The view from the East of Hollein’s new gig

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco loss of Director Max Hollein to New York’s Metropolitan Museum was reported here by Charles Desmarais, and also, of course, from the East Coast, whence there were many stories about the move.

The New Yorker’s Andrea Scott noted, for example, that the Met had been having major financial troubles and that “Hollein, unlike his predecessor, is a fund-raiser with a proven track record ... not above an out-there development idea: in 2014, he proposed working with a drug-store chain to sell hundred-euro prints of works from the museum’s collection. While I hope not to encounter copies of the Met’s Vermeers in my local Duane Reade any time soon, it will be thrilling to see what a man who once paraphrased Goethe to describe his twinned interest in art and finance — ‘two souls are dwelling in my chest’ — has in store for the museum.”

In the City Journal, an online magazine of civic affairs, Brian Allen reported that Hollein “has the curatorial and political chops . ... In San Francisco, he dealt successfully with the imperious museum board president-for-life Diane Wilsey. Wilsey, the city’s best fundraiser, has a history of intense involvement in the institution’s operations. Hollein charmed this most intractable of mistresses so we know he is a courtier without peer.”

(Wilsey, who has raised millions for the museum and for UCSF, is deserving of praise for her fundraising abilities. But “best”? There’s stiff competition for that crown: think Nancy Pelosi and Charlotte Shultz.)

The Tenderloin Museum has mounted a variety of exhibitions since its opening in 2015, but probably none as adventurous as “Tender (n.): a person who takes charge.” This will be a series of site-specific aerial dances, to be performed by Flyaway Productions June 7 to 16 in celebration of what the museum calls 100 years of “outcast activism.”

The museum is at the corner of Eddy and Jones. Performances by seven artists will be on the outside of the building on weekend nights and at 12:30 p.m. on Fridays. The project is undertaken by the museum in collaboration with Code Tenderloin and the Asian Art Museum.

The performance is divided into four historical segments: “Nine Ladies Dancing,” about young working men in the city in the early 1900s; “The Queen’s Wave,” about transgender activism in the 1960s; “This Boat,” about Vietnamese immigrant activists; and “Kathy’s Dance,” about Kathy Looper and the Cadillac Hotel.

The company describes itself as using “the artistry of spinning, flying and suspension to engage political and social issues.” Related events will include lecture-demonstrations at the Asian Museum on May 6 and curbside conversations with the artist on May 24 and 31.

Dannie Martin, who was in Lompoc prison when he began writing essays published in The Chronicle about everyday life there, died in 2013. Martin’s work, and the story of his collaboration with Chronicle editor Peter Sussman, was shared in “Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog,” which was published in 1993. A legal case over whether he had a right to publish his works under a byline and be paid was lost in a lower court, appealed by The Chronicle and the ACLU to the Ninth Circuit, and became moot when Martin was paroled in 1992.

In 2007, Martin began writing his autobiography, a transcription of which popped up unexpectedly last year in the computer of a man who’d transcribed that prose from yellow legal pads. His friend Jan Sluizer subsequently arranged to have the Martin autobiography “Incorrigible” printed. Almost five years after his death, at his April 28 “Celebration of Life,” at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, copies of that book will be distributed.

Winner of the juried portion of April 8’s Best Croissant contest sponsored by French Morning, a website for Francophiles and French expats living in the United States, was the croissant baked by Jane the Bakery on Geary Street (sister to Jane cafes on Fillmore and on Larkin). Let Oscar winners thank their directors, their publicists, their spouses. Founder Amanda Michael attributes the win (for both croissants and pain au chocolat) to French butter, “such a lovely product, very extensible . ... It’ll sheet out nicely. It gets very, very thin for layers.” And also, to “a lot of hard work. I think the secret is my staff, personally.” (The Midwife and the Baker won the audience favorite part of the competition.)