San Francisco Art Association Quotes

“San Francisco Art Association and related organizational records, 1871-1978, bulk 1871-1920”

“The San Francisco Art Association has a distinguished record for encouraging the development of modern art. ...
The San Francisco Museum of Art, originally under the administration of the Art Association, was installed in the Civic Center in 1935, under the directorship of Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley. ...
One of the unique features of the SFAA is the Artists' Council, which nominates the yearly juries for the annual show.”

“Much of San Francisco's artistic and bohemian life revolved around the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and the San Francisco Art Association. The institute converted ground-flour salons and drawing rooms into exhibition galleries and classrooms, using many of the spacious chambers on the top floors as studies. Major art exhibitions were scheduled twice each year in the spring and fall. Every winter the students hosted one of San Francisco's major social events of the season, the colorful and not always sedate Mardi Gras ball. Everyone appeared in costume, including Alice B. Toklas, who once came dressed as Carmen, a high point for the revelers, arriving with the crowning of King and Queen of Bohemia at midnight.”

“A few of Conner's assemblages became fully dimensional sculptures. Some were outspoken expressions of social protest. Child, a grotesquely gnarled, life-sized figure in black was placed in a real highchair, was inspired by the gas-chamber execution of the convicted rapist Caryl Chessman, who for years had made appeals for clemency from San Quentin's Death Row. It scandalized viewers when it was exhibited in a San Francisco Art Association Annual at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.”