The Best of the Bay Area

The pulse of northern California’s cultural scene still thumps the loudest in downtown San Francisco: There’s the city’s world-renowned Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Museum of Craft and Folk Art; and the Daniel Libeskind–designed Contemporary Jewish Museum will add to this visual-arts nerve center when it opens next summer. Yet outside the urban bustle are oases still within San Francisco’s city limits: the de Young Museum in bucolic Golden Gate Park and its sister institution, the Legion of Honor, perched above the gorgeous rocky coast overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Wander a bit further and discover museums in Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and beyond, stretching from picturesque wine country—the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art and the di Rosa Preserve—all the way down to southern Silicon Valley—the San Jose Museum of Art and the San Jose Institute of
Contemporary Art. Gap CEO Donald Fisher’s proposed Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio—which, according to his plans, is se  to open as early as 2010 and be bigger than SFMOMA—will be just another addition to the Bay Area’s critical mass of excellent visual-arts venues.

San Francisco
SFMOMA in the SoMa (South of Market) district is the city’s most popular draw among veteran collectors and first-time visitors alike. “Take your time: Olafur Eliasson”—the Danish artist’s first comprehensive survey in the United States—proves why. Eliasson uses simple materials to create transformative installations that push the boundaries between art, science, entertainment, and philosophy  The intent is to jar us from passive viewing into interactive collaboration. In a dark room, mist and a spotlight produce Beauty’s rainbows, while in another, 360˚room for all colours transports us out of ordinary architectural space into a circular dynamic sunset that threatens to collapse time and space. One-way colour tunnel reconfigures a museum catwalk into a fun-house ride, and in Room for one colour, monofrequency lightbulbs transform the elevator foyer into a living photograph. Two floors below in the Art and Design galleries is Eliasson’s BMW car project: an icy carapace that comments on global warming.

The perfect antidote to Eliasson’s sensory overload is “Jeff Wall,” a show of large, representational photographs just one floor down at SFMoMA. A tight retrospective of 40 works, these images (called “cinematography” by the artist) are carefully staged tableaux mounted on light boxes, depicting moments drawn from the news, art history, and everyday life in crystal-clear detail. Across the hall, “Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” presents nearly 50 works. Monitors stacked four and five high play the artist’s varied fare of repetitive hand gestures and appropriated clips from Hollywood classics.

A short cab ride away in the Civic Center district, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco features one of the most respected contemporary artists in China, in the eponymous exhibition “Zhan Wang.” in this artist’s hands, traditional “scholars’ rocks”—natural rock formations of unusual shape worthy of contemplation—are wrapped in stainless steel that is then removed and polished to liquid-mercury sheen. At the AAM, Zhan’s use of rocks from the nearby Sierra Nevada alludes to Chinese immigrant miners during the California gold rush. The exhibition also includes one of his “urban landscapes,” in which he brings together actual rocks, their metal reproductions, silverware, and pots and pans to form a topographical map of San Francisco.

Moored in the greenery of lush Golden Gate Park, Herzog and de Meuron’s shiplike de Young Museum boasts a tower with panoramic city views and a globe-spanning collection with particular strengths in American and South Pacific art. The museum has increasingly ambitious special exhibition programming, which now includes “Gilbert & George,” the largest retrospective of the duo’s work ever organized. The pair’s 20-year (and counting) practice blurs the boundaries between artist and art. Their most celebrated work, the “living sculpture,” is documented by an array of large photographs, film, and computer graphics.