San Francisco Zoo – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Hearst Grizzly Gulch

Posted by Cindy on October 21, 2014

Oct 212014

San Francisco Zoo

This grizzly by Tom Schrey graces the Hearst Grizzly Gulch building at the SF Zoo. Tom has a degree from California College of the Arts and presently works at Artworks Foundry.

The following was excerpted from a June 15, 2007 SF Gate article by Patricia Yollin:

Three summers ago, two grizzly bear orphans in Montana were trying to fend off starvation. Now they are coddled ursine superstars living in San Francisco.

On Thursday, the public got its first glimpse of the twins’ opulent new home as Hearst Grizzly Gulch, a $3.7 million habitat at the San Francisco Zoo, opened for business. Kachina and Kiona, whose species adorns the California state flag, quickly demonstrated that they knew how to work the Flag Day crowd.

Proximity is one of the exhibit’s highlights. A thick glass window is the only thing separating humans and carnivores in one section of Grizzly Gulch, which also includes a meadow, 20,000-gallon shallow pool, heated rocks, 2-ton tree stump, dig pit, herb garden and 20-foot-high rock structure.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Where are we going to put them?’ ” recalled Manuel Mollinedo, the zoo’s executive director.

The sisters, now 4 years old, moved into a concrete enclosure that’s part of an old-fashioned bear grotto built in the 1930s. It will serve as night quarters and adjoins the new habitat, the result of a fundraising campaign by Carroll — who said he envisioned an endless series of “$100,000 lunches” before Stephen Hearst, vice president and general manager of the Hearst Corp., set up a $1 million donation.

Hearst was mindful of his family’s connection to grizzlies. His great-grandfather, San Francisco Examiner publisher William Randolph Hearst, arranged for the 1889 capture of a wild grizzly that he named Monarch — his paper’s slogan was “Monarch of the Dailies” — who inspired the creation of the city’s first zoo.

The Zoo’s first major exhibits were built in the 1930’s by the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) at a cost of $3.5 million. The animal exhibits were, in the words of the architect, Lewis Hobart, “ten structures designed to house the animals and birds in quarters as closely resembling native habitats as science can devise.” These new structures included Monkey Island, Lion House, Elephant House, a sea lion pool, an aviary, and bear grottos. These spacious, moated enclosures were among the first bar-less exhibits in the country.

California Grizzly

Posted by Cindy on October 15, 2014

Oct 152014

San Francisco Zoo
In Front of the California Grizzly Exhibit

This Grizzly sculpture is by Scientific Art Studio. From their website:

We are designers, sculptors, painters, welders, builders, crafters, fabricators, and – above all – dreamers. We live to see the world through new eyes, to laugh and play like children, and to explore boldly and fearlessly. We push boundaries and relish challenges.

For the past 33 years Scientific Art Studio has been the design and fabrication studio pushing the envelope of the latest fabrication techniques and bringing beautiful to everything we do. Under Ron Holythuysen’s creative direction, our multi-talented team has designed and built engaging exhibits, themed environments, immersive playgrounds, and engineered icons around the world.

Originaly sculpted and cast for an outdoor trail exhibit the bear statue was recast and placed in the interpretive center of Hearst Grizzly Gulch.

Recognized as the California state mammal and the symbol of the California state flag, the grizzly bear is now extinct in the state. Between 1800 and 1975, the grizzly bear population in the lower 48 states decreased from 50,000 to less than 1,000. The decline can be attributed to human development, livestock depredation control, commercial trapping and unregulated hunting.

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.