Ocean Beach – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Fire Pits on Ocean Beach

Posted by Cindy on October 14, 2013

Oct 142013

Ocean Beach

There is only one beach in San Francisco where bonfires are allowed. In response to beachgoers’ concerns that beach fires were leaving unsafe debris on the beach, as well as concerns about smoke blowing into neighborhood homes, Golden Gate National Parks initiated a public process to consider the future of fires on Ocean Beach.

Instead of banning fires, Golden Gate National Park joined several organizations in a creative partnership to install artistic fire rings on portions of the beach away from neighborhood homes. Those organizations, Surfrider Foundation, Burners Without Borders, Ocean Beach Foundation, and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, are working with Golden Gate National Park to allow fires to continue.

Burners Without Borders has begun donating artistic fire rings so that fires can be physically contained. Surfrider, Ocean Beach Foundation and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy are organizing beach cleanups to keep Ocean Beach clean and safe for both humans and wildlife.

Burners Without Borders (BWB) coalesced from a spontaneous, collective instinct to meet gaping needs where traditional societal systems were clearly failing post Hurricane Katrina. Since that time, BWB has emerged as a community led, grassroots group that encourages innovative, civic participation that creates positive change locally.

Following the 2005 Burning Man event, several participants headed south into the Hurricane Katrina disaster area to help people rebuild their devastated communities. As the volunteer numbers grew, they focused their initial efforts on rebuilding a destroyed Vietnamese temple in Biloxi, Mississippi. After several months, that job done, they moved to another needy Mississippi community, Pearlington, to continue to work hard — gifting their time — to help those in need. Over the course of eight months, BWB volunteers gifted over $1 million dollars worth of reconstruction and debris removal to the residents of Mississippi. The important thing is to create collaborations and bring as much creativity and fun to the project as possible.

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.

Dogie Diner Sign

Posted by Cindy on July 12, 2012

Jul 122012

Ocean View

45th Avenue and Sloat near The Great Highway

Restored Dogie Diner Sign

The Doggie Diner (1949-1986) restaurants could be seen throughout the Bay Area during their heyday.

Mr. Al Ross, the Doggie Diner Chain’s owner asked Harold Bachman an ad and billboard layout designer, to draw up designs for the sign, it is said that the bow tie was added by Mr. Ross.

Three of Doggie Diner’s heads took a road trip to New York in 2003, courtesy of Laughing Squid and SF Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, and that experience was immortalized in a documentary called Head Trip.

According to Mr. Ross’s obituary, his family came to Alameda when he was in his early 20s and started an ice cream business called White Castle. He and his mother, Rose Rosenbluth, ran the business together. He eventually began rolling a pushcart around San Francisco’s Embarcadero selling ice cream to ship workers.

Mr. Ross took note of all the hubbub on Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue during the war and decided a restaurant featuring “wiener dogs” would do well there. The Doggie Diner that opened on 19th and San Pablo Avenue in 1948 was an instant hit.

This is the last Doggie Diner head that’s permanently viewable to the public. After a $25,000 restoration the sign was declared a San Francisco Landmark on August 11th 2006.

The Doggie Diner dogs even have their ownwebsite.

See Map

Beach Chalet Murals Part III

Posted by Cindy on July 6, 2012

Jul 062012

Land’s End

The Beach Chalet – Part III

1000 The Great Highway

Lucien Labaudt’s Beach Chalet murals: John McLaren (G.G. Park Superintendent) in left foreground on bench, with Jack Spring (later General Manager of Parks and Rec Dept.) holding redwood tree’s root ball, while behind on horseback (upper right corner) sit sculptor Benny Bufano and Joseph Danysh, then head of California Federal Art Project.

Labaudt, following the precedent set by many of his era’s fellow artists to include other artists, depicts here Gottardo Piazzoni, a Swiss-Italian muralist who worked in San Francisco during the first two decades of the 20th century.

There are a few monochrome murals under the stairway they are also by Labaudt.

Sunset District – Propeller on the Walk Way

Posted by Cindy on November 3, 2011

Nov 032011

The Sunset District

The Great Highway at Riviera

Standing here, looking out towards the Pacific you will find art at your feet. You will also guess, at this point that it is covered in a lot of sand.

Propeller by Richard Deutsch

This granite and marble terrazzo paving piece has bronze nautical elements inlaid into the surface.

Richard Deutsch has been featured on this site before. He is an accomplished artist, with work all over the world, and pieces in great museums across the country.

This piece was commissioned by the SFAC for $9000 in 1988