Search Results : asawa

Ruth Asawa at Ghirardelli Square

 Posted by on August 27, 2013
Aug 272013
 

Ghirardelli Square
Fisherman’s Wharf

Ruth Asawa fountain ghirardelli square

This fountain is titled Andrea’s Fountain and is by Ruth Asawa.  It sits in Ghirardelli Square.

There is a plaque next to the fountain that tells the story of the piece, it reads:

Then-owner William Roth selected Ruth Asawa, well known for her abstract, woven-wire sculptures, to design and create the centerpiece fountain for Ghirardelli Square.  Although it was unveiled amid some controversy in 1968, Asawa’s objective was to make a sculpture that could be enjoyed by everyone.  She spent one year thinking about the design and another year sculpting it from a live model and casting it in bronze.  Although landscape architect Lawrence Halprin attacked Asawa’s design of a nursing mermaid seated on sea turtles for not being a “serious” work, Asawa’s intentions were clear: “For the old it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood, and for the young it would give them something to remember when they grow old!  “I wanted to make something related to the sea…I thought of all the children, and maybe even some adults, who would stand by the seashore waiting for a turtle or a mermaid to appear.  As you look at the sculpture you include the Bay view which was saved for all of us, and you wonder what lies below that surface.”  The most photographed feature of Ghirardelli Square the fountain was named in honor of Andrea Jepson, the woman who served as the model for the mermaid.

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I found the sign to be of interest as I had always heard of this conflict between my two heroes, and it was nice that they put a sign up to “clear the air”.  Lawrence Halprin was responsible for Levi Plaza and was a man I admired both as a visionary and a legend in his field.  Ruth Asawa, who has appeared many times in this website is also one of my favorite local artists.

Andrea's fountain ghirardelli square

As far as Ghirardelli Square: San Franciscan William M. Roth and his mother bought the land in 1962 to prevent the square from being replaced with an apartment building. The Roths hired landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons to convert the square and its historic brick structures to an integrated restaurant and retail complex. Ghirardelli Square was the first major adaptive re-use project in the United States.

Frogs in a fountain at ghirardelli square

Sadly, Ruth Asawa passed away earlier this month.  The link to a lovely tribute in the San Francisco Chronicle can be read here.

Turtle in a fountain at ghirardelli square

Ruth Asawa at the Parc 55

 Posted by on December 26, 2012
Dec 262012
 

55 Cyril Magnin
Union Square Area
Parc 55 Hotel porte-cochere

San Francisco Yesterday and Today by Ruth Asawa 1984 – Cast Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete

Ruth Asawa used baker’s clay to sculpt these panels.  Ms. Asawa has many works around San Francisco.  An American artist, who is nationally recognized for her wire sculpture. Ruth, at the age of 16, along with her family, was interned in Rohwer camp in Rohwer, Arkansas at a time when it was feared the people of Japanese descent on the West Coast would commit acts of sabotage.  It was the first step on a journey into the art world for Ruth.   In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she said of the experience: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”

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Redding School Self Portrait

 Posted by on June 8, 2015
Jun 082015
 

Boeddeker Park
295 Eddy Street
The Tenderloin

Ruth Asawa Redding School

Redding School Self Portrait by Ruth Asawa and Children of the School

Father Boeddeker

The Asawa piece is a tribute to Father Alfred Boeddeker.  Boeddeker was the Franciscan priest who founded St. Anthony’s Dining Room and he is the park’s namesake. The 4- by 16.5-foot bas relief wall mural is a portrait of Boeddeker surrounded by children.  Asawa was assisted by 100 schoolchildren from Redding Elementary School. The childrens’ images were initially created out of pastry dough, then coordinated into an overall design by Asawa. The piece was originally installed in 1985 and is made of glass fiber reinforced concrete.

Ruth Asawa Boeddeker Park

Ruth Asawa was a favorite of this author, and she has appeared many times in this site.  Asawa passed away  in 2013.

Father Boeddeker

Tile and Bronze Column

 Posted by on April 10, 2013
Apr 102013
 

580 Bush Street
Financial District/Union Square/Chinatown

Asawa, Lanier, Thompson

This little hidden gem, done in 1992,  is a collaboation of Ruth Asawa, her son Paul Lanier and artist Nancy Thompson.

Ruth Asawa has been on this website many times before. I recently found this article by Milton Chen and Ruth Cox at Edutopia that gives a few new details about Asawa that I did not know.

“The daughter of truck farmers, Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, in southern California, one of seven children. In 1942, her family was ordered to report to the temporary incarceration center for Japanese Americans at the Santa Anita Race Track. Her father had already been taken away by government agents and would be separated from the family for several years. Asawa lived with her siblings and mother in a horse stall for six months before relocating to an internment camp in Arkansas.

The one silver lining for the teenage Asawa was encountering Disney artists, also interned, who conducted art classes in the grandstands and taught her to draw. Her first artist teacher, Tom Okamoto, encouraged the students not to copy but to create original drawings from life.

Later, in Arkansas, she and other interned students dutifully recited the Pledge of Allegiance every day for their social studies teacher. After the final phrase, “with liberty and justice for all,” they always added in a loud voice, “Except for us!”

After the war, Asawa went to Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), intent on becoming an art teacher, but no school district in the state would hire her for student teaching to fulfill her credential requirements and allow her to complete her degree. Decades later, when the university approached her to bestow an honorary doctorate, she asked only that it hand her the undergraduate diploma she had been denied.

Asawa went on to study at North Carolina’s legendary Black Mountain College under artist Josef Albers and designer Buckminster Fuller and alongside composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It was the formative art experience of her life. She also began experimenting with crocheted wire sculpture and met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier.

After moving to San Francisco in 1949, the two began a family, fulfilling her professed goal of having six children. However, when her kids entered the local public school, Asawa was dismayed to learn that “art” consisted of coloring in mimeographed pages. “I remember what it feels like to be a victim — to be victimized,” she says. “And I couldn’t bear to see the lack of true arts education.”

In 1968, Asawa cofounded the Alvarado Arts Program, which began at San Francisco’s Alvarado Elementary School and now brings together professional artists, parents, and teachers in many of the city’s schools to work with students in clay sculpture, visual arts, music dance, and theater.

The program began by recycling milk and egg cartons and scrap fabric for materials, and it also emphasizes gardening to provide children with a hands-on connection to nature. Asawa has worked tirelessly to convince policy makers to elevate the level of arts teaching in the nation’s schools, serving on the San Francisco Art Commission, the California Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts committees, and President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health.

Activism in arts education is now a tradition in Asawa’s family. Her son, Paul Lanier, is a ceramicist and has been an artist-in-residence for nine years at the Alvarado Arts Program.

“Through the arts, you can learn many, many skills that you cannot learn through books and problem solving in the abstract,” Asawa says. “A child can learn something about color, about design, and about observing objects in nature. If you do that, you grow into a greater awareness of things around you. Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into. It makes a person broader.”

Many of Asawa’s elegant bronze and steel sculptures began as folded paper or simple clay figures. For the Hyatt Hotel’s bronze fountain sculpture, in San Francisco’s Union Square, she enlisted family and friends in molding city landmarks and scenes from baker’s clay, a mixture of flour, salt, and water, a medium she first used with fifth graders at Alvarado. Her large latticed pieces, evoking organic forms and shapes, originated in a wire-basket crocheting technique she learned while visiting Mexico City in the 1940s.

“Art is for everybody,” Asawa says. “It is not something that you should have to go to the museums in order to see and enjoy. When I work on big projects, such as a fountain, I like to include people who haven’t yet developed their creative side — people yearning to let their creativity out. I like designing projects that make people feel safe, not afraid to get involved.”

Ruth Asawa should be an inspiration for generations of educational activists to come. Confronted with wartime racism, didactic teaching, and the bureaucracy of schools, she was never afraid to get involved.”

Paul Lanier

Paul Lanier is a ceramist, sculptor and designer.

Nancy Howry Thompson

According to her obituary Nancy Howry Thompson was an original member of the Alvarado Arts Workshop that used local artists to teach the craft to thousands of children in San Francisco public schools.

In 1968, Ms. Thompson joined Ruth Asawa and other artists whose children attended Alvarado Elementary School in Noe Valley to fill what they saw as a gap in arts programs offered at the school.

Two years later, she worked as project coordinator, with several volunteers and about 400 students, to create and install a major mosaic mural in the schoolyard at Alvarado. It was the first time in San Francisco that students, teachers, parents, volunteers and school administrators working with an artist participated in a project which provided a public school with a major work of art.

The Berkeley artist, who worked in a variety of media, including murals, mosaics, stained-glass and sculpture, became the first artist in residence at Alvarado and went on to lead art programs at a number of schools in San Francisco. The Alvarado experiment grew into the San Francisco Arts Education Project, which four decades later serves 200,000 children in the city’s schools.

“She loved teaching and sharing what she knew how to do and she believed that art belongs to the community,” said her daughter, Stephanie Curtis. “She often said she got more out of the programs that she ran than she gave.”

Ms. Thompson once said, “As a practicing artist, I find the interaction of community, artist and student artists immensely rewarding.” An avid bicyclist, backpacker and environmentalist, Ms. Thompson loved California’s landscape.

“The Bay Area’s colors and shapes of the mountains, hills, water and light of Northern California are constant themes in her work,” her daughter said.

 

Old Blueprints take on a New Look

 Posted by on February 13, 2013
Feb 132013
 

Muni Metro East Yard
Pier 80
Bayview

Muni Metro East Yard

This view, taken through a fence, is as close as one will get to the art work at the new Muni Metro East maintenance facility.

Nobuho Nagasawa Glass Work for Muni

*Anita Margrill Glass work for Muni

These photos I took from the Pulp Studios website.

I am going to simply copy directly what they have to say about these pieces as the information is excellent.

“The beauty of rail car engineering details is revealed in these historic blueprints from the 19th and 20th centuries.” Artist Anita Margrill’s statement rings true upon the very first site of the two towering glass curtain walls on the Metro East Light Rail Vehicle Maintenance and Operations Facility. This installation is a prime example of how art can seamlessly meld with Architecture, while taking two very standard stairwells from ordinary to extraordinary.

The artists Nobuho Nagasawa and Anita Margrill were inspired by the intricate pattern of white lines contrasting with the bold blue on the engineering blueprints they had found in the Muni Metro Archives.

In 1996 Pulp Studio received the call from Judy Moran of the San Francisco Arts Commission to work with artists to fabricate these two very large curtain walls, that measure an impressive 36 feet high by 19 feet wide. At the time Pulp proposed bringing the vision into reality by carving the line portions onto the glass and then painting them white to capture the vibrancy of the bold white lines of the drawing. However, this being a public works project 10 years had passed by the the time the facility was ready for it’s crown jewels to be produced.

During the interim, better technologies were formed and Pulp Studio recommended using their photographic laminated SentryGlas Expressions (SGX) product instead of the carved glass. SGX is a form of laminate that can be printed on in the full RGB spectrum, and even in white to produce photographic quality images. Once laminated the unprinted areas are clear, this product is what allows the blueprints to have their highly defined intricate bold look.

The 21 individual insulated glass sections of each curtain wall are comprised of two parts. A laminated blue glass panel on the interior and a clear glass panel on the exterior laminated with a mechanical engineering drawing printed in white on SGX as the substrate within the glass.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency recently won an award for the facility from the American Public Works Association, which is a national association that recognizes exceptional public works projects. This facility won in the category of projects costing over $75,000,000. Judy Moran of the SFAC said, “I am sure the curtain walls played a large part in making it an exceptional facility. Everyone is very happy with them, they are stunning.”

These pieces were commissioned for $100,000.

Nobuho Nagasawa has appeared here before with her Liberty Ship sculpture at the SFMTA Motor Coach Facility.

Anita Margrill  was born in New York City . She attended Cranbrook Academy of Art, received her BA from Bennington College, her B. Architecture from CUNY School of Architecture and Environmental Studies, and her MA in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University.  As a licensed architect she has designed and built several passive solar houses and she holds numerous copyrights and patents for her water distribution systems.

Islais: From Creek to Sewer to Creek

 Posted by on February 7, 2013
Feb 072013
 

Islais Creek
Bayview/Hunter’s Point

Islais Creek

It is known as Third and Army by skateboarders. Longshoreman call it Pier 84. Locals just think of it as Islais Creek. No matter its name, it is an area experiencing ongoing urban and environmental renewal.  Islais Creek originally flowed for 3.5 miles from the hills of  San Francisco into the Bay. The area now called Islais Creek Channel is an inlet of San Francisco Bay located in the Central Waterfront area between Potrero Hill and Bayview / Hunters Point. The area was once a vast salt marsh.  Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries this area of Islais Creek devolved from a habitat teeming with wildlife to an industrial wasteland, until it was finally rescued by environmental, government and neighborhood groups working hand in hand.

skateboarder

Los Islais (is-Lay-is), named for the Hollyleaf Cherry, provided the Ohlone Indians-the first settlers of the area-mussels, clams and shrimp. In the early 1800s the missionaries from Mission Dolores drew their fresh water from the area. Later, the 49ers, coming down from the mountains during the Gold Rush, began settling on its banks, and then the deterioration started. In 1871 over 100 slaughterhouses were situated on the banks of the creek, giving the neighborhood the illustrious name “Butchertown.” After the 1906 earthquake, the city fathers found it a convenient spot to dump earthquake debris. In 1925 the State Legislature created a reclamation district to drain and develop the Islais Creek basin as an industrial area, leaving only a small shipping channel.  Until the 1950s this section of Islais Creek was basically an open sewer.

Islais Creek LandingIn 1970 the City of San Francisco built a water treatment plant along the channel to improve the quality of the water flowing into the Bay.

This same area of Islais Creek, the center of the current urban renewal, is now a channel within a landfill, atop what once was a broad inlet of the bay. Towering over the site of the rebirth is a dynamic structure called a Copra Crane. Copra is dried coconut imported, in those days, from the Philippines. Men would go down into ships’ hulls, alternatively working and resting for 20 minutes at a time. One man would break up the coconuts with a pick, and another would shovel the broken pieces into a pile. Cranes would then suction the pieces out and transport them to a warehouse. From there the meat was sent to a Cargill plant to be made into coconut oil. In the 1960s mechanization came to the waterfront, and the men, their picks and shovels were replaced by a small tractor with mechanical choppers.

Copra CraneCopra cranes performed many functions in the coconut business;  this  particular crane  was used to load onto ships processed pellets that were then sent overseas to be sold.

The 1970s saw the end of the Copra trade and the abandonment of the industrial area known as Pier 84. In the 1980s a large contingency of environmental and neighborhood groups began lobbying for a clean up of the area and the building of a park to increase the open space that was so needed in the Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhood, an area often described  as a marginalized community with modern problems including high rates of unemployment, poverty, crime and disease.

A group of retired and active waterfront building tradesmen also joined the efforts to ensure that the Copra Crane was part of this revitalization. The historic value of the crane was recognized by the Port of San Francisco, and the crane was saved.

Copra CraneIn the Fall of 2011 the crane was removed and restoration began.

As part of the revitalization, the dock that the crane sits upon will be stabilized and the crane put back in its rightful place. The restoration is expected to cost a minimum of $400,000 and take well over a year. The revitalized area already has a small boat dock and sand slide for launching outrigger canoes. Additional plans call for a museum featuring waterfront labor history. The groups that have worked so hard to restore Islais Creek continue to write grants and find ways to bring jobs and public awareness to the area through urban revitalization.  In 2009 Jo Kreiter, an aerial artist, and her troop performed on the crane. It is hoped that more art will be brought to the neighborhood as the popularity of the revitalized area grows.

 

Islais Creek Promenade

 

Islais Creek is home to the Liberty Ship Sculpture  by Nobuho Nagasawa  and the Metal Fish  by Todd Martinez and Robin Chiang.

Liberty Ship at Islais Creek

 Posted by on December 19, 2012
Dec 192012
 

SFMTA Islais Motor Coach Facility
Sitting on Islais Creek in the new Shoreline Park
Indiana Street and Ceasar Chavez
Bayview

This 340′ Long Steel Sculpture is an abstract representation of the old Liberty Ships that were built in the Shipyards of this neighborhood.

 

The sculpture is by Nobuho Nagasawa a New York based artist. Nobuho had this to say on ArtNet

My work ranges from site-specific projects to installations and public art. I create an interactive space that is informed by the actual place — its history, people and spatial narrative. This approach requires detective-like investigation and quasi-archeological research, exploring sociological and psychological aspects of each site. Immediate physical and social context influences the form, content, and choice of materials and media.

I see my artist’s identity as inevitably “hybrid” – in my case, part sculptor, journalist, poet, architect, and urban designer. Materials and methodology follow upon the necessary diversity of evolving concepts as a project reveals its conditions. I see this process as an excavation of meanings – cultural, geopolitical, social, personal – that lie hidden within the materials themselves. By revealing personal memories, collective histories, unacknowledged myths, and contradictory issues, I try to open up key social and personal reserves that can galvanize public interaction. Art, after all, has the power to deconstruct the blockages of social energy and serve as a catalyst to new vision and public self-discovery. My goal is to create artwork that provokes and revives a site and wakes people up to the poetry of place.

I am intrigued by the sense of scale, both human and civic, and how relatively small change can enhance private experience within the public setting. A truly livable space should stand the test of time. It spurs social communication and inspires reconstruction. When history is brought to the surface through public art, it can serve as source for the renewal of cultural identity and the evolution of social values.

My goal is to create works that attract people to possibility where and as they live. The development and realization of art in public is a dialogue with a place and its time – land and substance, its past, its people, the future they create – made new, immediate, and somehow timeless.

Based in New York City since 2001, Nobuho Nagasawa was born in Tokyo, and raised in Europe and Japan, and received her MFA at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.  She came to the United States as a visiting scholar through the invitation of California Institute of the Arts in 1986, where she studied visual art, critical theory and music.

This piece was commissioned by the SFAC for $750,000 in the 2008-2009 budget year.

San Francisco All Wrapped Up in a Fountain

 Posted by on December 18, 2012
Dec 182012
 

Union Square
Hyatt Hotel
345 Stockton Street

This fountain by Ruth Asawa was commissioned by Hyatt in 1970 and completed in 1972, the fountain consists of 41 individual bronzed plaques each about 26X32 inches depicting San Francisco landmarks covering the entire circular wall of the fountain bowl and measuring over 14 feet in diameter. At the center of the high wall of the drum, you will notice HH which represents the Grand Hyatt on Union Square. Everything to the south of Union Square is to the left, everything north is to the right. The Ocean is the top boundary, the bay is at the bottom. You may recognize the Powell St Cable Car turnabout, the opera house, Nob Hill, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Ferry Building, Ghiradelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Golden Gate Bridge, among many other familiar sights. In addition, you may notice fantasies such as Superman flying past the Montgomery St Skyscraper over Snoopy on his dog house or the Wizard of Oz character. Total effect is a real and unreal world where anyone can enter.

Because of Ruth’s desire to show what many many hands working together could do, help from visitors and over 100 children in the area was solicited. Rather than the traditional sculpture’s material, Asawa used a bread dough bakers clay to model the fountain. When finished the piece of sculptured dough was arranged on the panels surface and stuck down with white glue. The panel were then set aside the thoroughly dry before being taken to the fountain for casting.

Lombard Street

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The French Laundry, one of the Bay Areas renowned restaurants, and at the time of this sculpture was owned by Don and Sally Schmitt, whose legacy lives on at The Apple Farm. The Schmitts sold the restaurant to it’s current chef, Thomas Keller.

Mission Dolores

The Conservatory in Golden Gate Park

Fleishacker Pool was a public saltwater swimming pool located in the southwest corner of San Francisco, next to the zoo for 47 years. Upon its completion in 1925, it was one of the largest heated outdoor swimming pools in the world.

Palace of Fine Arts

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Garden of Remembrance

 Posted by on September 28, 2012
Sep 282012
 

San Francisco State University
Lakeside

Head by Shu-hie Yang – Student work

This piece resides in the Garden of Remembrance.

The Garden of Remembrance is located in the quiet courtyard between Burk Hall and the Fine Arts Building, it was dedicated in 2002. It honors the 19 former SF State students who were pulled from their classes under U.S. military and government orders and forced to live in remote camps across the country during World War II, along with the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who suffered the same fate.

Designed by Japanese American artist and honorary SF State Master of Fine Arts recipient Ruth Asawa, the garden contains 10 boulders that serve as symbolic reminders of the different internment camps. A waterfall on the east side of the memorial represents energy and renewal, and the Japanese Americans’ return to their homes. The garden also features a plaque, which provides historical information regarding internment and the SF State Students directly affected by it.

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Japantown – Fan

 Posted by on December 30, 2011
Dec 302011
 
Japantown
Webster Street, San Francisco

There is a plaque near this fan – or Sensu – and this is what it reads:

The Japantown Sensu (fan) is a modern interpretation of traditional Japanese forms blended with the unique Japanese American culture that has existed, persisted and grown in San Francisco’s Nihonmachi since 1906.

Invented in Japan 1300 years ago, the sensu is a palette for artists, an instrument of dance and drama, a graceful and practical part of everyday life. It is an important link to our Japanese culture and continues to be used in the Japanese American community.

Elements of the Design
The design of the Sensu incorporates key elements from Japantown:

• Peace Pagoda – Designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, the Pagoda was donated by the people of Osaka,
San Francisco’s Sister City, in 1968.
• Origami Fountain – One of the two sculptures inspired by Japanese paper folding, designed by Ruth
Asawa.  ((Found on this blog here))
• Mountain stream motif – Architect Rai Okamoto designed this pattern as the setting for the Buchanan
Mall.

The four seasons are represented by traditional Japanese plant motifs:
• Sakura – The springtime cherry blossom is a symbol of the beauty and impermanence of life.
• Ayame (Shobu) – The summer iris flower symbolizes feminine beauty, its leaves masculine strength and
courage.
• Momiji – The autumn maple leaves evoke the flow of time.
• Matsu – The evergreen pine symbolizes strength and longevity.

Original concept and Sensu design by Tony Kaz Naganuma, Grace Horikiri and Karen Kai of NDD Creative, Japanese calligraphy by Mutsuyo Horikiri, former principal of Kinmon Gakuen Japanese Language School.

 

Japantown – Origami Fountains

 Posted by on November 24, 2011
Nov 242011
 
Japantown
These are two of my most favorite fountains in San Francisco.  They are by Ruth Asawa and they reside in the Nihomachi Pedestrian Mall in Japantown.

Nihomachi is a term used to designate an historical Japanese community.  Ruth Asawa has been in the site before, and her website shows the wonderful work she does with wire and other media.

In 1974, Asawa created the Origami Fountains, two lotus, fabricated in corten steel. By 1996, the steel had seriously deteriorated and the fountains had to be removed.   Due to the communities love for Ruth, it was easy to mount support to have the fountains replaced.  They were recast in bronze. Ruth was on hand for the entire process and helped to oversee the process of making molds from the original fountains as well as the fabrication and installation of the new fountains.

Victoria Manalo Draves Park

 Posted by on September 11, 2011
Sep 112011
 
SOMA
Folsom Street Between 6th and 7th
Victoria Manalo Draves Park

How many times do we walk by something every day, and forget that, yes it is art. These fence panels are on a park with a fascinating history.

Victoria “Vicki” Manalo Draves (December 31, 1924 – April 11, 2010) was an Olympic diver who won gold medals for the United States in both platform and springboard diving in the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. She was born in San Francisco. Born to a Filipino father and an English mother that met and married in San Francisco. She couldn’t afford to take swimming lessons until she was 10 years old and took summer swimming lessons from the Red Cross, paying five cents admission to a pool in the Mission district.

This 2-acre park is located between Folsom and Harrison Streets, and Columbia Square, and Sherman Avenue, and adjacent to the Bessie Carmichael Elementary School. In 1996, Mayor Brown and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to allow for a series of property transfers between each agency to construct a new neighborhood park in the South of Market Area. In February 1997, the Board of Supervisors approved an exchange and lease agreement between the City and SFUSD to purchase the Bessie Carmichael School site for a new city park.

Bessie Carmichael school had been a very sad sight. It opened as a temporary school in 1954. Temporary trailers served as classrooms and they surrounded a blacktop area. It was very, very bleak, and lasted in that state for 52 years. The new school is modern, light and airy, and far more conducive to learning. 1 out of 5 students at Bessie Carmichael live in transitional housing: a shelter, residential hotel, or an over-crowded living condition. It was time the kids got a nice place to attend school.

The park is also a wonderful spot for children to come and play.

The panels are aluminum.  The were commissioned by the SF Arts Commission for the Park and Recreation Department in the 2006-2007 budget for $60,000.

The artist is Irene Pijoan (1953-2004) Born in Switzerland, she received her MFA from the University of California, Davis.  She was a professor at the San Francisco Arts Institute.

The creatures are of air and the sea and were dedicated to the artists daughter Emiko Pijoan Nagasawa.

The Embarcadero – Aurora

 Posted by on January 20, 2000
Jan 202000
 
The Embarcadero
Aurora by Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa is an American artist, who is nationally recognized for her wire sculpture. Ruth, at the age of 16, along with her family, was interned in Rohwer camp in Rohwer, Arkansas at a time when it was feared the people of Japanese descent on the West Coast would commit acts of sabotage.  It was the first step on a journey into the art world for Ruth.   In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she said of the experience: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”

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