Ghosts of the Tower
January 26–April 8, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, January 27, 7-9pm
Atholl McBean Gallery
You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.
–Carolyn Steedman
Arthur Brown had a thing for towers. The famed architect of Coit Tower, Hoover Institution Tower at Stanford, San Francisco City Hall, and San Francisco Art Institute’s 1926 Chestnut Street campus oriented our faux-Italian hillside around a non-functioning tower. There’s no bell and no lookout. Brown’s postmodern gesture came before its time and is now a famous home of ghosts. The SFAI tower also shrouds an indispensable archive of nearly 150 years of art history—spanning the founding documents of the San Francisco Museum of Art to early acid-trip induced exhibitions.
Since its founding in 1871—as the first art organization west of the Mississippi—San Francisco Art Institute has lead the formation of new art forms, ideas, and histories. This project reveals SFAI’s singular history as a place where contemporary art history happens, and artists invent the future.
Ghosts of the Tower unveils the initial implementation of SFAI's recently awarded Institute of Museums and Library Services two-year grant to digitize and make widely accessible the Exhibitions and Public Programs Collections. In a collaborative project between the Anne Bremer Memorial Library and the Exhibitions and Public Programs department, the collections will be rehoused, processed, catalogued, and selections digitized, beginning in the Atholl McBean Gallery. This public process offers the SFAI community—including students, faculty, and the public—a rare firsthand opportunity to explore the breadth of SFAI’s Archives' fugitive material.
The Exhibitions and Public Programs Collection contains a vast store of unique primary source materials, including over a thousand recordings of artist lectures, correspondences, catalogs, installation views, and posters. Within the trove are John Cage’s legendary question-and-answer sessions, San Francisco Art Association’s board approval for the 1878 public presentation of Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, cassettes of Angela Davis’ lectures, Diego Rivera’s fee negotiation for his site-specific fresco, documentation of David Dashiell's seminal 1993 exhibition Queer Mysteries, and images of Mark Bradford’s first ever solo show in this same gallery.
show less
January 26–April 8, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, January 27, 7-9pm
Atholl McBean Gallery
You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.
–Carolyn Steedman
Arthur Brown had a thing for towers. The famed architect of Coit Tower, Hoover Institution Tower at Stanford, San Francisco City Hall, and San Francisco Art Institute’s 1926 Chestnut Street campus oriented our faux-Italian hillside around a non-functioning tower. There’s no bell and no lookout. Brown’s postmodern gesture came before its time and is now a famous home of ghosts. The SFAI tower also shrouds an indispensable archive of nearly 150 years of art history—spanning the founding documents of the San Francisco Museum of Art to early acid-trip induced exhibitions.
Since its founding in 1871—as the first art organization west of the Mississippi—San Francisco Art Institute has lead the formation of new art forms, ideas, and histories. This project reveals SFAI’s singular history as a place where contemporary art history happens, and artists invent the future.
Ghosts of the Tower unveils the initial implementation of SFAI's recently awarded Institute of Museums and Library Services two-year grant to digitize and make widely accessible the Exhibitions and Public Programs Collections. In a collaborative project between the Anne Bremer Memorial Library and the Exhibitions and Public Programs department, the collections will be rehoused, processed, catalogued, and selections digitized, beginning in the Atholl McBean Gallery. This public process offers the SFAI community—including students, faculty, and the public—a rare firsthand opportunity to explore the breadth of SFAI’s Archives' fugitive material.
The Exhibitions and Public Programs Collection contains a vast store of unique primary source materials, including over a thousand recordings of artist lectures, correspondences, catalogs, installation views, and posters. Within the trove are John Cage’s legendary question-and-answer sessions, San Francisco Art Association’s board approval for the 1878 public presentation of Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, cassettes of Angela Davis’ lectures, Diego Rivera’s fee negotiation for his site-specific fresco, documentation of David Dashiell's seminal 1993 exhibition Queer Mysteries, and images of Mark Bradford’s first ever solo show in this same gallery.
Ghosts of the Tower
January 26–April 8, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, January 27, 7-9pm
Atholl McBean Gallery
You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.
–Carolyn Steedman
Arthur Brown had a thing for towers. The famed architect of Coit Tower, Hoover Institution Tower at Stanford, San Francisco City Hall, and San Francisco Art Institute’s 1926 Chestnut Street campus oriented our faux-Italian hillside around a non-functioning tower. There’s no bell and no lookout. Brown’s postmodern gesture came before its time and is now a famous home of ghosts. The SFAI tower also shrouds an indispensable archive of nearly 150 years of art history—spanning the founding documents of the San Francisco Museum of Art to early acid-trip induced exhibitions.
Since its founding in 1871—as the first art organization west of the Mississippi—San Francisco Art Institute has lead the formation of new art forms, ideas, and histories. This project reveals SFAI’s singular history as a place where contemporary art history happens, and artists invent the future.
Ghosts of the Tower unveils the initial implementation of SFAI's recently awarded Institute of Museums and Library Services two-year grant to digitize and make widely accessible the Exhibitions and Public Programs Collections. In a collaborative project between the Anne Bremer Memorial Library and the Exhibitions and Public Programs department, the collections will be rehoused, processed, catalogued, and selections digitized, beginning in the Atholl McBean Gallery. This public process offers the SFAI community—including students, faculty, and the public—a rare firsthand opportunity to explore the breadth of SFAI’s Archives' fugitive material.
The Exhibitions and Public Programs Collection contains a vast store of unique primary source materials, including over a thousand recordings of artist lectures, correspondences, catalogs, installation views, and posters. Within the trove are John Cage’s legendary question-and-answer sessions, San Francisco Art Association’s board approval for the 1878 public presentation of Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, cassettes of Angela Davis’ lectures, Diego Rivera’s fee negotiation for his site-specific fresco, documentation of David Dashiell's seminal 1993 exhibition Queer Mysteries, and images of Mark Bradford’s first ever solo show in this same gallery.
read more
January 26–April 8, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, January 27, 7-9pm
Atholl McBean Gallery
You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.
–Carolyn Steedman
Arthur Brown had a thing for towers. The famed architect of Coit Tower, Hoover Institution Tower at Stanford, San Francisco City Hall, and San Francisco Art Institute’s 1926 Chestnut Street campus oriented our faux-Italian hillside around a non-functioning tower. There’s no bell and no lookout. Brown’s postmodern gesture came before its time and is now a famous home of ghosts. The SFAI tower also shrouds an indispensable archive of nearly 150 years of art history—spanning the founding documents of the San Francisco Museum of Art to early acid-trip induced exhibitions.
Since its founding in 1871—as the first art organization west of the Mississippi—San Francisco Art Institute has lead the formation of new art forms, ideas, and histories. This project reveals SFAI’s singular history as a place where contemporary art history happens, and artists invent the future.
Ghosts of the Tower unveils the initial implementation of SFAI's recently awarded Institute of Museums and Library Services two-year grant to digitize and make widely accessible the Exhibitions and Public Programs Collections. In a collaborative project between the Anne Bremer Memorial Library and the Exhibitions and Public Programs department, the collections will be rehoused, processed, catalogued, and selections digitized, beginning in the Atholl McBean Gallery. This public process offers the SFAI community—including students, faculty, and the public—a rare firsthand opportunity to explore the breadth of SFAI’s Archives' fugitive material.
The Exhibitions and Public Programs Collection contains a vast store of unique primary source materials, including over a thousand recordings of artist lectures, correspondences, catalogs, installation views, and posters. Within the trove are John Cage’s legendary question-and-answer sessions, San Francisco Art Association’s board approval for the 1878 public presentation of Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, cassettes of Angela Davis’ lectures, Diego Rivera’s fee negotiation for his site-specific fresco, documentation of David Dashiell's seminal 1993 exhibition Queer Mysteries, and images of Mark Bradford’s first ever solo show in this same gallery.
show less
Date/Times:
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133
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