We are presenting daylong screenings of Al Wong’s Twin Peaks (1977) in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater on Free Tuesday, May 7. Over the course of a year the San Francisco native shot this contemplative journey, winding around the distinctive hills in the city. Twin Peaks was featured at SFMOMA in a spotlight screening of his work in 197... More
Posts Tagged “San Francisco Art Institute”
Sunlight and Shadows: Al Wong in Conversation
05.03.2013 | ByFiled under: 151 3rd, Conversations
Carlos Villa 1936–2013
03.24.2013 | ByNobody wants to get that call, but at 3:41 am this morning I got it. Carlos Villa had passed away. I didn’t want to write an obituary, and so I am not mentioning his numerous awards and such – so this is not an obituary – OK?
It’s just that I had worked with him at the San Francisco Art Institute and saw how he had been a role model and father figure for so many students in the Bay Area and not saying something about that doesn’t seem right.
Also – it’s worth noting that while a cast of colorful charact... More
Receipt of Delivery: Windows by Eleanor Coppola
01.25.2013 | ByFiled under: Back Page, Projects/Series
Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.
Poster text: “Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole comm... More
Art School Confidential 2: The MFA Show
05.11.2011 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
Spring, at art school, isn’t exactly about sunny days and waiting for the first heirloom tomatoes to show up at farmers’ market. It’s a frantic season of creative pushes, buffing edges, and occasional artistic breakthroughs. More often, it’s a season of anxiety levels spiking along with pollen counts. I’m in deep — thesis advising,... More
Art School Confidential
04.28.2011 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
Spring, at art school, is an emotionally schizophrenic season. The weather tends to be glorious (and pollen-filled), as it was today, and campuses pulse with alternating currents of stress, anxiety, hope, exhaustion, and celebration as everyone lurches to the finish line. That was definitely the mix at SFAI this evening, when the campus was buzzing... More
Congratulations, San Francisco Art Institute!
03.08.2010 | ByFiled under: Uncategorized
…0n the first of your graduates to take home Best Director and Picture Oscars. The history of film instruction at SFAI includes the participation of such luminaries as Sidney Peterson, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and George Kuchar. Kathryn Bigelow continues SFAI’s currently challenged legacy of small-gauge celluloid filmmaking: The Hurt Locker was photographed in Super 16mm.
MoreOdessa Steps
06.12.2009 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
Last month I got to play an iconic figure of cinema when the San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa recruited me, and dozens of others, for a forthcoming project. He was planning, he said, to recreate the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1921 silent film Battleship Potemkin. I would play the old lady who gets her glasses broken.
Would I do it? Hell yeah! I have worked with Kota many times and always had a ball. He is one of the most imaginative and perceptive artists around. I trust his instincts more than I do my own, so even if I don’t understand why he wants what he wants, I generally fall in. And I embarrass him by telling him is he is my culture hero—a variation on the “science hero” of the Alan Moore comic books—or as they say in his native Germany, he is my “held.” When he confided years back that he planned on making a full length animation of the infamous “sex tape” of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, in which I would ... More
