Herrera’s penance for books overdue
After almost 13 years as San Francisco city librarian, Luis Herrera’s last day on the job was Friday, Feb. 23. “It’s tough letting go after almost 42 years of librarianship,” he said of retirement.
What will he miss most? “I have the most amazing view of City Hall from my office,” he said, evoking the Civic Center vista from Larkin Street to Polk Street. “I could always tell what kind of activity was happening” at City Hall “because I could hear the volume of protests . ... I think I have the most coveted view of any department head.”
And what he will miss the least? The job deals with many different kinds of people, and “a lot of engagement . ... And I love that, but ... you were always weary of dealing with problems including every kind of safety issue,” and other nuts and bolts of the job. On “any given day, you could always expect the unexpected.”
Perhaps those hardships were earned. “When I was a young child, from a working-class family in Texas, my twin brother and I were taken to a new neighborhood library.” They took out some books and failed to return them. In Texas at the time, he says, libraries had truant officers who would go around to individual homes to retrieve books. The brothers lived in fear all summer. “We hadn’t returned the books . ... We spent the whole summer with every knock on the door being cause for worry. My penance for that was becoming city librarian in San Francisco. It’s a great job, but it’s not an easy job.”
Artist Tom McKinley, who lives in the Bay Area, was surrounded by well-wishers at his opening at the Berggruen Gallery on Wednesday, Feb. 21. McKinley’s precise housescapes (on view until March 24) feature images of precisely appointed homes in precisely manicured settings.
The artist was dressed with obvious attention to detail, too: He had on a satin white tie and crisp white shirt, covered with a custom-tailored mechanics’ jumpsuit with “JBG,” for John Berggruen Gallery, embroidered on the back. Did Berggruen have it made for him?
“He doesn’t make me anything,” said the artist, “but money.”
The 12 paintings in the exhibition, described by the gallery as “domestic architecture embedded with rich references to material culture,” feature homes appointed with well-known works of art, for instance, McKinley’s rendition of Andy Warhol’s image of Mao Tse Tung.
“I don’t really like narrative,” said the artist, and figures “are so loaded” that the only humans in his paintings are those in art created by others. McKinley said in a 2014 interview in the RealReal, that “like architects, I like rooms empty . ... So like staging a house to sell, I furnish the houses with popular furniture and select primarily blue-chip art because it’s the most desirable and coveted.”
P.S. As to architecture: Michael Wurzel of Foster + Partners Architects, the British firm that designed the new Apple building in Cupertino (and the Hearst skyscraper in New York) was among the guests at the Berggruen Gallery’s post-opening dinner at International Smoke. Wurzel has been traveling back and forth between London and San Francisco, overseeing construction of the Oceanwide Center just down the block, a mixed-use residential and commercial building with a Waldorf Astoria Hotel at the street level.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Keep your eyes open and be ready to spring around here. We’re not in Woodside anymore!” Bicycling bro to bicycling bros, overheard while riding through Golden Gate Park by Steve Heilig
The opening event for Photofairs/San Francisco on Thursday, Feb. 22, at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture was — in contrast to the recent Fog and Untitled fairs — a pretty serious gathering of photo-lovers, photo-dealers and even a few photographers.
The Shanghai-organized fair, a benefit for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seems pitched to photo aficionados, with a preponderance of international exhibitors. Opening night wasn’t the usual snacky/ chatty party. If you wanted something to eat, you bought it at a restaurant/ bar presided over by Nopalito.
That said, there were plenty of visual treats. We fell into conversation with Meghann Riepenhoff ,a San Francisco Art Institute alum who divides her time between here and Bainbridge Island, Wash., and makes cyanotypes, in which she immerses treated paper in water to create images reflecting, in one large work, the roiling sea.
Standing in front of “Sea Wall Sea Stack,” displayed on two walls meeting at a right angle, she described herself wearing waders, dipping the paper into the surf, then burying it in the sand so it could dry and be taken back to her studio. The image she created was no less vivid.