinc Details has turned 20. How did it all begin?

I was fresh out of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley and simply had an idea and some very strong feelings. At the university, Wendy Nishimura and I had developed an understanding and shared a passion for the modern classics of furniture design. In travels to Europe and Japan, we came face to face with new styles hatched from traditional forms. And naturally, we began to form strong relationships with young artisans and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area who were creating excitement with simply styled, highly functional and innovative pieces.

What led you to put your architectural education to use in a retail design store?

It takes a long time for architecture to actually be realized and influence a person’s life. Retail design is a lot more immediate. You can touch people on an everyday level. Personally, we love to collect, admire and interact with beautifully designed products and the store is a reflection of our vision and taste. Having the knowledge of history of architecture and art is also a great reference when dealing with modern design products. All products designed today have references to the past. We can appreciate all the thought process put in to develop the products. And even when creating a display, we can visualize space relations to the products better.
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Journal of a woman’s life — in paint

Posted on January 5, 2012 by editors

Self Portrait (1977) by Joan Brown

ART | JEROME TARSHIS

Joan Brown (1938-1990) may have thought of herself as an unclassifiable artist. “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,” the survey of her paintings at the San Jose Museum of Art, positions her as one who portrayed women’s lives, beginning with her own. Curators need to say something, but it’s an idea that hardly narrows things down. A woman is called upon to play many parts — and Brown tells us that she enjoyed most of them.

Joan Brown (nee Beatty) was born in San Francisco and received a Catholic education through high school. Her teachers seemed to offer her a choice between becoming a nun or becoming a 1950s wife and mother. By sheer chance, she saw an ad for the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, visited its campus, saw people with beards and sandals, and thought an entirely different world had been opened to her.

As a child, she had played with paper dolls, putting different costumes on a single figure, and as a teenager she had copied photographs of glamorous movie actresses. When she applied to art school, the drawings of actresses were enough to secure her admission. They were girlish rather than feminist, but they prefigured much of her career, which was dedicated to making a body of work that was a journal of a woman’s life far more than it was a product offered for sale.

For a time Brown considered herself the least qualified of art students and thought of dropping out until one of her teachers, Elmer Bischoff, changed her sense of what she could do. Bischoff told her that she didn’t need to master academic drawing — that experience would teach her what she needed to know. And as for what to paint, a cup of coffee in her studio was a perfectly legitimate subject for art.

She became enormously successful. The paintings of her student years, much admired at school, brought her to the attention of an outstanding gallery in New York, where she sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art in her early twenties. In San Francisco at that time, being a woman artist was no great handicap; in lifetime career terms, both Brown and her next-door neighbor on Fillmore Street, Jay DeFeo, outstripped their artist husbands, Bill Brown and Wally Hedrick.

Brown was notable for getting paint on herself; she seemed almost eager to look like a mess. But she also enjoyed being pretty and dressing up, and the show includes a painting in which she and her third husband, Gordon Cook, are on their way to a performance of San Francisco Opera.

One of the most teasing works in the show, a summation of cliches about women and women artists but also an example of her refusal to be only one thing or only another, is Self-Portrait (1977). In it, Brown sits in her studio, painting a still life of a flower, and instead of wearing a paint-stained artist’s smock, she is wearing a handsome dress and high-heeled shoes and looks as if she has dressed for
a party.

Her paintings tell us that she could embrace the most varied possibilities: she could be physically strong, as a long-distance swimmer; she could be a painter; she could be a wife or mother or lover; by the 1980s, she could be a spiritual seeker in India. For her, at least, there was never any contradiction between looking terrific in high heels and being a serious, successful, and, if one wants to use the adjective, feminist painter.

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New at 92

Posted on September 10, 2011 by editors

Theophilus Brown, Self Portrait, 1994

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 career. The exhibition begins with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery at 2291 Pine Street, near Fillmore.

Read more: “A friendship with Theophilus Brown,” by Matt Gonzalez

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Art, commerce, thuggery collide

Posted on September 2, 2011 by editors

Murals at Fillmore and Geary were overtaken by graffiti after a new bus shelter was installed.

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, ketchup, sugar and toilet bowl cleaner — all intermixed with graffiti.

Alexander Andreas, owner of the Boom Boom Room, says the mural depicting jazz musicians on his building went undamaged for six years. But now it is “totally tagged,” he says, and vandals have also etched graffiti into the glass walls and top of the new designer bus shelter and smashed its back wall.

Andreas blames the rise in vandalism on the recent repositioning of the 38-Geary bus shelter. Before it was at the curb. Now it is backed up against the wall of the Boom Boom Room, providing shelter for taggers to deface property out of sight.

“It’s absurd,” he says. “The city did a disservice. The move has triggered an onslaught of graffiti hitting my mural.”
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Before Alice met Gertrude, she lived nearby

Posted on August 2, 2011 by editors

Photograph of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris by Cecil Beaton

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 she know that she would remain in Paris for the rest of her life and see San Francisco briefly only one more time, 28 years later.
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Michael & Sarah Stein: from Pierce Street to Paris

Posted on August 2, 2011 by editors

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 in history. Hers is the most recognizable name in the family.

Her brother Leo, a gifted explainer of the art he and his sister collected, and himself an occasional painter, was in his own way equally pyrotechnic until he almost willfully burned himself out and broke with Gertrude in 1913.

Their brother Michael and his wife, Sarah, presented themselves less brilliantly. Unlike Gertrude and Leo, birds of passage who left the Bay Area at an early age for Harvard, Johns Hopkins and then Paris, Michael and Sarah were deeply established in the city’s commercial and social life.
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Before Paris, the Steins were locals

Posted on June 2, 2011 by editors

The rental flats at Washington & Lyon Streets helped fund the Steins' art collection.

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 consolidated and sold. He also built the first rental flats in the city at the corner of Washington and Lyon Streets. It was the income from these investments that enabled the family to collect art and live abroad for many decades. Together they created a legendary collection of modern art and helped establish Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso as two of the most important artists of the 20th century.

The Stein collection has since been dispersed to museums around the world. But it is reunited in “The Steins Collect,” an exhibition now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which highlights their local connections.

Read more: “From Pierce Street to Paris”

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Alta Plaza birds take flight

Posted on May 1, 2011 by editors

Bay Area Bird Encounters is Walter Kitundu's new interactive art piece at SFO.

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 children of all ages.

“If you don’t feel like playing the benches, you can always sit on them,” says Kitundu of the two wing-shaped wooden seats that are also xylophones tuned to play the song of the golden-crowned sparrow.

The benches are part of a project he calls Bay Area Bird Encounters. They sit in front of a 28-foot-long mural of birds Kitundu photographed, then printed on sheets of veneered plywood and hand-carved into a wooden mosaic of 147 separate pieces. There’s a third sparrow in the mural, also a xylophone.
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Gardening goes vertical at Drew School

Posted on February 20, 2011 by editors

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 world.

Blanc was in the neighborhood recently to unveil Drew’s new vertical garden, which consists of thousands of plants that are all native California species. First the dirt was removed from the roots of the plants, then they were stapled to a three-story felt wall that is automatically watered several times daily. The 1,720 sq. ft. garden — Blanc’s largest in the U.S. — faces Broderick Street and is visible from the sidewalk.

“What was very interesting for me,” Blanc said, “it was a school much involved in artistic work. For me, it was important to have receptive students for a new kind of work with plants.”

Blanc spoke to students about the project and also lectured to a sold-out crowd at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, which has its own living roof. The firm that completed the academy’s roof is also creating a 2,630 sq. ft. green roof on the school’s new building.

The New Fillmore

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