San Francisco (Museums)

I started my day with a visit to SFMOMA . I actually have a membership to this museum, so it was fun to use it. Like many of these big city art museums, it is not practical to see the whole thing in one day. I picked two current exhibitions that looked interesting to me, Pacita Abad and Chiura Obata .

While both were replete with social commentary, Obata’s work was particularly poignant. Obata was a Japanese immigrant whose tenure as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley was interrupted by his imprisonment at two different incarceration camps. Through it all he continued to produce and teach art. He returned to his University position and became a naturalized citizen. His work is ethereal.

Pacita Abad, born in the Philippines, traveled the world to interact with many different artistic communities and cultural traditions. She eventually settled on a painted quilt media to produce large pieces depicting such diverse subjects as migrant families, ethnic masks and the underwater environment. All reflect a larger commentary on the world around her.

I had hoped to visit the California Historical Society , but apparently they are temporarily closed. They did, however, have a window exhibit highlighting Trek, a literary and arts quarterly published from December 1942 to June 1943 by inmates of the Topaz War Relocation Center. Topaz was a concentration camp located in the Sevier Desert in central Utah where Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants—most of them from the San Francisco Bay Area—were incarcerated during World War II. Interestingly, this directly tied in with the Obata exhibition at SFMOMA as this was one of the camps at which he established an art school.

I then decided to visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum . This is a place that I have wanted to visit for some time, but never quite made it. I was glad to see a Native American Land acknowledgment statement. This is in keeping with the clear intention of the museum to embrace diversity. I was, unfortunately, underwhelmed by the exhibits. One was a pedestrian explanation of Jewish symbols and two others were rather uninteresting videos. Slightly more interesting was a retrospective of photography of rock and roll groups. While I could appreciate the depth and breath of the work, it is not a topic that particularly interests me.

At that point, my brain was done and I decided to just walk around the city for a while. I ended up heading to the the ferry pier and the re-purposed Ferry Building . It was a beautiful day and a lovely walk. I wandered around the Ferry building for a while. Once upon a time this was more of a rough farmer’s market. Now it is a collection of upscale shops and eateries. Knowing that I was going to be meeting my friends G and T for an early dinner, I headed back to my room to take a short rest and get ready.

A comment about the city of San Francisco. After my experience in Portland, several people had warned me that I might find a similar situation in San Francisco. Even though I live less than and hour away, I rarely come into the city because of the inconvenience of both driving and parking. I have to say that, at least in my experience over the last couple of days, SF feels safe, warm, inviting and vibrant. Granted, I did not visit all of the neighborhoods and, like all cities, the downtown area experienced an exodus of office workers and businesses. But that was not obvious to me as a tourist. Also, the parking garage at my hotel is practically airtight; any car violation would almost have to be an inside job. At the most expensive of my trip, $75 per night, it should be.

After a lovely dinner with G & T at Che Fico , I returned to my room for my last night in a hotel room in the continental U.S. Tomorrow morning I head home to sleep in my own bed for the first time in almost a year. I will spend two days at home before flying to Hawaii for my last week.