@MISSBIGELOW A LARRY SULTAN TRIPLE-PLAY.
It’s a good thing Brent Assink, the longtime San Francisco Symphony executive director, recently retired. Now he has more time for house calls .
Assink knew he was being honored April 18 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music gala. What he didn’t know was that conservatory President David
Stull and Michael Kim, music director of the University of Minnesota (Assink’s alma mater), would surprise him with an honorary doctorate in music.
This marvelous musicale — featuring a concert, McCalls dinner in an elegant J. Riccardo Benavides-designed tent and dance-party with Red Baraat Band — organized by co-chairs Deepa Pakianathan, Eileen
Blum-Bourgade and Maria Shim, enriched conservatory student scholarships and community programs to the tune of $800K.
Also on deck: Conservatoryboard chairman Timothy Foo with Assink’s former “bosses” — Symphony President Sako Fisher and her predecessors Nancy
Bechtle and John Goldman, who announced a conservatory scholarship named for the honoree and his wife, Jan Assink.
The initial $250K seed grant endows this fund in perpetuity for students with the greatest musical promise and highest financial need.
“Brent and Jan have given so much to the Symphony and the conservatory,” Goldman enthused. “They believe strongly in the spirit of outreach and engagement and know that ensuring the future of music leads to the betterment of society.”
Onstage, that future was evident — even for pianist Jon Nakamatsu and soprano Deborah Voight, who are both conservatory faculty members — in a young group of musicians. These established stars were wowed by the superb Little Stars String Trio — 10-year-old Dustin Breshears Jr. and his sisters Starla, 9, and
Valery, 7 — who travel to the conservatory’s pre-college program every Saturday from Chico.
During Assink’s 18-year tenure, which has coincided with Michael Tilson Thomas’ time as maestro, the Symphony has attained global preeminence and developed such groundbreaking sideline businesses as a Grammy-winning music label, the “Keeping Score With MTT” media series, and Soundbox. Additionally, 35 Symphony orchestra members moonlight as conservatory faculty.
“Minding a symphony orchestra is difficult enough. Yet all this derived from Brent’s leadership,” enthused Stull. “And when a symphony turns its attention, through its free Adventures in Music programs, to the education needs of public school students in a city that’s losing arts funding, that’s when you know Brent achieved something remarkable.”
Snap: There’s a Larry Sultan spectacular in town — a threering circus of complementary celebrations of the late photographer.
Sultan was a master documentarian who re-imagined the banal, using his shutter to transform hackneyed suburban spaces into alien terrain.
He honed his groove amid what were assumed to be the sleepy hamlets of Los Angeles, where he grew up. In the early ’70s, Sultan moved north earning his master’s of fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, and later taught there and at California College of the Arts.
First at bat: A major retrospective, “Here and Home,” recently opened at SFMOMA, where director Neal Benezra proudly noted, at a Director’s Circle conversation with former SFMOMA curator Sandra Phillips and the late artist’s wife,
Kelly Sultan, that the museum’s permanent collection boasts a whopping 84 of Sultan’s works.
“In 2005, Larry received our Treasure Award, and just before his sad passing in 2009, he served as the museum’s second artist trustee,” Benezra recalled. “Larry continues to mean so much to our community of photographers, artists, collectors and students.”
He’s also beloved by local swells, including grande dame
Denise Hale. Though her famous Sultan portrait (shot for a sizzling W Magazine story about Pacific Heights denizens) resides in an exhibition on the south end of town, Hale, draped in white fur and diamonds, joined innerSultan-circlers at the museum cafe for a post-exhibition McCalls buffet. There, art critic and author
Philip Gefter raised a glass to his longtime friend: “Larry had the ease of a surfer, the speech of a poet and the manner of a prince.”
The next night, at Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch, a more funky vibe reigned as cofounders Deborah and Andy
Rappaport welcomed students, photographers and fans of all stripes to their gallery collective.
Amid this artistic hive are more Sultan installations at Casemore Kirkeby Gallery, including “Editorial Works” (here’s where you’ll find la Hale) and “Fake Newsroom,” an au courant revamp of the 1983 “Newsroom” performance-photo project Sultan created at Berkeley Art MuseumPacific Film Archive with artist
Mike Mandel, whose own exhibition opens May 20 at SFMOMA.
“‘Ambiguity’ was Larry’s middle name, and his art is a form of storytelling where the viewer must participate,” explains gallerist Julie Casemore, who worked with Sultan at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. Kelly Sultan echoed that oeuvre, noting that her late husband’s art is about not knowing what exactly you’re looking at.
“Larry was in love with reality and didn’t feel the need to make a fiction of it. His ultimate question was, ‘What are you seeing and whose truth is it?’ ” she continues. “But by looking at a piece, you eventually see. Larry documented poetically with the result being something more than just a photograph.”
Soup’s on: St. Anthony’s supporters raised a very filling $450K during the recent Raising Hope gala at City Hall. Led by chair
Meagan Levitan, the McCalls dinner turned the tables by ladling praise on dedicated volunteers who serve meals with a side of hope to at-need clients of St. Anthony’s.
In three years, this event has raised more than $1 million for the charitable organization’s recovery clinic, tech lab, clothing program and dining room.
Founded in the Tenderloin 67 years ago by Father Alfred Boeddeker, St. Anthony’s serves the homeless and those who’ve slipped through the social safety net. While St. Anthony’s is not as widely known as the cable cars or S.F. Giants, it is, Levitan said, a revered San Francisco icon.
“St. Anthony’s reminds us of what we are called to do as humans and as San Franciscans — to take care of others,” Levitan declared. “When we talk about what it means to be a city of compassion and generosity, the city of St. Francis — we can still point to St. Anthony’s as the embodiment of these values.”