Reminder: Coit Tower Mural Artist exhibit opens at Jazz Heritage Ce... @ Wed Oct 20 7pm - 8pm (Queer Things)

more details » Coit Tower Mural Artist exhibit opens at Jazz Heritage Center Lehrhaus Judaica Presents Zakheim: The Art of Prophetic Justice Jazz Heritage Center October 17 - December 30, 2010 Lehrhaus Judaica will present Zakheim: The Art of Prophetic Justice at the Jazz Heritage Center (1320/1330 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, CA) with the public opening reception scheduled for Wednesday, October 20, at 7 p.m. A photographic history of leading Bay Area muralist, painter and sculptor Bernard Zakheim's life and work will be showcased in the Koret Heritage Lobby (Oct. 17 - Dec. 30), and approximately 25 original Zakheim paintings will be displayed in the Lush Life Gallery (Oct. 17 - Nov. 30). Following the opening reception on October 20, award-winning historian Fred Rosenbaum will speak about Zakheim at 8 p.m. Admission to the exhibition is free every day, including the public opening event. Although he is little known today, Bernard Baruch Zakheim (1896-1985) was one of the leading artists in California in the middle decades of the 20th century. Born and raised in a Hasidic family in Warsaw, Poland, he immigrated to San Francisco in 1921 and except for lengthy periods of study in Paris and Mexico City, he resided in the Bay Area until his death. Zakheim, a protégé of the legendary Diego Rivera, won fame primarily as a muralist. He studied under Rivera in Mexico City in 1929, and befriended him and Frida Kahlo when the couple came to San Francisco for a momentous visit in 1931. Zakheim even presented Rivera with a colorful sketch depicting the burly Mexican at work on a mural, his back to the viewer; Rivera's own mural at the San Francisco Art Institute, which may still be seen today, is strikingly similar. Commissioned for the San Francisco Jewish Community Center in 1933, Zakheim's Jewish Wedding is considered one of the most notable works of art in any Jewish building on the West Coast. The piece was removed, restored, and reinstalled when the JCC demolished its building and erected a new facility in 2004. In 1934, Zakheim oversaw the entire Coit Tower mural program, the largest publicly funded art program in the country at that time. He served as one of the designers and managed the 26 local artists in the project. While working at Coit Tower, the muralists could see the violent battles between workers and the police on the waterfront below, the Big Strike as it was called, which eventually resulted in multiple fatalities. Not surprisingly, several of the murals reflected the social and economic fault lines of the Depression. Zakheim's own wall painting, entitled Library, depicted well-known local radicals reaching for books like Das Kapital, and inflammatory newspaper headlines mirroring the current crisis of American capitalism. The Coit frescos came under great scrutiny, and resulted in the greatest controversy over public art in the city's history. Zakheim was scorched by the incendiary politics of his times. In July 1934, a San Francisco Examiner reporter somehow gained access to the landmark and photographed Zakheim's mural. The editors of the Hearst publication then ran the photograph in their newspaper, superimposing a hammer and a sickle, and the words "Workers of the World Unite," an icon and a slogan the artist never used. The headline read: "Soviet Symbol in Tower." The left wing Zakheim found himself both revered and reviled in a city polarized by the Depression. To this day, all of the murals can still be seen almost exactly as painted by Zakheim and his crew of painters. By the end of the 1930s, Zakheim came to paint the monumental 12-panel fresco, The Story of California Medicine, which hangs in the amphitheater of Toland Hall on the campus of the UCSF Medical Center. He also produced a large oeuvre of watercolors, oils, other works on paper, and sculpture. He was one of the first American artists to depict the Holocaust, and his huge wooden sculpture Genocide (initially displayed at the Magnes Museum, and since 1969, in Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles) was among the earliest Shoah monuments in the United States. He also painted a series of vivid scenes showing the Jewish contribution to the American Revolution. The upcoming Zakheim exhibition at the Jazz Heritage Center is a follow-up to the highly successful Jews of the Fillmore exhibit presented by Lehrhaus Judaica and the Magnes Museum in the fall of 2009. Zakheim lived and taught in the Fillmore District, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s, during the interwar period before moving to Sebastopol where he set up his studio in an apple orchard. Fred Rosenbaum's recently published cultural and social history of Bay Area Jewry, Cosmopolitans (UC Press, 2009), includes a five-page section on Zakheim in the context of his times. "In the 1930s, Zakheim was one of the foremost Jewish artists in the country," said Rosenbaum, the 2010 Cowan Award recipient. "He was also among the most controversial. The Jewish symbols of his youth in Warsaw, the narrative fresco techniques he studied in Mexico City, and the postimpressionism he absorbed in Paris, all served his artistic plea for human dignity." Other than the murals, the majority of Zakheim's work is in the possession of his son, Nathan Zakheim of Los Angeles. The family also has an invaluable photo collection dating from the artist's birth to his death at the age of 89, as well as an extensive archive of his personal correspondence and other papers. Nathan Zakheim vividly recalls what it was like to be raised by his father. "His mood transcended joy," says Nathan. "Just as a great violinist becomes immersed in the vivid sounds that he produces, likewise, my father entered a sort of sacred trance and was no longer in the room, the house or this world. He seemed to connect with a visionary source, and when he was done, he looked sedated and spent." Nathan continues, "My brother and I were apprenticed from birth. My father was a highly charismatic visionary artist, and when he painted, the room filled with electricity. Whatever he painted or drew, I had an art pad and brush or conti or pen, and tried my best to emulate his fearless lightning like brush strokes!" In addition to the public opening lecture by Fred Rosenbaum, there will be three additional Zakheim presentations in San Francisco. Rosenbaum will participate in the Contemporary Jewish Museum's panel on the Works Progress Administration murals on Thursday, October 21, at 7 p.m. Contemporary art specialist Susanne Strimling will speak about Zakheim on Tuesday, October 5, at 7 p.m. at Congregation Sherith Israel and on Sunday, November 14, at 11 a.m. at the Jazz Heritage Center. The Zakheim family and its exclusive representative for Bernard Zakheim's art, Albert Neiman, have pledged full cooperation for this project. The exhibition is made possible by a lead grant from the Koret Foundation, the Laszlo N. Tauber Family Foundation, the Fleishhacker Foundation, and Fred Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, collaborated on the exhibition. To read a full Q&A with Nathan Zakheim, please visit www.lehrhaus.org/2010/09/nathan-zakheim-qa/. Reproductions of Zakheim's main works may be viewed at www.bernardzakheim.com. For more information, please visit www.lehrhaus.org or www.jazzheritagecenter.org. When Wed Oct 20 7pm – 8pm Pacific Time Calendar Queer Things Who • Larry Bob Roberts - creator

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