MetaFilter posts tagged with sanfrancisco and art

plus, there's food. And bars.

oneirodynia — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:13:31 -0800

With over 35,000,000 visitors a year, it could be argued that it is the busiest museum in the world. Yet most people are there to catch a plane. The San Francisco International Airport is the first airport accredited by the American Association of Museums. It houses a permanent aviation exhibit, as well as dozens of rotating exhibits in various terminals, some of which are only available to screened passengers ( and for some reason, one has to dig through press releases to see photographs: Catalinaware, Victorian Majolica, Eight Centuries of Buddhist Imagery.) More pictures of the aviation museum from the Flickr site of the completely awesome Telstar Logistics. Another blog post on a past exhibit, The Engineering of Sound.

Daily photos from the SF Bay Area

whir — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:30:37 -0800

So you'd like to see daily photographs taken in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area? You can start with What I'm Seeing and supplement your viewing with the following sites. Fogbay's excellence is only hampered by its lack of an RSS feed, although it does categorize its posts via a handy map. Both Valerie J. Cochran's Your Waitress and Manuel Guerzoni's San Francisco Daily Photography tend to focus on urban scenes. Donald Kimmel's A Photo a Day features mostly, though not exclusively, landscapes and the North bay. Frederic Larson has a photojournalist's eye. Photography per se is not its focus, but Vélo Vogue provides near-daily updates on the fashions of local bicyclists. And finally, as a one-time bonus, here is an excellent set of photos taken at a long-abandoned swimming pool, now taken over by squatters.

It was this, or a million rubber duckies.

Leon-arto — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:46:05 -0800

The world's largest ball pit? 400,000 black plastic balls, one reservoir, thousands of happy goths. Other unusual things being filled with balls: the Spanish Steps, Rome, a co-worker's cube, San Francisco. (videos)

It's Down At The End of Lonely Street

fandango_matt — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:56:11 -0800

San Francisco's Hugo Hotel, the current home of Brian Goggin's Defenestration, has been seized by eminent domian and will probably be demolished. Fear not; San Francisco has many other ancient hotels.

Urban[e] Renewal

Smart Dalek — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:12:07 -0800

Postcards from Our Awesome Future. [via] An art exhibition stemming from the minds of Packard Jennings (whose illustrations have appeared in Adbusters) and Steve Lambert (of Anti-Advertising Agency fame); using San Francisco's infrastructure as a model for improvement, the duo answered the siren call of Objectivism through an arcology devoid of “...budgets, beauracracy [sic], politics, or physics”. While the final result owes more to MAD Magazine than Le Corbusier, Frederick Law Olmstead or Lebbeus Woods, it does capitalize upon the Utilitarian ideals of reknowned multitaskers. Jennings and Lambert's works are also available for download.

Choose Your Own Adventure in Graffiti

jonson — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:22:40 -0800

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. Via

Misako Inaoko

grapefruitmoon — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:27:51 -0800

Misako Inaoka is a Japanese born artist living and working in San Francisco who makes her own ecosystems where the real and the artificial intertwine. She is currently showing at the Johansson Projects gallery. [via]

Have You Seen Me?

fandango_matt — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:33:20 -0800

Requiem for La Contessa: After she was set afire in December, three questions arose: who burned her, why, and what became of her figurehead? The first two have been answered, but the third remains a mystery despite the sculpture's brief appearance in a photo on tribe.net.

Flavorpill adds Art & World Events mailing lists...

dobbs — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 16:21:59 -0800

2 years ago I FPP'd FlavorPill, a company that sends out permission-based emails for books (Boldtype), music (Earplug), and fashion (the JC Report). They've since added ArtKrush (it's art, stupid! - nsfw) and Activate (world events) to their aresenal. In addition to the topic-specific mailing lists, they offer city-specific lists for London, New York, SF, LA, and Chicago. Sample issues are archived on the site.

How Tos now on Fecal Face

dobbs — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:50:34 -0800

I've linked their site before, but now Fecal Face has instructional How Tos: Stuff a Mouse, Make an Oil Painting, Screen Print a Poster, Make a Mini-Comic/Zine. The site has many other features as well but remember that where there's art, the occasional nsfw image may wait, brooding.

The Parking Project

mathowie — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 08:45:03 -0800

The idea behind the Parking art project is pretty simple: once you throw some coins in the meter, you can do pretty much anything with a parking space, right? Rebar decided to try converting some vehicle space into a community space, by laying sod, adding benches and a tree, then letting people enjoy the space for a few hours. [via treehugger]

vacapinta — Wed, 08 May 2002 10:19:32 -0800

16thandmission: Urban Data Stories is "an investigation into the interplay of data, interactivity and narrative in an urban environment. It takes as its focus the corner of 16th and Mission Streets in San Francisco.... Depending on the state of the bus system at any given moment, the narratives interrelate to a variety of degrees with the map framework." [For you non-san-franciscans, 16th and Mission is a well-known intersection - lively, multicultural, gritty]

msippey — Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:51:01 -0800

SFMOMA appoints Neal Benezra as new director. Benezra was formerly the deputy director and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Art Institute of Chicago, and replaces David Ross, who left the museum in a hurry last August to become chairman of the board of Eyestorm. During his tenure, Ross spent $140 million on acquisitions for the museum; Elaine McKeon, chairwoman of the Museum's board told the NYTimes that "We will still continue purchasing works of art, but we are going to move more slowly." Benezra has ties to Hunk and Moo Anderson, and wrote the catalog essay for the 2000 show of the Anderson collection. Could this mean that the Anderson collection will eventually be gifted to SFMOMA? (sfgate story, nytimes story)

badstone — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 15:41:14 -0800

Artist-in-Residence Program at the landfill. There are plenty of "found object" artists out there, but in this particularly enlightened recycling program, the Sanitary Fill Company pitches in to the process in a big way.

msacheson — Fri, 03 Aug 2001 15:02:13 -0800

I MUST go see this exhibit in San Francisco. If I had to choose my favorite artistic medium, and the greatest practitioner of that medium, it would be the amazing black and white landscape photos by Ansel Adams.

msippey — Tue, 05 Jun 2001 22:00:37 -0800

Stretcher.org launched today, a "grassroots publication...providing a critical, informative survey of visual art and culture in the Bay Area and beyond with a provocative mixture of essays, dialogs, artist projects, and reviews by local, national and international contributors." It's about time -- the Bay Area is in desparate need of more sophisticated and in-depth art coverage than the Comical, Guardian or Weekly currently provide.