Search Results for “McChesney” – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Search Results : McChesney

Log

Posted by Cindy on February 3, 2014

Feb 032014

Corner of Webster and Golden Gate Avenue
Park behind the Rosa Parks Senior Center
Western Addition

I have driven past this park one thousand times and have always wondered about this tree stump. Then one day my dear friend Netra Roston told me about an artist named Sargent Johnson. Sargent Johnson was not a stranger to this blog, his WPA work is at the Maritime Museum.

Born in Boston on October 7, 1887, Sargent Claude Johnson was the third of six children of Anderson and Lizzie Jackson Johnson. Anderson Johnson was of Swedish ancestry, and his wife was Cherokee and African American. All of the children were fair enough in complexion to be considered white, and several of Johnson’s sisters preferred to live in white society. Sargent, however, was insistent upon identifying with his African-American heritage throughout his life.

The Johnson children were orphaned by the deaths of their father in 1897 and their mother in 1902. The children spent their early years in Washington, D.C., with an uncle, Sherman William Jackson, a high school principal whose wife was May Howard Jackson, a noted sculptress who specialized in portrait busts of African Americans. It was probably while young Sargent was living with his aunt that he developed his earliest interest in sculpture.

Johnson arrived in the San Francisco area in 1915, during the time of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, which impressed him greatly.

The same year Johnson arrived in San Francisco, he met and married Pearl Lawson, an African American from Georgia who had moved to the Bay Area. The couple had one child, Pearl Adele, who was born in 1923. The couple separated in 1936 and shortly afterwards Mrs. Johnson was hospitalized at Stockton State Hospital, where she died in 1964.

Johnson worked at various jobs during his first years in San Francisco but also attended two art schools, the A. W. Best School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts. Johnson was enrolled at the latter school from 1919 to 1923 and from 1940 to 1942. He studied first under the well-known sculptor Ralph Stackpole for two years, and for a year with Beniamino Bufano. Johnson’s student work at the California School of Fine Arts was awarded first prizes in 1921 and 1922.

The 1930s were the most productive decade in Johnson’s career. The W.P.A. Federal Art Project provided a number of opportunities for Johnson during the late 1930s in the Bay Area. Johnson’s first large W.P.A. project was an organ screen carved of redwood in low relief for the California School of the Blind in Berkeley. The eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot panel was completed in 1937 and installed in the school’s chapel. In 1939 he undertook another W.P.A. project, decorating the interior of the San Francisco Maritime Museum in Aquatic Park.

For the Golden Gate International Exposition Johnson completed his largest figures. He designed two eight-foot-high cast stone figures, which were displayed around the fountain in the Court of Pacifica. Johnson’s figures depicted two Incas seated on llamas and were distinctly East Indian in inspiration. They are known as the “happy Incas playing the Piper of Pan,”. He also designed three figures symbolizing industry, home life, and agriculture for the Alameda-Contra Costa Building at the Exposition.

Johnson moved a number of times in the final fifteen years of his life. Following an illness in 1965, Johnson finally settled in a small hotel room in downtown San Francisco. In October 1967 Johnson died there of a heart attack.

This was Johnson’s last large work. It is not titled, and I could find out literally nothing about it and how it came to be sitting at this corner. The brochure that Netra gave to me was regarding a fundraiser titled Reclaiming Our Treasures. The intent was to raise funds to restore and resurrect the “log” along with the intent to place an historical marker near it. The fundraiser took place in 1997, I have not been able to find out anything more.

The Smithsonian has a transcript of a delightful conversation between Johnson and fellow artist Mary McChesney about Johnson’s work that can be found around San Francisco. You can read it here.

update 2016: The log has been removed and is now with the University of California for both authentication and potential restoration. It most likely will not return to this location.

Dos Leones at SFGH

Posted by Cindy on March 16, 2013

Mar 162013

1001 Potrero
San Francisco General Hospital

So much of the collection paid for by the San Francisco Art Commission is not readily available to the general public. This piece is no exception. On the patio of the 3rd floor of SFGH, the doors were locked, however, you can see the sculpture through the window.

Titled Dos Liones, this sculpture, done in 1974, is by Mary Fuller. Mary Fuller has many pieces of public art work around the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mary Fuller was born in Wichita, Kansas on October 20, 1922. Creating totemic figures, playful animals and dancing goddesses (to honor older women and their fiery spirit), she is also an author with one major art historical work, three mystery novels, and a host of short fiction and art reviews to her credit. Fullers family moved fom Kansas to California in 1924.

She grew up in the farm country of California’s Central Valley. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1940’s, working as a welder in the Richmond shipyards in 1943 during World War II.

Mostly a self-taught artist, she apprenticed in ceramics at the California Faience Company in the 1940s and began to exhibit in 1947, wining first prize at the 6th and 8th Annual Pacific Coast Ceramic Show, 1947 and 1949. In 1949 she married the painter Robert McChesney, and many of her subsequent writings are published under the “Mary McChesney” name. As a mystery writer in the 1950s, however, she used the pseudonym “Joe Rayter” to publish The Victim Was Important; Asking for Trouble and Stab in the Dark. Fuller began to construct concrete sculpture in the 1950s while pursuing her writing career. She free-lanced for major art journals, including Art in America and Art-forum, throughout the 1960s, while also conducting research on 1930s Works Progress Administration artists for the Archives of American Art. A Ford Foundation fellow in 1965, she conducted research on modernist art in the Bay Area that culminated in A Period of Exploration, San Francisco 1945-1950, termed one of the key documentary works in the field of modern California art history.

Beginning in 1974, she was awarded the first of many public art commissions, including Dos Leones.

The above is excerpted from Women Artists of the American West by Susan Ressler.

Electric Substation and the Art World

Posted by Cindy on September 7, 2012

Sep 072012

8th and Mission
SOMA

These two bas-reliefs in cast stone, titled Power and Light, sit on the 8th Street side of the Pacific Gas and Electric Mission Substation. The building was designed in 1948 by William Merchant. The sculptor was Robert B. Howard.

William Gladstone Merchant was a San Francisco architect who trained in the offices of John Galen Howard and Bernard Maybeck. Merchant obtained his architectural license in 1918 and from 1917 to 1928, worked in the office of George W. Kelham. Merchant opened his own firm in San Francisco in 1930, designing a number of commercial buildings in San Francisco. From 1932-1939, he was the consulting architect for the San Francisco Recreation Commission; he was also a member of the Architectural Commission of Golden Gate International Exposition (1939). William G. Merchant & Associates was the successor firm to Bernard Maybeck.

A sculptor and painter, Robert Boardman Howard was born in New York City on September 20, 1896, the son of Mary Bradbury and architect John Galen Howard. At six years of age Robert Howard moved to Berkeley, CA with his family. Upon graduating from Berkeley High School, he studied art at the California School of Arts and Crafts under Xavier Martinez. He moved on to the University of California and studied under Worth Ryder and Perham Nahi, and with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League in New York City. Howard was married to highly successful artist Adeline Kent, from Kentfield, California. He died in 1983.

On September 16, 1964, San Francisco artist Mary McChesney interviewed Robert Howard. Howard speaks of his background and education; his early paintings and sculptures; his involvement with the Federal Art Project in San Francisco; Coit Tower; and his opinions of federal support for the arts, you can read the transcript here.

Howard worked on many public projects in his lifetime, including Coit Tower. One highly recognizable piece is in the Mural Room at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

Earth Air and Sea on the Great Highway

Posted by Cindy on July 15, 2012

Jul 152012

Ocean Beach

Sloat and The Great Highway

West Side Pump Station

Earth Air Sea – 1986 – by Mary Fuller

Mary Fuller, along with her husband Robert McChesney, has been in this site before.

Mary Fuller McChesney, a California sculptor, has been carving “giant totems and goddesses” for nearly 50 years. Her artwork embodies numerous sources – Native American, Pre-Columbian, African, ancient matriarchal cultures – and like the sacred totems of the Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, honors her ancestral ties to family, both animal and human. Her art is shared and openly accessible, as public commissions have ensured that it is visible to a wide audience.

Earth – Air – Sea is sited in close proximity to the ocean and the San Francisco Zoo, and like many of Fuller’s works,the animal figures (in this case a lion, bird, and fish) were chosen to relate to their environment and engage a broad audience.

Born in 1922, Fuller has lived in California all but the first two years of her life. She studied philosophy at Berkeley, and discovered she loved to work with metal and stone while welding in a Richmond, California shipyard during World War II. In 1949 she married Robert McChesney, and much of her writing, including the book A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950 (which has been called “one of the key documentary works in the field of modern California art history”) has been published under the Mary Fuller McChesney name.

An ardent feminist who makes art that is consciously “anti-patriarchal,” Fuller found that in the 1950’s, women artists, as well as west coast artists, were not taken seriously. More recently she has said that “women artists [. . .] are often viewed as eccentrics, or perhaps merely quaint, or worse, plain uninteresting, depending upon husbands to support them, and painting privately for themselves.”

Earth Air Sea was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for the San Francisco Clean Water Program.

Portmouth Square Tot Park

Posted by Cindy on November 25, 2011

Nov 252011

Chinatown

Portsmouth Square

Tot Park

Untitled by Mary Fuller McChesney and Robert McChesney

In researching the artists I found this 2002 article in the San Francisco Chronicle by M. V. Wood. I loved it so much I thought I would just reproduce it here for all to enjoy.

They were hip.

They were young and beautiful. And they were both artists living in San Francisco in the 1940s, when the city was already romantic, and the cars and tourists were still scarce. Their crowd ruled the scene long before the Beats bought their bongos. They were the countercultural kings when Jerry Garcia was a toddler playing somewhere along the city’s streets.

Years later, Robert McChesney would become recognized as one of the leading figures of American Modernism. His works would be in numerous museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And Mary Fuller would become a well-known sculptor and writer, awarded public art commissions throughout the Bay Area.

But back then, McChesney was an emerging, hotshot artist, and Fuller was a successful potter. They kept bumping into each other in artsy North Beach. Finally, during a gallery exhibition of his work, McChesney drew Fuller into a closet and kissed her.

Since that kiss, more than a half-century ago, the Beats had come and gone. Garcia grew up and died. The Berlin Wall went up and came down. So did the World Trade Center. And through it all, McChesney and Fuller continued creating art.

On Saturday, the couple, who moved to the North Bay in the mid-1950s, will return to their old stomping grounds in San Francisco for the opening of the Art Exchange Gallery’s show of his paintings and her sculptures.

A lot has changed in the world and in the city since they were young, McChesney says. “And all of that goes into the art,” he adds. “Everything about life influences your art.”

While 89-year-old McChesney tells the story of their early years and that first kiss, Fuller, 79, smiles. Her husband gives her a sly grin and sidelong glance, probably much like the look he gave her in that closet long ago.

Older couples who give each other that look tend to elicit a characteristic response from younger people: to cock one’s head to the side and whisper, “Oh, aren’t they cute?” It’s the same kind of endearment bestowed upon puppies and other sweet, benign creatures.

McChesney and Fuller do not elicit that sort of behavior. They’re still too wild, too passionate, too fierce to be cute.

They’re still hip.

Robert died in 2008 at 95 years of age.

The sculpture, done in 1984, is cast cement. It represents the symbols of the Chinese Zodiac.