Displaying items by tag: de Young Museum

San Francisco city officials are looking into a complaint filed against philanthropist and board president of San Francisco's de Young museum, Dede Wilsey, over a $450,000 payment to a museum staffer, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The complaint from the museum's chief financial officer, Michele Gutierrez, is being investigated by City Hall and the office of the state Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The payment was allegedly made to Bill Huggins, a city worker assigned to the museum who retired in September 2014 after suffering a heart attack.

On Wednesday night at the 10th anniversary gala celebrating the de Young Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco revealed 10 pledged gifts to the de Young’s permanent collection. Of the 10 works, eight were on display at the museum. The gifts are:

The allure of the Western frontier has been a central part of Ed Ruscha’s biography and mythology ever since he drove his black Ford from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956, following Route 66 most of the way to the school now known as Cal Arts. It is also the concept for a show organized by the De Young Museum in San Francisco set to open in July 2016: "Ed Ruscha and the Great American West."

The exhibition, divided into nine parts, stars with a focus on landscapes by Ruscha that stretch across our field of vision in the same sort of aspect ratio as a car windshield.

Anyone whose appetite for painting has gone cold will find it inflamed again by “Botticelli to Braque: Masterpieces From the National Galleries of Scotland,” a spectacular exhibition that opened at the de Young Museum on Saturday, March 7.

Decades ago, I began to notice how often in museum retrospectives and anthology shows the lender of particularly impressive works proved to be the Scottish National Art Collection, shorthand for the three linked Edinburgh institutions contributing to the current show: the Scottish National Gallery, Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

A retrospective of one of America’s most famed and cherished fashion designers, Oscar de la Renta, will make its world premiere in San Francisco next year, bolstering the Fine Arts Museums’ reputation as a venue for blockbuster fashion — including the Vivienne Westwood, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier retrospectives — since 2007.

The exhibition, to be mounted at the de Young Museum from Feb. 27 to May 30, 2016, will feature 100 ensembles from the designer, who died late last year of cancer.

While many San Francisco institutions have banned Google Glass over the course of 2014 — the fine art museums of San Francisco are embracing the face computers. According to a press release, the de Young and Legion of Honor are incorporating the Google Glass experience into their exhibits, and first up is the new Keith Haring show; GuidiGO will provide access to in-depth interviews, audio recordings, and videos via the face computers — because reading the plaques and listening to the audio tour is pretty much akin to walking around with a newspaper and a walkman. 

The press release goes on to state: 

“'Wearing Glass in the gallery is like embarking on a multimedia journey, with visual archives, contextual music and testimonials revealing the artworks’ hidden stories. Within minutes, visitors completely forget they are even wearing Glass, as the screen subtly turns on only when needed,' said David Lerman, CEO of GuidiGO."

"The Last Rainforest.” “Silence = Death.” “Apartheid.”

Though many associate the late artist Keith Haring with his seemingly innocuous images of barking dogs, crawling babies, beating hearts and flying saucers, his work often tackled social justice issues – from nuclear proliferation to AIDS to the environment to racial and income inequality.

“The Political Line,” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, is the first show to look at Haring’s art from a social justice perspective, grouping it by themes such as racism, capitalism and consumerism, the growing use of technology in everyday life, the treatment of those suffering from HIV/AIDS, the suppression of individual freedoms, and environmental devastation.

"Neptune's Daughter," a bronze sculpture that stood prominently in the Garden of Enchantment to the right of the de Young Museum until 2011, was vandalized that year and quietly removed from the garden without any press attention. The four-foot statue of a young girl atop a sea horse, created by artist Melvin Earl Cummings in 1926, was on prominent display at the museum for nearly 90 years before unidentified vandals pried off one of its arms and disappeared with it. And now, thanks to some Good Samaritans and the good will of the insurers, the arm has been restored and "Neptune's Daughter" will be rededicated next month.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the museum had insured the sculpture with Lloyd's of London, who paid the museum just under six figures for it after a search of Golden Gate Park three years ago turned up no trace of the missing bronze arm.

A rare collection of African art assembled over nearly 30 years by a leading Genentech biochemist will go on display at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park in late January, marking the first time the public has seen many of the carved forms and shapes.

The collection, "Embodiments: Masterworks of African Figurative Sculpture," was assembled by scientist Richard Scheller, who was taken by African art's "amazing forms," but fascinated when he began to learn what the sculptures represent.

Esther Bell, a former Fulbright scholar and current curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, was named on Wednesday as the new curator in charge of European paintings at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Bell, who specializes in 17th- and 18th-century European art, has more than a decade of experience at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Colin Bailey, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco – which includes the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor, said, “We are delighted to appoint someone of Bell’s caliber who brings a depth of knowledge and expertise that will benefit our future exhibitions and the museums’ permanent collections.”