Dos Leones at SFGH

 Posted by on March 16, 2013
Mar 162013
 

1001 Potrero
San Francisco General Hospital

Dos Liones by Mary Fuller at SFGH

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.

Earth Air and Sea on the Great Highway

 Posted by 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 on November 25, 2011
Nov 252011
 
Chinatown
Portsmouth Square
Tot Park

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.

 

 

 

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