Understanding the collector’s impulse

Over the past 20 years, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Director Neal Benezra said at a celebration last week for the opening of “Selves and Others,” Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein have given more than 100 works from their photo collection to the museum. The selection in this exhibition, curated by Erin O’Toole, are portraits, images of people between 1854 and 2017.

That’s a huge range but, of course, a focus on the human image is timeless, however presented by one of the 47 artists with works in the show, whether traditional or manipulated photo, or in video. The current show displays “soulful works,” O’Toole said, that explore “the slippery nature of what is the self and the relationship of the self to others ... identity and self-representation.”

The curator also noted that although it wasn’t an overt goal, many of the artists in the exhibition happen to be women. “The gender equity,” she said, “came about naturally.” Emil and Silverstein have been married for more than 30 years, but it was definitely she who was credited as the collector of these works. “We used to live with these pieces,” she said. People would visit their Mill Valley home, “and there were these faces. They were so normal for us.”

It’s a rarity to have music playing at an SFMOMA opening, but “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song written for Nina Simone, was playing on speakers in every room of the show. Whether you were looking at a wall of Diane

Arbus pictures or a section in which the photographers had posed themselves as various characters (“appropriation artist” Yasumasa Morimura’s portrait of himself as Rembrandt hangs alongside his portrait of himself as Frida Kahlo alongside his portrait of himself as the “Girl With the Pearl Earring”), the song — looped by Silverstein, performed in 12 different versions — was playing. “It’s always been my favorite song,” Emil said.

A gang that included museum supporters, curators, collectors and pals of Emil and Silverstein headed upstairs from the third-floor gallery to Cafe 5 on the fifth floor, to share a family-style pizza dinner. There was no society photographer capturing the event.

The meal was catered by McCall’s and served with its usual grace, but the mood was informal, well reflecting Benezra’s description of Emil’s taste. She has a “collector’s vision,” he said, “but she thinks and feels like an artist.”

And while the subject (at least a bit) is women in art and, particularly, Frida Kahlo:

Feminist cartoonist Trina Robbins wrote last week to say she has a May 3, 1941, issue of Life magazine, which contains a double-page image of Diego Rivera’s “Pan American Unity” mural at City College. On the page following, Robbins writes, there’s a numbered key in which all the figures in the mural are identified.

“If you find Frida on the key,” wrote Robbins, “she is identified as ‘Mrs. Diego Rivera.’ ”

“Has anyone’s name ever been more appropriate for a cocktail (than Stormy Daniels?)” asks Ferenc Dobronyi. Picco in Larkspur is offering a drink called just that, which includes Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, lime Fever-Tree Ginger Beer, cane syrup and Angostura bitters. The price on the menu is $130,000.

It is illegal in France, reports Francophile Adda Dada, to give a speed camera the finger. Dada says a motorist in the Loire Valley bestowed the gesture on a camera. This action, which was seen by a worker whose job it is to review the tape, was considered “insulting a public service person with gestures that attack their dignity and respect.” The sentence was two to four months jail time. Honor roll:

Kehinde Wiley, the artist whose official presidential portrait of Barack Obama broke tradition by picturing him in a field of flowers, will be keynote speaker at the San Francisco Art Institute’s May 13 commencement. Wiley, who received a BFA from the institute in 1999 — and later an MFA from Yale and an honorary Ph.D. from the Rhode Island School of Design — will receive an honorary SFAI doctorate at the ceremonies.

Meanwhile, Dominican University’s keynote speakers/honorary degree recipients are spouses: actor John Lithgow and economic historian Mary Yeager. (Lithgow gets a doctorate of humane letters; Yeager gets a doctorate of laws.) What is amazing about this is that they will deliver a “joint keynote address,” a marital feat (“Will you stop interrupting me?”) that deserves its own honorary doctorate.