After delicious meal at the Grove restaurant on 3rd Street – one of several we had there during our stay – we went to a lovely old theatre, Orpheum Theatre which features a vaulted ceiling and a beautiful façade, apparently inspired by a 12th century cathedral. There we saw a really good musical called Company which had previously been on in the West End in London. It was directed by Marianne Elliot and the acting was superb.
We took a bus to Golden Gate Park, which is enormous, we could easily have spent a day there. We walked through a beautiful rose garden and a Japanese tea garden and also visited a really interesting art gallery, the De Young museum. Most of the works were by American artists, such as Thomas Moran, who are well known in America but who we had never come across before and the themes of the paintings were interesting, many featuring scenes from the Civil War. We also went up to the top of the De Young tower where we had a great 360 degree view of San Francisco. (click on the images to enlarge)
We spent a day in the Museum of Modern Art, getting there as soon as it opened. So much to see and take in. What a wonderful place.
William Scott – This work spans the whole of one wall of the ground floor of SF MoMA. It’s William Scott’s largest painting to date. The full name of the painting is “Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City” It is one of a series of commissions by local artists. To find out more click here
There was so much art work – paintings, installations, textiles, you could spend days wandering around taking it all in and then going back again. Here are a few samples. (click on the image to increase the size)
Such a fantastic place.
We took a bus to the Latino area of San Francisco, the Mission District, for one of the highlights of our visit to San Francisco, the Precita Eyes murals tour. Precita Eyes is a community based mural arts organisation which was founded in 1977. Its aim is “to enrich and transform urban environments and educate communities locally and internationally about the process and the history of public community mural art”. It offers low cost art classes for children, young people and adults, mural education workshops and seasonal community painting workshops. It also offers mural tours.
The tour we went on was led by the lovely Carmela Gaspar who was really interesting and very informative. Most of the tour took place in nearby Balmy Alley, which runs between 24th and 25th Street. Balmy Alley is a privately owned road in which all the walls and garage doors are covered in amazing murals, some painted in the 1970’s and some as recently as this year. Many of them have a political theme such as human rights, political corruption, gentrification and government injustice, and the titles are often in Spanish (click on the images to enlarge)
In addition to those in Balmy Alley there are more than sixty other murals in the Mission District. Precita Eyes have produced a map showing where they are, their titles and the names of the muralists who created them.
After feasting our eyes on these colourful, vibrant and very powerful murals we wandered through Mission, sampling some Mexican food on the way of course. We came to a bookshop called Medicina para Pesadillas – Medicine for Nightmares and saw a woman standing in the shop window holding a microphone, and a crowd standing outside. As we drew nearer, we realised that she was reading out her poems and they were being broadcast in the street! Later we also came upon various bands playing music in the street. It was a great atmosphere.
We ended the day walking to 18th Street to take a look at the amazing mural on the outside of the Women’s Building and then people watching in Dolores Park as we admired the great views over the city.
The Broad is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building that houses the Broad art collections.
In the entrance hall is an installation by Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. This was in a separate room which you entered and stood on a platform in darkness, and then ….
It is a fantastic gallery and has a standing exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein, so this was our next port of call.
When Eli and Edythe Broad acquired Rauschenberg’s Untitled in 1983, they traded Vincent van Gogh’s drawing Cabanes à Saintes-Maries, 1888, which they had cherished for a long time. For the Broads, Untitled represented a turning point in their lives as collectors, a symbol of their increasing commitment to the works of contemporary artists.
Jean Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents in 1960, and left home as a teenager to live in Lower Manhattan. In the late 1970s, he and fellow artist Al Diaz became known for their graffiti, a series of cryptic statements seen around Manhattan.
Many of Basquiat’s works have been likened to the improvisational and expansive compositions of jazz. Often themes accumulate through multiple references on a surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams.
Basquiat’s work celebrates histories of Black art, music, and poetry, as well as religious and everyday traditions of Black life. At the same time, his paintings and drawings offer these references against the American and global backdrop of the white supremacist legacy of slavery and colonialism.
In his work, Basquiat integrated critique of an art world that both celebrated and tokenized him. He was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception, whether it took the form of positive or negative stereotypes. Basquiat saw his own status in this small circle of collectors, dealers, and writers as connected to an American history rife with exclusion, invisibility, and pater-nalism, and he often used his work to directly call out these injustices and hypocrisies.
Jeff Koons created the ‘Puppy’ outside the Gulbenkian in Bilbao and here he is in Los Angeles with Balloon Dog
There were many other artists but we’re saving them for the next time!
Our friend Sheryl took us to the Getty Centre for the day. It’s an extraordinary set of buildings set high up on a hill with stunning views of Los Angeles and the surrounding area (click on a picture to enlarge).
The architecture is beautiful. The buildings are very light in colour with clean lines.
The entrance hall has a superb installation by Mercedes Dorame entitled ‘Looking back’
A trailblazing woman artist working in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Camille Claudel defied the social expectations of her time to create forceful sculptures of the human form. Her innovative works of art treat the universal themes of childhood, old age, love, and loss with an expressive intensity in a variety of genres, materials, and scales. Collectors and critics immediately recognized Claudel’s talent, but today her art remains little known outside France.
Other works within the studios.
And further sculptures were to be found outside, down by the carpark.
The Getty also has a restaurant with wonderful views and delicious food. All in all a fantastic day.
We were very excited to discover that the Dinner Party, that wonderful creation by Judy Chicago in the 70s was housed in the Brooklyn Museum. The subway in New York is great and we easily found our way down to Brooklyn and to the museum. Here are the photos (if you click on a photo it will expand to full size)
The Museum of Modern Art in New York is the most wonderful museum and you could spend days wandering amongst the galleries. (click on the images to enlarge)
This is a high level pedestrian highway running north-south through west Manhattan. Originally it was a railway line whose trains carried meat, produce and dairy products into warehouses and factories. Now it’s a walkway with gardens planted amidst the old railway lines, and sculptures along the way. You can walk through gardens, view art, experience a performance, savour delicious food, or connect with friends and neighbours -all while enjoying a unique perspective of New York City.
We again walked down to the south end of the High Line to the Whitney Museum. There we met Harriet and entered this fantastic gallery. We were especially lucky as they were showing their Biennial 2024. (click on the photos to enlarge them)
Suzanne Jackson made these suspended paintings without canvas, slowly building up many layers of acrylic, detritus, gel medium and objects from the natural world including seeds from her garden. She says “I don’t call it collage because … it’s all paint – acrylic on acrylic. And it’s suspended: paint suspended in space….”
In Kiyan Williams’s outdoor sculpture Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, the north facade of the White House leans on one side, sinking into the floor, and is composed of earth. If you look carefully you can see that the flag is upside down – this symbol is used by people who believe that Trump did not lose the election.
The museum had a great collection of paintings by Hopper.
