My San Francisco

I was born in San Francisco and lived all my life within an hour’s drive of The City (as Bay Area natives call it) till I moved to to the Northwest in 1997. I never lived in San Francisco itself after my first six weeks in an incubator there, but it always felt like my city, and I’m protective of it and of my memories of its most beautiful and special places.

I love Coit Tower—the WPA-era murals inside it, the views of the bay and San Francisco from its apex, even the shape of the building itself. I remember when Union Square still looked like it does in Francis Ford Coppola’s great thriller, “The Conversation.” As a child, my mother and I would go into The City at Christmastime to stare at the gorgeous windows around Union Square and visit the City of Paris building (demolished by Neiman-Marcus in 1981, the bastards), a lovely beaux-arts-style landmark. We filled our tummies on the great soups at Salmagundi on Geary Street before seeing Peter Donat or Philip Anglim on stage at ACT across the street, and I savored the thick coffee milkshakes at Bill’s Place on Clement Street. Years later I went back to Clement to spend endless happy hours browsing art and design ideas at Green Apple Books.

During my college years I loved dancing at the I-Beam in the Haight (as did Rock Hudson when he was in town) and shopping for neon plastic sunglasses, watches and funky New Wave everything at the Headlines stores on Polk Street and Castro Street, each nestled among sex shops and leather bars and populated with adorable twinks. During the nineties I got married in the exquisite San Francisco City Hall building (Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio did the same thing in the 1950s), and had some of the best meals of my life at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant in the Marina district. I loved having afternoon tea in the Fairmont’s Cirque Room to celebrate a special occasion, or meeting friends in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel before showing them around my favorite parts of the city.

I even miss freezing my tuchis up at the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down at spectacular views of San Francisco (please, don’t ever call my city Frisco) while gusts of cold wind blew my hair straight back and turned my ears first red, then white with cold. (And that was in the summer; in winter it felt positively polar up there.) I wish I could duck into the Musée Mechanique just below Cliff House and enjoy 80-year-old mechanical fortune tellers and player pianos for a few bucks’ worth of quarters again, but it’s moved to Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. I'm glad it still exists, but in its old location, under the boardwalk, it seemed so pleasingly down-at-the-heels. Fisherman's Wharf, while no longer as skanky a place as I knew (and avoided) from childhood, still boasts enough seedy spots to remind me why I've never liked it.

One of my favorite (and most frequent) San Francisco destinations over the years was Golden Gate Park, from its lakes to the elegant glass domed Conservatory of Flowers (one of the world’s largest) to the meadows full of tiny daisies. My father took me there with VW-loads of his hippie friends in the 1960s when I was very small. I remember passing through the Haight-Ashbury district to get there in the late sixties and early seventies and knowing even as a little child that the Haight, and the U.C. Berkeley campus, which my father also took me to, were the places to find hippie culture. (My parents were both students at Cal when they met, and my mom followed the more traditional Cal values while my father took the other road.) I think our sojourns to the epicenters of the counterculture were his attempts at balancing out what he thought was his daughter’s overly mainstream, white-bread, suburban world.

I always felt out of place when visiting my father and hanging out with his scruffy friends during my infrequent visits with him. I felt weird because of my comparative lack of weirdness among these people. At least during Dad’s visits we were were often hanging out in attractive city parks full of impressive things to see and interesting people to gawp at. My father wanted me to see hairy, lefty urban culture as an antidote to what he saw as sleepy, conservative, stultifying suburban values. Sadly, he and his friends and their choices emphasized all the scarier aspects of hippie culture instead of showing me the fresher, freer, more positive aspects. They may have loved countercultural values for their anti-war, anti-establishment elements, and I can admire those aspects, too, at a nearly forty-year remove from the experience. But what I saw and shrank from even as a very tiny child were physically dirty folks with stoned expressions who made a lot of jokes about sex that they thought I didn’t understand, and a father who picked up stray hitchhikers and invited them into his succession of coughing VW Beetles while he drove down foggy streets on dark nights whether I was in the car or not.

Dad also took me to graveyards for picnics occasionally; this scared me at the time, but I wonder whether my own penchant for old cemeteries grew out of these odd al fresco afternoons. On my few overnight visits, Dad thought it funny to have me sleep on a daybed made up under a bookcase that featured a real human skull as a decorative element. My father and his friends had no clue what was appropriate behavior around a small child, listened to me only sporadically and then laughed at whatever I said without explaining to me why my opinions or questions were so funny. I felt lonely among them, and just as much a misfit among hippies as I did around the suburban folks I grew up among.

But I always loved visiting Golden Gate Park, whether with my dad and his deadhead pals, with my beloved uncle on a trip to the Steinhart Aquarium, or with my mom on our way to the de Young Museum. The Japanese Tea Garden had (and still has) koi ponds, melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies and an impossibly steep Japanese bridge to climb, and there were free opera and band concerts at the band shell between the aquarium and the de Young. I enjoyed the whole park, but oh, how I loved the de Young. That’s where I first saw King Tut’s golden mummy case, treasures from the time of of Alexander the Great, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and so many important visiting exhibitions. Even when there wasn’t a blockbuster show there, the de Young was like a visual sampler platter of art, craft and design through the ages. Like other grand old art collections in grand old buildings around the country, one found rooms full of elegant furniture, hallways lined with vitrines stocked with porcelain and fine silver pieces, small portraits and sweeping landscapes, all in a building that had a history and a personality of its own.

Visiting the de Young felt kind of like stepping into an eccentric old aunt’s mansion, but one built in a distinctly Californian style, not like the darker, heavier mansions-based art museums of the East Coast (which I’ll admit I also love). When I was little, the best part for me was going into the central hall lined with suits of armor and banners. It was like a grand baronial space, a dramatic fantasy place where I stepped out of time. The museum was welcoming and of its time, and I loved it.

The de Young that I loved so was a gracious Spanish-style building built in 1919 with a lovely tower built in 1921. It had a simple stucco exterior and flanked by palm trees and a stood behind a pond. Its style was very Californian. A number of buildings on the Mills College campus in nearby Oakland, including my beautiful dormitory, Olney Hall, were built in the same simple Californian stucco, beam and tile-roofed architectural style around the same time. This 1910s and '20s Californian version of the Spanish style has always appealed to me as carrying a number of the elements and proportions found in the Arts & Crafts bungalows built at the time while also incorporating some of the state’s Spanish mission and rancho past. Architect Julia Morgan (most famous for designing the much grander Hearst Castle) used it to good effect in several buildings on the Mills College campus, including the Margaret Carnegie Library, where I worked part-time in the Albert M. Bender Rare Book Room during all four of my years at Mills. This style is unpretentious and it fits into the Californian landscape, and even when built on a grand scale, its simplicity keeps it from overwhelming its occupants. It was a lovely and elegant complement to the art of the de Young.

And now it’s gone.

The huge Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 damaged the de Young so profoundly that it was eventually found seismically unsafe. Retrofitting the building didn’t make financial sense to San Francisco voters, and in 1998 they voted to demolish it and replace it. It was torn down and the new de Young’s construction began in 2001. And then some lurking evil force settled into the brains of those in charge of the new design like a malevolent worm. It somehow ate away at their good sense and at any desire they might once have had to create a welcoming public space that both enhanced the art-viewing experience and invited the visitor to linger and appreciate the space itself. Gone were gracious details, human-scaled spaces, architectural echoes of the region’s design history or cultural history, and architectural context for historical pieces. The museum’s designers, architects, directors and private funders instead described the old de Young’s design with sneers and scorn. They couldn’t wait to rip it down and erase any visual reminders of it, save the palm trees that used to surround it. Considering it outdated, tired and ugly, they stated that their new building design sought "to communicate diversity; it is an embodiment of the open-ended concept of art fostered by the museum. It expresses the distinctiveness of different cultures and, at the same time, it is a place of common ground, where diversity meets and intersects, where otherwise hidden kinships between divergent cultural forms become visible and tangible."

Oh yeah? Could have fooled me. It’s the ugliest museum I have ever seen.

I’ll write more about it soon.

I'm a Living Dickens Character!

This week I learned that Charles Dickens invented me in 1872! I had no idea. Look, I have proof: click here.

I feel so much more important now. It’s wonderful to learn that I’m a figment of my favorite novelist’s imagination. I suppose this means I must take up wearing crinolines and corsets, speak in dulcet-toned King's English all the time and faint more often. Well, if it means enjoying carriage rides through London, attending regular afternoon tea parties, wearing Victorian hats and going on long walks through Dickens’ imagination, perhaps it’s worth it.

Maybe I'm Crazy

Okay, so I’m slow. I only just caught on to Gnarls Barkley’s music. I’d heard and enjoyed “Crazy” before, but somehow my ears really opened up to it last week. I’ve been listening to them a lot and enjoying their videos, which are so clever and cool, on You Tube. I love their wonderful inkblot video.

I think Cee-Lo’s vocals are gorgeous; he has a smooth Motown-style falsetto that sounds warm and perfectly natural, not forced like some do, and Danger Mouse's production is delicious. Their rhythms are totally infectious and they’ve got a lovely gospel thing going on, too. Tasty. I love their sense of humor, too; Cee-Lo dressed like Darth Vader at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, they dressed like droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” for other photos. My favorite is this spot-on "Napoleon Dynamite" send-up.

“Crazy” songs seem to work for me. I love Seal’s early hit “Crazy” (and his later acoustic version of it), and of course Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is perfection. Willie Nelson made something like $50 for writing that song, and Patsy’s version went on to become the all-time top jukebox single. With reason. Willie’s versions are beautiful too, much softer, as if he’s accepted that his love is a hopeless cause. Patsy seems unconvinced that it was really so crazy to fall in love; Patsy's version of the song is so addictive because when she sings it, her torch still burns so brightly. Her head knows it’s crazy, but her heart still hopes. “The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

I'll write more on museums soon. In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and have kind, funny, open-hearted people to spend it with. I wish you peace and happiness, now and always.

Wowed by Denver's Splendid Art Museum

Last month I visited Denver for the first time, and was wowed by the fabulous weather (sunny and 72 degrees in November!), the inviting and attractive mix of historical and brand-new architecture, the friendly locals, the city’s progressive vibe, and, especially, by the Denver Art Museum, which I can now call one of my favorite regional museums in the country.

San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Seattle Art Museum were both renovated recently at enormous expense with mixed results. In contrast, the money, thought and care Denver has poured into the expansion of its most important art museum is successful on many levels. This is primarily because DAM's designers and curators never forgot that the point of having an art museum is to create a positive, exciting and enriching environment for all sorts of people that helps them to enjoy, understand and grow more intimately acquainted with art.

A great civic building should not be an impressive but intimidatingly impersonal temple to the arts that sets the work on display apart from humanity, only to make people feel smaller, less connected and more confused as a result. Often, proponents of modern architecture dedicated to the arts take the view that a fresh, modern approach requires that the building and the art experienced within it must be spare, cold, harsh and huge. I find that such buildings (and such viewpoints) dwarf the soul and undermine both the art and the viewers’ experiences of the art. Those of us who prefer a warmer, more human (and more humane) arts experience are usually left clinging to the old ways and the old styles of display and design if we want to enjoy artworks in an atmosphere that isn’t devoid of charm or feeling. While I love many antique and classic architectural styles and can derive great pleasure from viewing artworks housed in them, I can also take pleasure in the clean lines, fresh perspectives and bold breaks with the past that modernity has to offer. That is, I can enjoy them if the purpose of the building and the needs of its visitors (and appropriate display of its contents) are all taken into consideration as well.

There are alternatives to the bleak, forbidding, humorless and sometimes artistically anorexic big-box museums popping up like pox around the world. San Francisco has the Museum of Modern Art, which is massive and impressive but broken up into digestible chunks of architectural space so that one can enjoy soaring curves and architectural leaps toward the sky from within the building without feeling dwarfed and swallowed by it. The Bellevue Arts Museum has grand vertical spaces in its entry hall, but the floorspace isn’t overwhelmingly large, and the mix of colors, windows, materials and artworks in the space keeps it from being too intimidating. Indeed, most of the museum is broken up into small galleries that allow the primarily intimately-scaled works they feature to be enjoyed without feeling lost or dwarfed by an overscaled, overly bright display space.

When I saw photographs of the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building I was at first disappointed. The building, which houses about half of the museum’s holdings (the rest are in the more sedate building across the street and connected to the Hamilton Building by a skybridge), was meant by architect Daniel Libeskind to imply the craggy triangular shapes of the Rocky Mountains. This is a respectful nod to the region’s geography, but to me it looked in photographs like a colossal pile of broken glass with huge spikes jutting out into the surrounding plaza in what I feared would be an intimidating fashion. I expected to find it as numbingly offputting as I find Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Seattle Public Library, which looms menacingly over downtown Seattle in sharp, cold, übergeometric fashion.

I find the Seattle Public Library's geometric shapes aggressively, threateningly angular, completely counter to anything found in nature, oversized and overscale, and too unyielding in style and material. When my daughter visited it shortly after it opened, she noted that even its children's section features hard, cold, unwelcoming surfaces and furnishings. Koolhaas’s library, so roundly praised by professional architects, feels claustrophobic to me despite all its glass; the large scale of the diamond-shaped metal grid covering the building makes me feel like a bug crushed beneath a window screen when I am inside the building. The library is oddly scaled and full of unusable spaces yet lacking in enough room to give those browsing the book stacks space to amble and view the books without feeling rather squashed. The building has been praised for bringing nature inside, but I find this laughable. The unattractive and half-dead grasses around and inside the building look weedy, and the grass-patterned carpeting inside only makes the rest of the interior look that much more divorced from nature and natural forms, most importantly including human beings, whose presence within the pile of offset oddly-angled glass blocks seems to be an afterthought. Rather than being a welcoming place in which to study, rest, read, browse, learn and renew, the place has all the welcoming cheer of an airport terminal. Less, actually; many airports, including Seattle’s, are quite full of friendly, inviting public artworks, from inlaid metal salmon swimming along one terminal’s floors to columns covered in intricate mosaic designs to exceptionally pretty stained glass windows that evoke Northwest Indian designs and stories.

But I digress. Yes, the Denver Art Museum’s spiky glass hull does loom a bit over visitors, but it sits in a splendid plaza, a welcoming public space bordered by an appealing glass multiuse building as well as by a practical and lovely modern library complex composed of buildings that reminded me of castles, towers and Monopoly houses, among other pleasing simple shapes. There is a giant sculpture of two cattle next to the museum, "Scottish Angus Cow and Calf" by Dan Ostermiller, which was voted the “Best Climbable Art" by locals, and an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a dustpan and broom right out front; it is hard not to smile when viewing either of these monumental yet whimsical works. Upon viewing DAM in its architectural context, one gets an immediate impression that those responsible for designing, making and presenting this plaza had not only panache and vision, but also well-developed senses of humor. A major arts center that doesn’t take itself too seriously? How refreshing!

Once inside DAM, the boldly scaled building is broken into component spaces that work with each other seamlessly, giving a sense of an inviting multitude of options without overwhelming the visitor and making her feel insignificant. Ceilings are dropped and comfy yet modern chairs are sized for humans. From the main floor’s small café, one can sit and admire the quirky furnishings that make up several relaxed conversation areas, view the main entrance, the ticket-purchasing area, get a glimpse into the well-stocked gift shop through a triangle of glass and watch a slideshow of images of artworks through another triangular cut-out in a wall. It’s easy to get one’s bearings at a glance and feel that one’s immediate needs have been considered and are easy to fulfill: snacks here, tickets there, comfy conversation area here, gift shop there, stairs to the special exhibition there, views out into the inviting plaza here.

Once upstairs, one finds generous exhibition spaces and many delightful resting spots, small libraries and fascinating exhibits explaining art conservation methods incorporating beautiful pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. There are attractive and comfortable areas for rest and research scattered everywhere, each different and appropriate to the style and content of the gallery. Child-friendly spaces attract people of all ages with interactive lights and activities. Colorfully painted walls act as invigorating backdrops that make artworks pop, a welcome alternative to the sterile and generic white or grey galleries favored at some newly minted museums. The museum is proud of its gallery of Western art, which I expected to find as uninspiring and hackneyed as an old episode of “Bonanza.” Boy, was I wrong. It housed my favorite works in the museum, a series of twenty 12x12-inch paintings of different grasses by Karen Kitchel, in addition to excellent paintings of cowboys, Indians and animals and the expected Frederick Remington horse-and-cowboy sculptures and paintings (which are actually quite impressive).

Just beyond the Western gallery is the skybridge to DAM’s other building, which houses an imposing and impressive gallery of Native American/Indian/First People’s artworks including masks, paintings, sculptures and fiber art. There was also a visiting exhibition of color field paintings that left me unmoved, but which was full of important works by influential artists, few of whom I like. Still, it was an appropriate and important juxtaposition to the rest of the museum’s holdings and to the other main visiting show at the time, an assortment of works of decorative art (from chandeliers to dishes to tapestries) on loan from Paris titled "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

The scale, the high quality of the artworks in the collection, the breadth of work on display, the excellent libraries and reference rooms scattered about, the attractive and appropriate design of the galleries, and the awareness of the museum’s planners regarding how the museum fits into its metropolitan surroundings both physically and metaphorically all work together to make the Denver Art Museum a great success aesthetically and culturally for people of any artistic persuasion, be it traditional or minimalist, abstract or figurative. The restaurants and gift shops are even well thought out, as are the sizes and layouts of the public spaces. Denver has a lot going for it that makes it worth a visit, but for me, just having another chance to enjoy DAM (and to see the wonderful 40-foot-tall blue bear sculpture at the Colorado Convention Center) will be worth the trip.

LauraGrey.com is Now Online

Laura Grey Fine Arts is online at www.lauragrey.com. Please take a look; from there you can read artist's statements, link to online galleries, find contact and biographical information, and visit this blog.