Follow the links to current and past exhibitions, starting with Robert Terrell's exhibit in July 2004, to read articles and interviews and view exhibition shots. Gallery directors Anne Brodzky and Tony Williams, previously editor and publisher respectively of the scholarly journal artscanada, hope these new features will help take those interested in gallery exhibits deeper inside the show, facilitating links to societal and personal contexts. Above all else, the availabilty of this information on an internet medium, free of costs and strictures, appeals to the goals of this nonprofit gallery!
by Mia Kirsi Stageberg
© Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums
The new de Young museum
Herzog & de Meuron, Primary Designer
Fong & Chan, Principal Architects
Mark Darley, Photographer
Getting lost in early-morning, deep fog in Golden Gate Park, my feet finally found the entrance to the new M. H. de Young Museum. The perforated façade, a kind of embossed copper skin, immediately challenges with its uniqueness. The museum has been designed by an entrepreneurial Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron.
Inside, first greeting is a group of rough-hewn rock sculptures flooded by bright natural light. These stone blocks are each scored with a line bisecting the surface, running down the side, and continuing out along the floor. Gathering Bay Area anxious realities about fault lines in the earth, this work "Drawn Stone" by Andy Goldsworthy also recalls the history of the museum. The original building on this same site was damaged beyond safety by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and demolished in 2000.
Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956)
Drawn Stone, 2005
Photograph Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Both the de Young and its art belong to the public. Neither of two San Francisco bond issues needed to build it passed. As a result, its creation was made possible through astonishingly generous private funding.
With so many rooms to see, the press was color-coded, divided and managed as tour groups. Museum Director Harry S. Parker explained that sister museum the Legion of Honor has the European collections, and the de Young has "everything else." In addition to contemporary and earlier American art, the permanent collections include African and Native American art and the ancient Americas.
The de Young's lower floor is of porphyry, a stone common in Italy that feels smooth and soft underfoot, resembling heather grey-brown cork. Upstairs, the floor is of warm eucalyptus wood. Gentle light protects the art's durability. Many pieces, such as those from Africa, are in glass cases designed to be viewed from all sides and seen together, not separately.
Textile Curator Diane Mott showed us a Yoruba ceremonial dancing robe, made from layers of trade materials, some very old. Meant to bring spirits of the dead, it commanded a vigorous joy and respect with its strong presence. I could not help but walk round to the robe's back to see all of it.
Daniell Cornell, American Art Curator, met the challenge of pulling works from the permanent collection by finding a theme. He spoke of the way artists are changing the way we think about the world. Using the theme of somatic experience of the body, Cornell's selections evoke living, breathing response, from the grace of a Japanese screen to the startling discordance of an animated neon piece with two figures poking each other's eyes. At the de Young, art from highly diverse cultures and states of being is given place, each resonating like a live being in a community.
Sculptural works commissioned for the new de Young include Kiki Smith's "Near," hung close to a two-story ceiling and best viewed by the top of a stairway. Within a stark aluminum structure, two small figures hover. These two little girls - their feet not-quite-planted at what felt to me like the sill of a skewed shed door - are made of flat copper-foil and drawn from a seventeenth-century portrait, as though they have long been with us. The metal structure that surrounds them, cast from cardboard, could house a space probe. Are they lost? Strung from the room's dimly-lighted vast ceiling, hand-blown glass teardrops throw still shadows. One wall holds the shadow of that difficult home.
Near, 2005
Cast aluminum, copper leaf, and glass
Innovative lighting throughout the museum speaks to the eye and the heart - ceiling light boxes radiating natural light, and high-windowed garden wedges entering the museum from the park.
In the current Hatshepsut Egyptian exhibition from the dynasty of a woman who became pharaoh, some statues weigh over ten thousand pounds, so their installation also served as a test of the museum's floor. I was struck by the way the directional light from the ceiling could pungently bring forward the graspability of a staff with birch bark and silver, and the pure cerulean blue of a gold-rimmed cup three thousand years old.
Dynasty 18, reign of Hatshepsut (1473-1458 BC)
From Thebes, Deir el-Bahri
Red granite. H 66 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund
On view in Hatshepsut: From Queen to
Pharaoh
de Young
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
15 October 2005-5 February 2006
M. H. de Young Museum
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118-4501
www.thinker.org
Mia Kirsi Stageberg is a San Francisco writer and editor. At the de Young Museum press review she represented the Society for Art Publications of the Americas. Stageberg first wrote about visual art, as Mia Kalavinka, for the journal artscanada.