Art I'm Looking At: Shows featuring SFAI artists (March 2025)

The Museum of Sonoma County (425 7th St., Santa Rosa, CA 95401 (707) 579-1500) is now in the middle of a show called "UNRULY: North Bay Artists from the San Francisco Art Institute" featuring art by students and faculty at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, which for 150 years fostered artistic experimentation in the San Francisco Bay Area, influencing generations (closed in 2022). The show of about 30 pieces by 18 artists occupies most of the museum's large central space. The show runs through July 8, 2025.

Local gallery owner Dennis Calabi, inspired by the Unruly show, has opened a show of his own at The Calabi Gallery (456 10th St., Santa Rosa, CA, (707) 781-7070) also featuring work by artists and students of the SFAI but mostly of an earlier generation. Dennis's holdings are rich in work by SFAI artists from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, nicely complementing the Unruly show, which mainly presents more recent work by living artists that were associated with SFAI. Both shows are worth seeing, but The Calabi Gallery show is perhaps the more rewarding as it is broader in scope, presenting more than 100 high-caliber works. 

Art I'm Looking At: SF MOMA (March 2025)

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped in at SF MOMA. I had visited only about six weeks earlier, so didn't find much new, but I enjoyed seeing a show of photography on right now called "Around Group ƒ.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography." 

The short-lived but influential Group ƒ.64 was founded in 1932 by California photographers interested in photography that was sharply focused and true to the medium – photography not pretending to be something it wasn't (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams were three of the eleven members). 

The impetus was a reaction to the pictorialists in vogue at the time whose aim was essentially to use photography to make images that mimicked painting, using soft focus and choosing mainly romantic subjects. The pictorialists and many early photographers were attempting to establish photography as a respectable art, a status it did not at first enjoy, by associating it with high art. The ƒ.64 Group photographers had as one of their goals a firmer footing for serious photography as well, but they chose an entirely different approach. 

The name of the group comes from ƒ.64, which is the smallest-diameter aperture setting available with most camera lenses, important in this context because the smaller the aperture used, the greater the depth of field there is – that is, the broader the range of view in an image that's in sharp focus. 

The show was a bit unfocused (no pun intended). It takes the actual Group ƒ.64 photographers as its starting point, showing work by all eleven original members, and then goes from there quite far afield. There is a section looking at the relationship between the Group's photographers and the poet Langston Hughes (a connection I was entirely unaware of). 

There is a section featuring the work of Tarrah Krajnak who does self-portraits referencing work by the Group ƒ.64 photographers. Some of her photographs are shown alongside the Group ƒ.64 photographs they were inspired by. These sections were followed by contemporary photographs with a rather tenuous connection to the rest of the show – the "counterhistories" of the show's title. I thought the earlier sections more interesting. I especially enjoyed seeing original prints by the less familiar Group ƒ.64 photographers. Posted here are a few favorites from the show, which runs through July 2025, along with one or two from the Amy Sherald show that has just closed at SF MOMA. 

 

(Above: Willard Van Dyke, Boxer's Hands, silver gelatin print, 1932; Willard Van Dyke, Funnels, silver gelatin print, 1932; Sonya Noskowiak, Spanish Bottle, silver gelatin print, 1927; Sonya Noskowiak, Industrial Section, San Francisco, silver gelatin print, 1937; Tarrah Krajnak, Self-portrait as West/as Bertha Wardell (Knees), silver gelatin print, 1927/2020; Edward Weston, Knees, silver gelatin print, 1927; Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsupressed Deliverance), oil on canvas, 2014; Amy Sherald, The Rabbit in the Hat, oil on canvas, 2009)

Places I'm Visiting: Corona Heights, San Francisco

Last week, on a fairly lazy day in San Francisco, I visited The Lost Art Salon, about which I recently posted. On the same day, I found myself on a hilltop and near the Randall Museum, which I had passed before when driving around the city but knew nothing about. Curious, I stopped and tried to find the place (which turned out to be a museum mostly catering to school groups, a mixture of natural history exhibits and exhibits about the history of San Francisco, including a large model train display).

Trying to find the museum entrance, I quickly got lost. The museum is in a little park and perched atop a rocky crag that I later learned was once known as "Rocky Heights" (today the area surrounding is called "Corona Heights.") The rocks were interesting, showing bands of the brownish-red Franciscan chert that is all over the city and along the coast in Northern California but interspersed with bands of pale yellow and greenish rock that my geologist friends surmise is simply the same Franciscan chert but weathered. 

The views from the summit, reached by a walking trail were excellent (the bottom photo here is the view to the south along the streets parallel to Castro St.). Atop a railing, I encountered a pair of ravens. Apparently used to people, they allowed me to walk by within a few feet without much fuss. I descended from the rocky summit after taking in the views and eventually I found the museum. After a short visit, I proceeded to SF MOMA to see what there was to see.