The bridge from George Washington High School’s campus. Photo by Hugh Stickney

Some local tidbits for your Monday off work:

• The Surfrider Foundation is hosting an Ocean Beach volunteer cleanup event on Sunday, January 22 from 10am until 12noon. Meet up at Stairwell 17 across the Street from the Beach Chalet Restaurant if you want to help out.
• Bison unite! The new, young, hip bison were released from quarantine and joined their elders in the main paddock. Cute but still one of the strangest things we have in Golden Gate Park.
• A dramatic fire took place on 42nd Avenue and Balboa very early Sunday morning. Flames were bursting out of the building, SFFD had to cut through a neighbor’s wall to control it, and two firefighters were injured. To top it off, the one woman who lives there ran off and is MIA.
• Cafe Mereb (1541 Clement) is no more but the dust barely settled before a new tenant will move in. I saw some construction going on there Sunday and Grubstreet reports that a place called “Chomp & Swig” will be opening soon. No word yet on the menu or when it will open.
• Seedstore clothing on Clement is having a 50% off winter sale from Jan. 21 – 29. Attend their kick-off party the night before on Jan. 20 from 5-8pm and you get an additional $20 off purchases over $200.
• The Academy of Sciences is changing their free day policy this year. Rather than one weekday a month being free, they’ll offer four Sundays during the year: February 5, June 3, September 16, and December 9. Why the change? “To target more working families, who were previously unable to come on the Wednesday free days. We hope that this change to weekend dates will allow a wider range of people to attend,” says the Academy website.

  Don’t worry – they’ll still be offering free days each Spring and Fall to residents based on zip code. For 94118 and 94121, our first free days will be May 11, 12, and 13.

• Burma Superstar to expand… again! They’ve got two restaurants on Clement, one each in Oakland and Alameda, and Eater SF reports they’ll be opening a Valencia Street location this year. Tea leaf salad for all!
• Artful reminder: The Pissarro’s People exhibition at the Legion of Honor closes this Sunday.

Sarah B.

Photo by Emily Hoyer

Late last month, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, John Edward Buchanan Jr., died at the age of 58 after a battle with cancer.

Buchanan joined as head of the de Young and Legion of Honor museums in 2006; prior to that he served as the executive director of the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon for more than 10 years.

Through his extensive global network of private lenders, museum colleagues and foreign governments, Buchanan brought the treasures and masterpieces of the worlds of painting, sculpture, haute couture, decorative arts, antiquities and pop culture to San Francisco. Buchanan’s leadership provided the Museums with exceptional opportunities, including hosting the foremost exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism from the collection of the Musee d’Orsay in 2011, and contributing to an internationally successful exhibition program, among which included the haute couture craftsmanship of Vivienne Westwood, Yves Saint Laurent and Cristobal Balenciaga.

Under Buchanan’s six-year stewardship the Museums welcomed over 11.9 million visitors, presented over 100 special exhibitions rooted in the depth and diversity of the museums’ permanent collections, oversaw the publication of 31 exhibition catalogues and collection-based publications, and increased the museums’ membership to 122,000 households. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have the third largest membership in the nation, are the fourth most visited art museums in North America and are the fourteenth most visited museums in the world.

A memorial service is planned for Buchanan on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1pm at Grace Cathedral, 1100 California Street, San Francisco.

At his family’s request, donations can be made in Buchanan’s memory to the Director’s Discretionary Fund at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (mail to: Sabina Crivello, de Young Museum, 50 Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118 or call (415) 750-3687) or to support the research of Dr. Andrew Ko at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center (mail to: Dr. Andrew Ko (research fund B2098), UCSF Medical Center, attention: Sarah Krumholz, UCSF, 220 Montgomery Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA. 94104 or call (415) 502-1899).

Sarah B.

On Thursday, Santa made a special visit to the Philippines Coral Reef at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Watch the video to see a bit of his underwater interview and to see how popular he is with the fish.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Sarah B.

The Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park just tweeted out the photo above to announce that Santa will be diving into their giant coral reef tank tomorrow, Dec. 22, at 11:30am and 2:30pm for a special visit.

I imagine all the fish have Christmas wishes too…

Sarah B.

A special sculpture has taken up temporary residency at the Legion of Honor. It’s the Baroque masterpiece The Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The loan is part of The Musei Capitolini’s program The Dream of Rome, a project initiated by the mayor of Rome to exhibit timeless masterpieces in the United States.

This is the first time Bernini’s scuplture has traveled to the U.S. and only the third time it has left Rome in nearly 400 years.

Recent conservation efforts have restored the Medusa to its full glory and revealed previously hidden polish and patina. Believed to date from between 1638 and 1648, this extraordinary work takes its subject from classical mythology, as cited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It shows the beautiful Medusa, one of the Gorgon sisters, caught in the terrible process of transformation into a monster. Her hair is turning into writhing snakes, which, according to Ovid, was a punishment from Minerva for having had an affair with Neptune, god of the sea. The punishment also made Medusa an instrument of death by turning anyone who looked upon her to stone.

Unlike most classical art that depicts Medusa as a monster in her post-transformation state, Bernini’s sculpture focuses on the agony of her transformation, showing the pain and anxiety she experiences, her mouth drawn in agony.

Bernini’s Medusa is on display until February 19, 2012 at the Legion of Honor Museum. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 9:30am until 5:15pm.

Sarah B.

Last Friday we got a peek at the new Pissarro’s People exhibition at the Legion of Honor, celebrating “Pissarro’s personal ties and social ideas through his life-long engagement with the human figure”.

Regarded as one of the most interesting artists of the Impressionist group, Pissarro is most known for his landscapes and urban views. But this new show focuses on a different aspect of his work that is more reflective of his personal passions.

The show explores three key dimensions of Pissarro’s life that helped define how he represented the human figure in his paintings. The exhibition includes over 100 paintings and works on paper of his family, his friends, and subjects that reflected his intellectual involvement with the social and political theories of his time period (1830-1903). “Pissarro was a lifelong anarchist,” begins one of the panels in the show.

Some of the works on display were created for close family and friends, and were never meant to be shown publicly. In a Pissarro first, the Legion of Honor exhibition brings together portraits of every member of the artist’s immediate family, who was regarded as a devoted husband and father.

Pissarro was a quintessential family man, yet conformity was anathema to him, and he actively encouraged his children to express themselves as individuals. He taught them to draw, to develop intellectually, and to question the received values of French civilization of the period. Pissarro represented this lively family dynamic, as well as his many friendships, through an ongoing series of portraits and genre scenes. – from the Legion exhibition

Another gallery in the show highlights figure paintings in which domestic workers were the central motif. A maidservant drinks her cafe au lait during a quiet moment, other paintings portray washerwomen and laborers at work.

He had great respect for the laborers he lived among, and he drew parallels between his own work and theirs; for him, the physical labor of painting was a deliberate, repetitive act not unlike hoeing, harvesting, and plowing the earth.

Camille Pissarro | Apple Harvest, 1888

Another room showcases a wonderful collection of works portraying rural markets in France, another extension of Pissarro’s interest in labor subjects. The pieces show the energy of the markets where women shopped to prepare their meals, and he captures them chatting, jostling, bargaining, calling out and sometimes gossiping among themselves. His depictions are “devoid of the beggars, pickpockets, and predatory men who often inhabit nineteenth-century urban views.”

A special gem of the exhibition is the inclusion of Pissarro’s book of drawings entitled Les turpitudes sociales, being shown publicly for the first time. Described as a “biting album of anarchist drawings”, Pissarro originally created it for his daughters who were living outside of France at the time. The actual book is on display, and panels displaying each page are on the walls.

The Pissarro’s People exhibition is at the Legion of Honor Museum, located in Lincoln Park at 34th Avenue and Clement Street. The show runs through January 22, 2012.

Sarah B.

Camille Pissarro | The Marketplace, 1882

Camille Pissarro | Portrait of the Artist’s Son, Lucien, 1874

If the above stream isn’t working, you can watch it on the Cal Academy website

In addition to their three cute penguin cams (and Pocket Penguin mobile apps), the Academy of Sciences is now broadcasting live from Shark Lagoon.

Tune in anytime to watch sharks and rays glide by; it’s surprisingly soothing to watch them float by on your screen. Check out the field guide on their website to find out what you’re watching.

Hit that full screen button and you’ll get a real-life aquarium screensaver.

Sarah B.