“Ghosts of the Tower”: Coit Tower Historic Archives Opening Reception | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

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.

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 is organized by the Anne Bremer Memorial Library and the Exhibitions and Public Programs department. This project is supported by the Institute of Museums and Library Services grant for Digitizing the SFAIs Exhibitions History.

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