There may not be any subject that’s been highlighted more at San Francisco’s de Young Museum than Ancient Egypt. In the past 30 years, there’ve been three separate exhibitions devoted to the theme—that’s as much space as the fine art museum has given to Matisse and Monet combined in the same time span—which can leave one wondering: Why are we so obsessed with Ancient Egypt?

I can’t say I’m immune. When I was young, my favorite toy was a mummy set I got for Christmas, complete with canopic jars that you could pop organs in and out of. My favorite piece of jewelry as a tween was a gold necklace that spelled my name out in hieroglyphics. While an undergraduate at New York University, I took a course on Ancient Egyptian religion and sought out a rare copy of the oversized Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The new exhibition at the de Young, “Treasures of the Pharaohs,” does not disappoint. It is dazzling, glittering, shimmering. It is full of lore and never-before-seen treasure. It has mummies and toe caps (that’s a thing—and they’re called “stalls”) and those incredible canopic jars (these are extra large, with a sledge included for easy transport). You can read my full review here (spoiler alert: it’s positive).

One of the things I love about covering exhibitions as a journalist is that by attending the press preview and lingering at the end, you have the opportunity to spend some quiet, personal moments with the art. With blockbuster exhibitions that will be packed even during member preview days, this can be a priceless gift. Once nearly everyone had trickled out, I got caught behind His Excellency Sherif Fathi Attia going on live television for an interview and then I had one of the galleries to myself.

I was drawn to a mummy case that hadn’t even made it into the press preview tour and, since it was behind a wall, had been obscured during the tour. Yet it was one of the most gorgeous objects in the entire exhibition. How had I almost missed it? I ogled the long golden body, its many decorations, so many of them—all of them, really—unseen.

It was then that it hit me. It was such an obvious thought, but in the quiet of that moment and in the presence of that sarcophagus, it felt like a revelation. We are obsessed with the Egyptians because they are obsessed with death. Modern American society has so much difficulty broaching this subject; here is a culture that puts it on display, celebrates it, makes it the centerpiece of their entire way of living. No wonder we can’t look away.

But here’s the thing: The Ancient Egyptians didn’t only highlight death; they adorned it. Death and art are inextricably linked and decorations people would never see get sealed inside sarcophagi or walled into pyramids. Yet as believers in the afterlife, the people living on earth were never going to be the last audience.

Reflecting on all of this made me want to dig up a quote on writing I’ve searched for dozens of times in documents where I catalog such things, only to come up short. But the very simple gist was something like this: We write—and by extension create any art—because it’s a curb against mortality. We may die, but our art will outlast us. It will have an afterlife. People will hold it, read it, cry over it, enjoy it, share it. In that small way, we live on, too. In a world where everything evaporates, this is a small, if often unrealistic, comfort.

And so the Ancient Egyptians’ love of decoration and love of the afterlife go hand in hand, living on together, echoing and reinforcing each other, carrying through the millennia. The physical manifestation of this marriage survives to stand in pristine, golden condition in this San Francisco museum, in a perfectly maintained 70-degree atmosphere, behind glass, with a woman’s eyes peering through, trying to make sense of it all.

Greek painter Theophilos Chatzmichael (1870-1934) never would have imagined the afterlife of his art.

Known simply as Theophilos—his name translates to lover of God—the folk artist died destitute after a life of hardship, painting his works for a plate of beans. Less than three decades after his death, he’d be the star of a solo show in the Louvre. Today he has an eponymous museum outside the capital city of Mytelinie on the island of Lesvos where he was born, which I visited last month.

It’s a small but well-kept museum in a private home in a leafy suburb of the capital city, surrounded by olive trees and aging estates. The museum is filled with Theophilos’s large works painted on canvas, colorful and detailed expanses, stories captured in time.

Spurned first by his family, then by his small town of Varia, and then kicked out of Turkey’s Smyrna where he was working at the Hellenic Consulate, it seemed there was no place that Theophilos fit in. The oldest of eight children, he was left-handed, had a stutter and always donned the kilt-like “foustanella” of a traditional Greek costume—all qualities that threw him squarely outside of the norm. I like to think of him as a kind of Emperor Norton of Greece.

Theophilos didn’t care. He lived his life in service to art, passionate to paint anything he could get his brush on: tavernas, cafes, private homes, shops, bakeries, bars. He requested only sustenance to get by, sleeping in a hollowed-out tree. You can find his art scattered throughout the island of Lesvos, in remote tavernas and cafes. Much of it, sadly, has been destroyed.

We likely would have lost all of it were it not for one individual, a Paris-based publisher and art critic who recognized that Theophilos’s art was extraordinary: Stratis Eleftheriadis Tériade. A friend of Marc Chagall and native of Lesvos, the well-connected Tériade donated 86 works by Theophilos that were to become the basis of his permanent museum. The folk artist often chose the Greek War of Independence, landscapes and related themes as a subject.

He embodied the Greek mentality by displaying the ultimate Greek characteristic—an obsession with all things Greek. He painted his homeland and its most nationalistic, patriotic elements; he wore its traditional clothing, he championed its history and embraced the Byzantine pictorial tradition.

Today, Theophilos is everywhere on the island of Lesvos. He inspires murals by contemporary artists, his works are featured in airline magazines, he has hotels and streets named after him. He’s been called the greatest, most famous Greek artist of all time. It’s hard to believe a man with such a humble and harried life could have ended up with such a hallowed place in art history.

His story demonstrates a few necessary lessons for all artists: the importance of having a devoted, well-connected fan of your work (even if it’s only one!); recognition may be elusive but that shouldn’t stop you from continuing; tapping into a culture’s core lends staying power.

Yet there’s another lesson that overrides all of these. Art, as a commercial venture, is hard. But one should be doing it for the joy of of the craft itself—and it’s there that the riches lie.

Sources:

“Theophilos the Painter of Lesvos.” Lesvos.com. Accessed 22 July 2026.

The Theophilos Museum, Mytilenie, Greece. “The Man Theophilos.”

Lonely Planet, Greece. “Theophilos the Greek.”

“Theophilos: The Evzone of Painting.” UCLA SNF Hellenic Center. YouTube. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

There’s no place on earth like Pyrgi.

The village on the island of Chios in Greece is filled with buildings decorated by black-and-white geometric motifs, patterns so intricate and consistent that locals refer to their Medieval labyrinthine village as “hand-embroidered.”

The buildings looked painted, but the striking ornamentation comes courtesy of a plaster effect called sgraffito. From the Italian for “scratched,” the process includes applying a layer of black plaster followed by a thin coat of white, which is scraped off in a pattern to reveal the darker color below. Since the effect must be done while the plaster is still wet, craftspeople must work efficiently yet accurately.

The Chian rendition of sgraffito is so unique and iconic, the Greeks have created their own label for it: Xysta (ξυστά). Unlike other countries where sgraffito appears on buildings—Italy, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland and Spain—the Chian version is the only one to employ geometric patterns exclusively rather than scenes. Not only is Xysta entirely abstract, it covers entire facades, again differing from its European counterparts.

To wander the maze-like streets of Pyrgi and discover new designs on nearly every building is a wonder unlike any other. The tradition has been kept alive since Medieval times (you can see buildings with years inscribed as recently as the 2000s), with new buildings adopting the signature design. The patterns appear on everything from door handles to tabletops to souvenirs (and even shopping bags from said souvenir stores). Once one person does Xysta, everyone needs to (even if many remain, sadly, in poor repair). It reminds me a lot of the children’s book I used to read to my kids: The Big Orange Splot.

While no one can say for absolute certainty how and when Pyrgi began adopting the design, their unique appearance likely stems from the Genoese occupation of the island from 1304 to 1566 and the Italian influence that organically occurred. Yet why does Pyrgi have such beautiful ornamentation while the other fortified Medieval villages nearby do not?

The answer lies with yet another type of wonder—the sticky resin known as mastiha, harvested from a tree related to the pistachio. Known as “weeping trees” (could this get any more romantic?), the bark of the trees is sliced so the “tears” (clear resin) of the trees can drip down the trunks. A prized economic good in the Medieval times, mastiha has been used for everything from chewing gum to face masks to air fresheners. The high value of the resin led the Genoese and Ottoman occupiers to fortify the villages producing it, adding thick stone walls and maze-like city grids to disorient potential invaders.

Of all the mastic villages (the region is collectively known as the mastihahoria), none was as wealthy as Pyrgi. That likely led to the adoption of the intricate, time-consuming designs that have since become a symbol of identity for the village.

Yet why Chios adopted all-geometric designs in contrast to other examples of sgraffito remains a mystery. Could it be inspired by the geometry of the Muslim world from Eastern trading routes? Could it be related to the geometric designs of embroidery? Could it be, as one of my family members suggested at breakfast this morning, yet another way to confuse and disorient potential invaders?

We can never say for sure, but the sgraffito has a long history, going all the way back to ancient pottery, which is likely how the technique originated. I can’t help but see the tradition within the long context of a Grecian predilection for geometric designs—whether it’s the classic and overdone and ancient Greek key symbol or more modern manifestations, like the photographer Costas Spathis’ aerial images.

Historians, embroiderers, folklorists, Greek lovers—do you have your own theories about how Xysta originated with its singular designs? If so, I’d love to hear about them; the black-and-white magic of Pyrgi has forever captured me.

Visiting the Acropolis is surely the highlight of anyone’s visit to Greece. Yet after touring the famed ancient site the day before, it was a compact, two-floor museum in the heart of Athens that took my breath away on my current trip.

You could say I’m spoiled — I’ve been to the Acropolis multiple times thanks to my Grecian husband — or I could admit dusty ruins often fail to conjure history for me the way collections and archives can. But in reality, it was more about the museum itself being great than the Acropolis being less than. The unlikely person at the heart? The opera singer Maria Callas.

Part of the genius: Before you learn anything about Callas in the petite Monistiraki museum, you hear her. In three curated listening rooms decorated analogously to the music they’re showcasing, the museum-goer has the opportunity to simply be cocooned by Callas’s voice, renowned for its “sound palette” and three-octave range. “This woman can sing anything written for the female voice,” said conductor Tullio Serafin.

In the museum, her bellowing voice first comes to you in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, filling a darkened room that also contains a shadowy figure projected and tree trunks for stools. Next comes the ruby red of a burlesque-feeling salon, complete with crystal-laden scarlet sconces and black-and-white footage of Callas singing in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

I sat in a red-upholstered armchair and felt the emotion collect hot in my throat. To hear her was already something, but to see her embodying all the emotion and passion of a role — that was something else entirely.

“I am not a singer who acts,” Callas once said, “But an actress who sings.”

More than anything else, Callas was a hard worker, which became clear on the museum’s second, more informational level. The Soprano was the first to show up and last to leave even for rehearsals, and the “diva” label she sometimes received was only due to the fact that she expected the same artistic dedication from her colleagues as she herself had.

The profound emotional depth of her performance (and voice) as Floria Tosca is mesmerizing. I sat in the red satin armchair, my eyes brimming with tears, unable to pull myself away. Knowing Tosca was my father’s favorite opera only added to the anguish swirling inside me.

Because while the Greek soprano is not at all a household name, I grew up knowing her face — a black-and-white signed photograph of her hangs in the downstairs bathroom of my childhood home. As a child, I never put it together that she was an opera singer, even though her image hung next to other greats like Pavarotti and a signed scrap of music by Puccini in my opera-loving father’s home. With her dark-rimmed eyes, moody stare and chokers of pearls, she looked too glamorous to be one of those people who sang on stage in big, funny outfits. As a teenager, I thought of her only as a lyric in one of my favorite R.E.M. songs, “E-bow the letter.”

But I’m not writing about my childhood experiences. I’m writing about the museum on Mitropoleos 44, which received a special mention from the 2025 European Museum of the Year Awards.

The final decorated listening room was of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the space decorated in elegant Parisian hues, followed by another room with headphones of various performances. All of this intimate music listening primed the visitor for the full scope of a life about to unfold on a separate floor, one marked with early promise and perseverance but that ended with great disappointment and loneliness — mostly because of her failed relationship with Aristotle Onassis.

As a fellow self-made Greek who rose to great heights, Callas felt a deep kinship with Onassis. Both of them left their respective spouses to have their champagne- and yacht-filled love affair. Callas was bereft when he eventually left her for Jackie Kennedy.

“The voice is not just notes and nothing else,” Callas said. “It is colors, one paints with their voice, and I need all the colors to express all the feelings of the role. But I also need a lot of faith, a lot of instinct and a lot of confidence.”

Callas lived a difficult life, dying at the young age of 53 and often maligned in the press. But two things are certain — she lived the emotional, fraught life of an artist and her artistry continues to reverberate to this day.

“When you seek a gesture, when you want to find out how to play it on stage, all you need to do is truly listen to the music,” Callas said. “The composer has already taken care of this. If you bother to listen with your entire soul and open ears … you will find every gesture and every movement there.”

As a raft of cultural institutions shutter and struggle across San Francisco, the Hosfelt Gallery is celebrating its 30-year anniversary in October. Gallery owner Todd Hosfelt fell into his line of work organically after he began buying photographs while practicing law in Monterey. As he became increasingly interested in collecting, he became affiliated with the nonprofit the Friends of Photography.

Hosfelt attributes the gallery’s ongoing success to numerous factors — most importantly the attempt to build a local, committed arts scene rather than focusing on global art fairs, which Hosfelt said are a waste of precious resources: both time and money.

The space is open late on Thursdays, with drinks and special guest lectures and panels on offer. The native Iowan also takes small groups of collectors on art and architecture tours. “It’s something you could never do by yourself,” he said.

The recent Isabella Kirkland exhibition showcased the incredibly detailed work of the self-taught painter, who trained herself in the techniques of 17th century Dutch and Flemish portrait artists after studying sculpture at the San Francisco Arts Institute in the 1970s.

An anniversary show on the theme of pixellation is in the works to celebrate the gallery’s three decades in business. “Pixellation is all about optics; it changes depending on your perspective,” Hosfelt said. “It’s a metaphor that changing your viewpoint can also change your understanding.”

The former lawyer turned gallery owner has felt an obligation to bring art to the people, even during the pandemic when he was able to open the space’s big windows up and invite a grateful public in.

“People are feeling discombobulated and anxious,” he said. “Art and community is a solution to all that.”

Another obligation? To protect the artists. Hosfelt said there’s more money than ever in San Francisco which has helped to support his business, but the inverse is the fact that it makes it difficult for artists to survive. He champions efforts to spearhead artist housing but believes there needs to be more done for visual artists specifically. “From the 1950s all the way through the 1980s artists could live here relatively inexpensively,” he said.

The obligation to art — and to artists — can border on the devotional. It’s a spirit captured in another in one of Kirkland’s large paintings, “Nantahals.”

The piece “Nantahals” is reminiscent of an Orthodox icon with a central image edged by panes of individual detail. Perhaps nature can serve as its own belief system, or we simply need to have the faith that it’s not too late to save it before we lose even more beauty.

“Good art is open-ended,” Hosfelt said. “It allows a way for a person to interpret it.”

On a recent trip to my family’s home, I had set upon the daunting task of excavating my childhood bedroom. I saved the closet—the most untouched and therefore most intimidating—for last. On the top shelf were folders, files and objects I hadn’t seen in decades, my memory void as to what those cryptic manila envelopes and newspaper-covered squares could contain.

I gingerly unwrapped them with the anticipation of Christmas gifts. One was a framed collage I had made in Russia out of cigarette boxes and трамвай tickets — too juvenile to hang up, too sentimental to throw away. Another was an oil painting I made of pointe shoes from my dancing days.

Then came the pile of newspapers, magazines and manila envelopes. I pulled it down and put it on my bed, already anticipating I would need to sit down to go through this. I picked up the first manila envelope. “here is new york,” I saw on the envelope. My throat thickened with dread and my belly went slick with nausea as I remembered what this must be.

I held my breath and pulled out the image. It’s the interior floor of what looks like a clothing shop—on the left side are tiers of shirts, neatly folded and covered in dust; on the right side, through the window, you can see the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

Suddenly I am breathing in that acrid air, standing in the midst of a tragedy, unmoored and uncertain. I hear that awful sound of twisting, burning metal, a high-pitched creak that went on for weeks. I am back there, walking in a Financial District that’s covered with a light industrial snow — not the magic of winter but the terror of destruction.

In the photograph, there are a few collared shirts from the neatly organized rows that have fallen onto the floor, a pale nod to the annihilation in the window beside it. I thought about how an ordered and neat world turned into its inverse; the proper suits, the business attire, the formal fits, all suddenly made into a mess, obliterated. How awful, how unfair.

I remembered how the pain felt back then, raw and unending. The photos of missing people at the subway stations, the family members who never gave up hope their relatives might come back. Portrait after portrait in The New York Times. Back then, our grief hadn’t been co-opted for anything. It hadn’t been used for wars or hawked for commercial products. It was simple and hard and brought every New Yorker together, no matter their neighborhood or age or race or belief.

Things are so different now from when I purchased this photo, the sale of which was itself a kind of miracle. In a storefront on Prince Street, a democracy of photographs sprang up, a fundraiser for the Children’s Aid Society that grew into something none of the organizers could have predicted. Snapshots from the disaster went on sale printed on an inkjet printer and pinned on a clothing line, all $25 and all the same size. The work of famous photographers, reporting journalists, and observant bystanders hung side-by-side, with no names to indicate whose photograph was whose. The images kept pouring in, and the sale became a makeshift museum of the tragedy.

As a college student at New York University, I was there on what must have been close to its opening day, when there was just a small collection of images. Eventually the sale drew celebrities and politicians and long lines, but when I was there so early on there was only a small quiet huddle of us. I can still feel the energy of that moment, all of us silent as we took in the evidence of the tragedy, horror made into art, knowing we were in the presence of a memorial.

Beneath the manila envelope with the photograph I purchased is a stack of newspapers and magazines, which puts my archival tendencies on full display (I worked in an archive during college and my first real job after college was at an archive). In them I had collected the newspapers and magazines with the first headlines after the horrific act: “U.S. Attacked: Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror” (The New York Times), “The Bastards! Terrorists Bring War to Our Shores” (The Village Voice), “The Day the World Changed” (The Economist), “L’Amerique frappée, le monde saisi d’effroi” (Le Monde), “Wish You Were Here: After the Fall” (The Village Voice). It’s the last one that gets me—not the hawkish language of war, but the art of what once was, an empty-framed postcard held up for a tourist’s view that will never exist again.

Why had I saved all these things? I wonder what to do about the photograph, a piece of art I love but can’t imagine framing and hanging on the wall. The photographer, Sean Hemmerle, is a talented artist who continues to create captivating images. Perhaps I felt it was my duty to remember, and saving all of these things was a way to do so. But how could I ever forget 9/11? It’s hard to know, sometimes, why we do the things we do. Maybe collecting is a way of organizing, sorting, taking hold of our trauma. Making sense of it. Yet all these years later, seeing those images hits just as hard—and the grief hasn’t gone away.

I certainly don’t need any convincing that art is good for you, yet reading the book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us has blown open my understanding of just how powerful creativity can be, whether while as a practitioner or a consumer.

This book goes beyond simply repeating the oft-cited Mihály Csíkszentmihályi discovery of “flow state” (it’s in there, but not until page 186 and only gets a brief mention), to examine how art impacts the brain in specific detail. This is not the a general treatment of art infusing you with awe; this book examines how art by specific medium lights up different parts of the brain. Using research rooted in neuroscience, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross present a compelling case that a world without the arts is not only devoid of wonder but also unhealthy.

Art, in turn, comes out of the rarefied spaces of museums and concert halls and into hospices and hospital rooms. I once wrote a story for The Boston Globe about a choir group that sings at the bedside of the dying, and despite all my interviews for that piece, I don’t think I grasped the full benefit of such music until I read this book.

After finishing this inspiring book, I can imagine a range of prescriptions being written out by art physicians:

Rumination

Poetry stimulates the posterior cingular cortex and medial temporal lobes, which are linked to introspection. An Exeter study showed images from an fMRI that demonstrated reading poetry with lighting up an area of the brain associated with a restful state. Poetry has a different impact on the brain than prose because of its rhythm and rhyme, inducing what neuroscientists call “pre-chill.” This state is perfect for giving yourself perspective or getting yourself unstuck from harmful thinking patterns.

Depression

Try sculpting clay, since the repetitive and rhythmic movement of hands have been shown to release the feel-good chemicals of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin.

PTSD

The book cites an example of Ukrainian refugees using drawing to release the fear surrounding their traumatic experiences, with peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that such art-incorporated therapy practices at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine “reduced the numbers of those qualifying for the diagnosis of PTSD by 80% or more.” While trauma can often be difficult to express with verbal language, drawing offers a different way to access the words with which to speak the experience.

Dementia

You don’t need to produce art to ward off cognitive decline—you only need to consume it. Cultural activities like going to museums, concerts and the theater are all connected to a lower risk of developing dementia.

Parkinson’s Disease

While it may seem counterintuitive that dance would alleviate Parkinson’s Disease, a brain disorder that compromises physical balance, coordination, shaking, and stiffness, the opposite is true. There are dance classes specifically for PD sufferers, because it marshals the basal ganglia, the cerebellum, and the motor cortex—the same areas impacted by PD. The fluid movements gained in class without even thinking about it are eventually transferred outside of class, while also improving overall quality of life and mood.

Anxiety

When you make—or listen to—music, oxytocin is released, blood pressure lowers, and an overall state of calm is induced, leading to an ebb in anxiety.

Sources:

Magsamen, Susan and Ivy Ross. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. New York: Random House, 2023.

Zigoris, Julie. “Lullabies for the Dying.” The Boston Globe. 26 May 2022.

The long-gone attractions of the GGIE have evocative, timeless names that belie their short lifespan: the Tower of the Sun, the Court of the Moon, the statue of Pacifica. These were not the ruins of an ancient civilization, but a temporary, frenzied pastiche of culture celebrating San Francisco’s completion of its bridges.

“The fair was only meant to be one year, but at the time of the 1939 fair it was hemorrhaging money,” said Treasure Island Museum curator Melanie Garduno. “That is the reason why it ended up being two years.” Despite its short lifespan, the influence of the fair lives on in some of the most significant popular culture of today.

The archive of the Treasure Island Museum is held in the basement of a horseshoe-shaped building built in 1938, located at 1 Avenue of the Palms. Because of its curved construction, you can never see the end of the hallway in its lower level. Garduno, the museum’s curator, recently took a small group on a tour through the museum’s collection that’s not typically accessible to the public.

One criticism of the GGIE was its confusing motifs. You could go from the highbrow to the lowbrow within walking distance at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island—strolling from the $40 million of European art on display to Sally Rand’s (very popular) DNude Ranch that boys would try to sneak into.

One of the most visible items in the archive is a poster of Zoe Dell Lantis, the hostess of the GGIE that famously promoted the fair in pirate costume and high heeled boots—including jumping over a crevice in the Grand Canyon in said footwear. Dell Lantis died in 2020 at the ripe age of 104, likely staying young thanks to all her physical feats.

A recent acquisition of the archive is a model of the 100-foot towering Pacifica statue that was torn down at the fair’s end. While that art was not meant to last, this little model did as an unusually beautiful—and unsuspecting—garden gnome where it sat in someone’s yard for decades until it was donated to the museum.

Friedolin Kessler’s linoleum blocks used for printing were another highlight of the tour. In 1938 Kessler took a three-month bicycle trip to sketch all of California’s missions, a record of which the museum recently acquired with his daily diary. Kessler’s prints sold for $25 at the fair, which would be the equivalent of more than $550 today. Previously displayed at the Legion of Honor, Garduno hopes to exhibit them there again someday.

Most revealing of all may be the photo scrapbooks in the collection, painstakingly put together by visitors to the fair, including a 13-year-old girl who documented the tortoise she purchased with the GGIE logo painted on it. But not everything is so charming.

“There’s a lot of controversial things at a lot of world fairs,” Garduno said. An example from the GGIE was the small person village, which had a lot of people from the movie The Wizard of Oz working there. One of the officers at the fair was the mayor from Oz’s Munchkinland, and people would stop to take pictures with him, Garduno explained.

Yet positive—and permanent—outcomes came from the fair, too. Walt Disney attended the GGIE and was inspired by the setup of the fair. “If you were to look at the guidebook and look at the map, it would be hard not to argue it looks similar to the Disneyland map,” Garduno said. Disney got his idea for Disneyland’s Main Street USA from the fair.

Dudley Carter, the wood carver at the center of Diego Rivera’s famed mural he painted at the GGIE as part of the “Art in Action” display (Rivera portrays Carter at work carving the wooden ram for City College’s campus), was a compelling character in his own right.

“He would be soaked head to toe with water and cold and carving, and then he would go to his cabin, remove all the wet clothing, leave it out, and then the next day the clothing would still be wet, and he would just slap it back on to go to work,” Garduno said. Carter, who lived to be 101, was famous for never taking a day off from his carving.

When the 300-foot tall Tower of the Sun was torn down to make room for the naval base that occupied the island after the close of the fair in the wake of World War II, it prompted a lot of sadness. But so many things in the GGIE were made of plaster (one exception is the fountain by Antonio Sotomayor), so the intention was always to tear them down. Yet in the basement of 1 Avenue of the Palms, pieces of the story—and art—live on.

Sources:

Richards, Rand. Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide. SF: Heritage House, 2007.

www.dollartimes.com. Accessed June 3.

https://www.redmond.gov/966/Dudley-Carter-Haida-House. Accessed June 3.

www.riveramural.org. Accessed June 3.

All photos not otherwise noted by Julie Zigoris.

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Art can survive the most difficult times.

Whether writing a book on creativity in a Stalinist labor camp or reporting on a cache of paintings discovered on a San Francisco park bench made by a Jewish painter who died in Nazi-occupied Paris, I’ve seen time and time again how art endures catastrophe. In doing so art becomes an accidental archive, creating a fragile form of preservation and memory in a world that often neglects it.

I believe we so often find art and destruction coupled because a creative practice is what allows us to endure hardship. In our world of constant catastrophe, in turn, there’s never been a more important time to connect to a creative practice.

I’m an arts and culture reporter and my writing has appeared in national outlets like The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Lit Hub and Atlas Obscura as well as many Bay Area outlets: SFGATE, KQED, Mission Local, The San Francisco Standard, The San Francisco Chronicle and others. I’ve won awards for my writing and continue to publish regularly. Which may lead to the question …

Why make a newsletter when I’m already covering the arts as a journalist?

At a time when space for arts and culture reporting is shrinking or disappearing altogether from many news outlets, my newsletter gives additional breathing room to explore the exhibitions, archives, murals and artistic wonders of San Francisco by placing them within a larger, universal story. But this newsletter is not limited to the Bay Area. It’s intended to be a broader community for the marvels of the creative process by highlighting art’s capacity to return and revisit us in various formats. In this newsletter, I’ll be able to explore subjects not possible in my news coverage. The Afterlives of Art will spotlight uncanny stories, book reviews, interviews and reflections on creativity’s incredible capacity to endure and heal.

I also want to build a community.

I want this to be a space where people can share their creative process—whether a writer, a painter, a dancer, a gardener, a musician, a thinker—and how it has impacted their life. I also want it to be a place where people can be inspired by one another and encouraged in their artistic pursuits as a way to bring meaning and joy into their lives.

What to expect.

Readers can expect a new post to land in their inbox every Friday—a weekly dose of thoughtfulness and inspiration to kick off your weekend. Some sample topics include: “Treasures from a not-accessible-to-the-public San Francisco archive,” “Lessons from Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us,” “That time I studied with a master of Japanese brush painting for months without realizing it,” “Art from 9/11,” and “Art as divination.”

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My mission.

Part reporting and part reflection, The Afterlives of Art hopes magnifies art’s capacity to endure, to return, to preserve—and to help us survive. This newsletter is also meant to connect you to one another in your creative practices.