The Anne Bremer Memorial Library - SFAI

If you haven’t yet picked up this beautiful new issue of The Eye you should do it! There’s a stack of them sitting here in the library waiting for you.

We went over to Berkeley to meet with some art librarians, and walked by this monument to the Free Speech Movement created in 1991 by Mark Brest Van Kempen who was an SFAI grad student at the time. The monument consists of a six foot wide granite circle surrounding a six inch wide patch of soil and the 60,000 foot column of air above it. An inscription chiseled into the granite reads:

THIS SOIL AND THE AIR SPACE ABOVE IT SHALL NOT BE A PART OF ANY NATION AND SHALL NOT BE SUBJECT TO ANY ENTITY’S JURISDICTION.

Completely excited to have our archives-based SFAI q***r history show up and running over at the campus! It was a real learning experience putting this together - so many amazing weirdos that have passed through SFAI, so much beauty and creation in the face of the AIDS epidemic’s devastation, so much history still out there to record.

The careful labeling of archival photographs for posterity

Cool to see students using the archives to make something happen. This is a drawing of the window in the Diego Rivera Gallery from the building’s original blueprints, consulted in an effort to determine and match its dimensions.

Next time you’re in the library, stop by our new display -

YOURS TRULY, HUMBLY, BESEECHINGLY, GROVELINGLY, EXHIBITIONISTICALLY, TERRY FOX

- a small exhibition of archival ephemera about a giant pit and the art that was made inside of it.

(In conjunction with TERRY FOX: RESONANCE, a multi-venue exhibition in the works at: The Lab, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 871 Fine Arts, and The SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library)

In memory of Robert Frank who passed away on Monday, a letter from our archives, written by Frank to John and Mary Collier on the occasion of John’s retirement:
_____________________________

Dear John and Mary -

What a good day - today - in Manhattan. The sun is warm - I hope that you enjoy the sunshine and all the good food coming with the sun - shining (on you). The wisdom you have brought to me (or I came to get it) is kept inside my head in a small box without walls just behind and above my left eye. Maybe one day - I'll show up again in your house - we hardly would have to say anything -

I shake hands with you
Stay well

Robert Frank

Using library resources

It’s been fun watching the slow uncovering of the painted-over Fred Olmsted mural downstairs. We know from photos like this one in the 1935-36 school catalog what it looks like under there (but not what COLOR anything is!) Olmsted (grand-nephew of the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted) painted other murals around the city including a wall in Coit Tower and one of our library’s lunettes before ditching art in favor of biophysics. He went on to develop a prototype of the pacemaker in an attempt to shock the diseased heart of one of his dogs (!).

Next time you're walking up the ramp, take a look at the first installment of a new project, THIS WAS HERE: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SFAI ARCHIVES IN THE PLACES THEY WERE TAKEN. (Hint: it wasn't an earthquake.)

"As I leave the SFAI tower, I feel something move through me. I have no explanation for what it is—it’s like a shift in energy or the feeling that something is in the room with me."

Our librarian, and our ghost! (If you scroll down a bit): https://www.eventbrite.com/rally/real-haunts-in-san-francisco/

Real Haunts in San Francisco The supernatural exists in our city. Here are a few lesser-known but very real haunts in San Francisco.

(W/thanks to Max, our one-man PR dept.)