SFMOMA expansion  
# Thursday, February 11, 2010

SFMOMA says it is more than halfway home in $480-million expansion campaign

LA Times  |  by: Mike Boehm  |  February 4, 2010 |  5:39 pm

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art says it has raised $250 million toward a $480-million campaign to expand the museum, including a new wing that will be the primary home to the prized, 1,100-work  Fisher Collection (including Andy Warhol's "Elvis, 1963," pictured) that the museum will receive as a long-term, renewable loan for 100 years.

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Digital Printing on Fabric: Campbell Soup tablecloths and chair covers  
# Saturday, December 26, 2009
This is an good example of what's possible with fabric printing.


SFMOMA's 2007 Modern Ball, designed by Stanlee Gatti, featured a table setting with Warhol Campbell Soup decor.

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SFMOMA opens 75th anniversary celebration  
# Saturday, December 26, 2009
SFGate | December 19, 2009 | By Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

People expecting flashiness from "The Anniversary Show" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art may come away disappointed at first, but those who revisit the show that kicks off the museum's 75th anniversary festivity a month early will leave each time more impressed with the curatorial decisions that shaped it.

A museum celebrating itself inevitably risks exaggerating its prestige, influence or prescience. To the credit of "The Anniversary Show's" organizers, curators Janet Bishop, Corey Keller and Sarah Rogers, they have refreshed our view of the institution while keeping its claims for itself in proportion. Their selections weave together accounts of patronage, exhibition and collecting history, within a sketchy outline of nearly a century of international art production.

The exhibit, which runs for 13 months, takes the form of a head-snapping re-hanging of the permanent collection on the second floor that it customarily occupies. Only the gallery contractually devoted to the Anderson Collection of Pop Art figures as a still point around which everything else seems to have pivoted, including chronology and thematic groupings.


A wall full of San Francisco views on the second floor landing provides a seemingly superfluous but frankly thrilling reminder of where we are. "San Francisco Views, 1935 to Now" encompasses everything from a Timothy Pflueger graphite and charcoal "Bird's-Eye View of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge On-Ramps" to Rigo 98's panoramic ink on paper "Study for Looking at 1998 San Francisco From the Top of 1925," a view west from the roof of Pflueger's 1925 Pacific Telesis building, SFMOMA's immediate neighbor.

Even signature images such as John Gutmann's 1938 "Nob Hill, San Francisco" and Max Yavno's Filbert Street "Garage Doors" (1947) regain life alongside less familiar pictures by William Gedney, John Harding and Mary Kocol.

Absorbed in the historical zigzag the pieces on view trace, you forget you are looking at a core sample of SFMOMA's holdings.

Such triumphs of fascination over didactics occur throughout "The Anniversary Show," though it effectively pays tribute to defining personalities such as SFMOMA's founding patron, Albert Bender, and its dynamic early director, Grace McCann Morley.

In recognition of Morley's unblinkered vision, the curators have hung opposite canonical works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Alexander Calder 100 watercolors made by teenage boys in 1950s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that Morley acquired through the Chirodzo Art Centre there.

A wall full of San Francisco views on the second floor landing provides a seemingly superfluous but frankly thrilling reminder of where we are. "San Francisco Views, 1935 to Now" encompasses everything from a Timothy Pflueger graphite and charcoal "Bird's-Eye View of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge On-Ramps" to Rigo 98's panoramic ink on paper "Study for Looking at 1998 San Francisco From the Top of 1925," a view west from the roof of Pflueger's 1925 Pacific Telesis building, SFMOMA's immediate neighbor.

Even signature images such as John Gutmann's 1938 "Nob Hill, San Francisco" and Max Yavno's Filbert Street "Garage Doors" (1947) regain life alongside less familiar pictures by William Gedney, John Harding and Mary Kocol.

Absorbed in the historical zigzag the pieces on view trace, you forget you are looking at a core sample of SFMOMA's holdings.

Such triumphs of fascination over didactics occur throughout "The Anniversary Show," though it effectively pays tribute to defining personalities such as SFMOMA's founding patron, Albert Bender, and its dynamic early director, Grace McCann Morley.

In recognition of Morley's unblinkered vision, the curators have hung opposite canonical works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Alexander Calder 100 watercolors made by teenage boys in 1950s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that Morley acquired through the Chirodzo Art Centre there.

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Outside the Box: 50 Extraordinary Billboards  
# Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Most billboards are unsightly blights along the highway, blotting out the sky to shill for car dealerships or talk radio personalities. Four states with an abundance of natural beauty?Maine, Vermont, Hawaii and Alaska?have banned the beasts altogether. But sometimes, as this collection of extraordinary and attractive examples show, a billboard can be the vehicle for innovative and perspective-altering design.

Johnson Koh, an art director for a Singapore gaming company, collected his favorite billboard images for his Photoshop tutorial blog 10Steps.SG. The best ones break the conventional rectangular mold: A quit-smoking banner is held up by a giant three-dimensional cigarette butt; an ad for Tylenol features a wrecking ball lodged in a headache-sufferer?s forehead. In other cases, design is less important than clever writing. Take, for instance, the tag line for this Smart Car advert: ?German engineering, Swiss innovation, American nothing.?

This is a re-post from: Very Short List

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Maurice Sendak Exhibition: Contemporary Jewish Museum  
# Saturday, September 19, 2009
Author-illustrator Maurice Sendak's work is the subject of a show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum
Mercury News - Posted: 09/03/2009
By Sura Wood

For Maurice Sendak, the prolific, award-winning author and illustrator of more than 100 children's books, no place is safe, not even a child's bedroom.

The snug comfort of idealized childhood, the gauzy, soft-focus variety envisioned by hopeful parents and hawked by advertisers, doesn't interest him. Rather, the province of Sendak's stories is in many cases a reflection of his own fearful coming of age in a world filled with peril and savage bullies, nightmarish monsters and jackbooted boogeymen who wreaked havoc, and a barbaric society of outsiders and insiders with a caste system and a set of enforcers that make the Mafia look like a brotherhood of softies.

He has often said that his abiding theme is children's tenacious drive to survive. "In my books, my fighting is all there, my fighting to stay alive, my fighting to communicate," he has said.

The new exhibition "There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak" takes a novel look at the influences and biographical themes that have shaped the author's sensibility and highlights his formidable talent as an illustrator while exploring the neurosis and terror, brilliance and humor that inform his work.


The show, organized by the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, the repository for Sendak's 10,000-piece archive, opens Tuesday at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

Built around four thematic sections, the show presents more than 100 objects, encompassing original watercolors and drawings from more than 40 of Sendak's books, as well as rare sketches, working materials, stage designs, dummy books and manuscripts. Interview footage with the 82-year-old Sendak, a notorious curmudgeon who serves as a pithy albeit cranky narrator, can be accessed via touch screen in the galleries.

The Brooklyn-born son of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Sendak has been plagued by demons that have haunted him throughout his life and have emerged in his work. They include a terror of kidnapping triggered by the 1932 abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby and especially the profoundly chilling shadow of the Holocaust, which took the lives of many of his relatives.

For example, in Sendak's frightening drawing for a nearly forgotten Wilhelm Grimm story, "Dear Mili," about a girl sent into the woods to escape an impending war she doesn't survive, Sendak links Grimm's tale to the true story of Anne Frank and the plight of Jews forced into hiding.

He shows the title character wandering in a burned out, denuded forest where the trees resemble corpses; a silhouette of the guard tower at Auschwitz looms in the background.

Horror also finds its way into a pen-and-ink drawing of the devil with tiny minions scrambling at his feet, a truly demonic incarnation created for a collection of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"Scariness is important to Sendak," says Patrick Rodgers, the Rosenbach's coordinator of traveling exhibitions.

"Look at how he grew up: His generation saw Europe descend into fascism, and he was aware of every family member who was eradicated in the Holocaust, every village that was razed. Half his family was killed.

"To be true to himself as an artist, he must deal with scary things in his work. The Holocaust looms very large, and so do other ghosts: AIDS, kidnappings, poverty, war."

Early in his career, the fear quotient made Sendak a lightning rod for child psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim and some concerned parents, who believed that their sensitive offspring were too fragile to handle the dark undercurrents of his books. With the 1963 publication of what is now acknowledged as his masterpiece, "Where the Wild Things Are," the controversy surrounding the artist reached its apex. But the admonitions and finger wagging haven't prevented Sendak's stories from being adored by legions of children.


The fantastical and playfully dangerous realms to which he has transported young readers have offered comfort and escape for millions of kids grappling with the travails of growing up. They are found in books such as "Kenny's Window," about the adventures of a boy whose bedroom window becomes a magical portal, and "In the Night Kitchen," where Mickey, in a dream state, floats down from his room to a kitchen with a bevy of rotund bakers who busily fold him into the cake batter.

In the aforementioned "Wild Things," naughty Max, after being sent to his room without supper, dons a wolf suit and consorts with an array of hairy and horned mythical beasts.

In a tribute to the cathartic power of literature, Sendak admits to working out his own long-standing childhood grudge against a despised uncle by turning him into the ugliest creature in the latter book, though he declines to divulge which one.

The brightly colored, original illustrations and final watercolors for "Wild Things" - a film adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, is due out in mid-October - and a 1930s comics-inspired picture for "Night Kitchen" are among the high points of the museum show.

However, no Sendak retrospective would be complete without the infamously misbehaving, tantrum-throwing children beloved by fans. Take Pierre, for instance, introduced in the early 1960s: The author's alter ego stands on a chair and shouts his favorite anthem, "I don't care," to whomever will listen, while his mortified parents look on.

Sendak "creates characters that are easy for kids to identify with," Rodgers says. "They're simple, with loud personalities, a lot of brass and a big taste for adventure. And, fantasy aside, they behave like real kids." Hey, out there, you know who you are.


But it's the portion of the exhibition devoted to Sendak's specialty - monsters, boogeymen and bullies - that's likely to elicit the greatest enthusiasm from youngsters and those adults for whom childhood was more battleground than playground.

"What is too often overlooked is the fact that, from their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions. That fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives," observes Sendak in an exhibition text panel. "And it is through fantasy that they achieve catharsis."

"There"s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak"

When: Tuesday-Jan. 19, 2010

Where: Contemporary Jewish Museum. 736 Mission St., San Francisco

Admission: $10, $8 students and ages 65 and older, free to members and ages 17 and younger, $5 for both adults and students after 5 p.m. Thursdays; 415-655-7800, www.thecjm.org

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Oracle & Sun showcase 'world's fastest' database machine  
# Saturday, September 19, 2009
DFM produced the prototype graphics and screen printing for the world's fastest' database machine!

On September 15th Oracle and Sun introduced the "world's first" online transaction processing (OLTP) database machine. According to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Exadata 2 is the "fastest machine" for both data warehousing and online transaction processing.

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The Vendor Client Relationship  
# Thursday, September 10, 2009
A photographer friend emailed a link to this video and asked, "how many times have we heard these phrases?"



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