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Category: Art
Architecture, as defined by the ancients, is the mother of all arts. We believe in the intrinsic relationship of this common historic origin, and, for this reason, we have always curated a fine art gallery. We use this space to exhibit the work of emerging artists, those whose work deserves a larger audience. We pursue this exercise to promote the arts, to refine our critical eyes and to engage in the dialogue around contemporary art and culture. This, in turn, deepens our approach to our work as architects.
Join us for a feast of culinary and visual delights! Live oysters from Tomales Bay Oyster Company will be served at this special opening night reception. Social distance and safety protocols will be enforced.
Saturday, February 27th beginning at dusk ~5pm PST Outside of 2501 Bryant Street, San Francisco, rain or shine
Join us as we consider pinhole cameras inside oyster shells, native oyster restoration at the Presidio and oyster farming and feasting in Tomales Bay.
Healthy oyster reefs are a proven way to effectively reduce water pollution and improve the marine environment. While other bivalves also possess the ingenious ability to clean water while flushing out pollutants as they feed, none are simultaneous symbols of feasting, as is the oyster.
Gwendolyn Meyer
Participating artists and scientists:
Oyster reef panels designed by architecture faculty MARGARET IKEDA & EVAN JONES at California College of the Arts (CCA) provided by JONATHON YOUNG, wildlife ecologist at the Presidio
Oyster shell pinhole cameras by DAVID JANESKO
Two-channel video installation “Consider the Oyster” about Drake’s Bay Oyster company by CHRIS KALLMYER
Video “Heard Above” filmed at Quartermaster Reach by TAYLOR GRIFFITH
Photos from “Oyster Culture” a beautiful book about the rich intersection between oyster farming and culinary culture in the unique region of West Marin by GWENDOLYN MEYER
Natural Discourse, curated by Shirley Alexandra Watts, is again collaborating with Levy Art + Architecture to consider this wondrous bi-valve in a street-front exhibit that will be visible from the street where anyone can view it, 24 hours a day for 8 weeks (best viewed at dusk) at 2501 BRYANT STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.
Following the recent reestablishment of seven acres of tidal marshland connected to San Francisco Bay, natural habitat is recreated, and native species — particularly oysters — are able to return to their homes.
Forest/Oyster #22 David Janesko 2015
Working in conjunction with the Presidio Trust and Natural Discourse, Levy Art + Architecture is proud to announce our upcoming art exhibit, “Consider the Oyster: Art, Science & Culture.”
Join us as we consider forests as viewed through oyster shell pinhole cameras, native oyster restoration at the Presidio and oyster farming and feasting in Tomales Bay. Participating artists and scientists: Margaret Ikeda and Evan Jones, Taylor Griffith, David Janesko, Gwendolyn Meyer and Jonathan Young, and Chris Kallmyer.
The art and gallery will be visible from the street where anyone can view it, 24 hours a day, beginning Saturday, February 27that Levy Art + Architecture 2401 Bryant St, San Francisco.
In December 2020, the Presidio Trust unveiled to visitors seven acres of re-established tidal marshland and a new pedestrian trail near San Francisco Bay.
The site is known as Quartermaster Reach, named for the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps, which operated in the area when the Presidio was a military post. The project transforms a formerly paved construction site under the “Presidio Parkway” approach to the Golden Gate Bridge into a beautiful new wetland ecosystem. Creeks now flow above ground along the Presidio’s largest watershed known as Tennessee Hollow to San Francisco Bay through Crissy Marsh, improving the biodiversity of the Presidio. The shallow tidal estuary is the natural habitat for oysters that were once prolific in the San Francisco Bay.
Quartermaster Reach is a huge milestone in the 20-year effort of the Presidio Trust, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and the National Park Service to restore the park’s largest watershed. The site will allow visitors to enjoy an intimate experience of nature just minutes from downtown.
A high-tech home for the oysters: resin-cast substrates
Featured Art: Oyster Habitats Designed by Architecture Faculty Margaret Ikeda & Evan Jones at California College of the Arts (CCA)
Another area where art + architecture meet with environmentalism are the parametric 3-dimensional oyster substrates designed and fabricated in the Architectural Ecologies Lab at CCA. These are designed to provide a habitat for oyster growth at the newly-opened Quartermaster Reach.
Featured Art: Oyster Shell Pinhole Cameras by David Janesko
David’s pinhole cameras are constructed from nature, in order to photograph nature. He turned Pacific Oyster shells into pinhole cameras that captured images of their forest surroundings. Read more about the project as featured on Smithsonian Magazine. See more photos of these incredible oysters-turned-photograph on David’s website.
Featured Art: Consider the Oyster by Chris Kallmyer
A two-channel video documenting place, culture, and a window into oyster farming in West Marin. It is based off of three basic facts:
Oysters reflect the place in which they are made. This recording documents the process of farming oysters with field recordings and two-channel video.
Oysters are equally, a grounded and celestial food: flavored by the tides, created by the rotation of the sun and moon. They put us in touch with our own position in relation to movement of our planet. Two drones are sounded to represent the sun and the moon, proportional to their gravitational pull on the tidal waters.
Oysters are bivalves, and so is a pump organ. Chris performs on a pump organ throughout the piece as a musical analogue for our beloved oyster.
About the Partnership for the Presidio
The Partnership for the Presidio works to sustain the Presidio’s natural beauty, preserve its history, maintain its funding, and create inspiring national park experiences for visitors. Two federal agencies manage the Presidio jointly: the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service, with support from their non-profit partner, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Together, the partnership has transformed one of America’s most storied military posts into the centerpiece of one of the most visited places in the national park system.
Art + Discourse
We have a long and extremely productive working relationship with Natural Discourse, teaming up to work on a series of environmentally-focused art productions in our galleries and around California.
Natural Discourse is an ongoing series of symposia, publications and site-specific art installations that explore the connections between art, culture, science and site. It is curated by Shirley Alexandra Watts.
Levy Art + Architectureis an interdisciplinary studio that functions at the intersection of architecture, environmentalism and art. A full-service design firm, with specialties in sustainability and construction, it is also an experimental art space. Exhibits typically concern larger social and environmental issues. The architecture and art mutually inform one another.
Levy Art & Architecture is proud to announce our second collaboration with Natural Discourse. We are currently exhibiting the digital and paper works of David Opdyke in conjunction with the release of This Land, by award-winning author Lawrence Weschler and David Opdyke.
We especially love the way this looks at dusk, but come by any time of day to check it out!
This inverted galley experience begins by asking what happens when we turn the gallery inside out? What happens when private spaces – art spaces – are unavailable and how can we present art to the community at large without constraint of time or entry?
David Opdyke’s massive collage This Land presents a slow-burning satire of the American Dream as it blunders into the reality of climate change.
This Land is an epic mural fashioned by New York artist David Opdyke out of vintage American postcards which he then treated with disconcerting painted interventions. What at first reads as a panoramic birdʼs-eye view of an idyllic alpine valley reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be an array of connected scenes and vignettes. Across more than five hundred postcards, each one portraying a distinct slice of idealized Americana (town squares, mountain highways, main streets and county seats), Opdykeʼs acerbic, emotionally jarring alterations gradually become evident.
Much thanks to Gene Grealish for support of this installation.
Natural Discourse is an ongoing series of symposia, publications and site-specific art installations that explore the connections between art, culture, science and site. It is curated by Shirley Alexandra Watts.
Levy Art & Architecture is proud to announce our second collaboration with Natural Discourse. We will be exhibiting the digital and paper works of David Opdyke in conjunction with the release of This Land, by award-winning author Lawrence Weschler and David Opdyke.
This inverted galley experience begins by asking what happens when we turn the gallery inside out? What happens when private spaces – art spaces – are unavailable and how can we present art to the community at large without constraint of time or entry?
We will hold an outdoor gathering to celebrate this work with David Opdyke, and to bemoan its implications on Saturday October 3, 2020 from roughly 3-7pm outside of our building 2501 Bryant Street, San Francisco.
The art and gallery will be visible from the street where anyone can view it, 24 hours a day, from the 3rd until the end of the show in November.
About THIS LAND
David Opdyke’s massive collage This Land presents a slow-burning satire of the American Dream as it blunders into the reality of climate change.
This Land is an epic mural fashioned by New York artist David Opdyke out of vintage American postcards which he then treated with disconcerting painted interventions. What at first reads as a panoramic birdʼs-eye view of an idyllic alpine valley reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be an array of connected scenes and vignettes. Across more than five hundred postcards, each one portraying a distinct slice of idealized Americana (town squares, mountain highways, main streets and county seats), Opdykeʼs acerbic, emotionally jarring alterations gradually become evident.
Much thanks to Gene Grealish for support of this installation.
Natural Discourse is an ongoing series of symposia, publications and site-specific art installations that explore the connections between art, culture, science and site. It is curated by Shirley Alexandra Watts.
Levy Art + Architecture presents the latest exhibition featuring paintings by Javier Arizmendi and sculptures by Robert Barnstone
Impressions on Paper” by Javier Arizmendi. Inspired by sketches done from the air depicting the San Fernando and Central Valleys, Javier Arizmendi, Design Director at SOM, has completed a group of paintings characterized by a greater scale and abstraction, allowing him to communicate a stronger emotional content through the use of color and gesture.
“Sketches in Steel” by Robert Barnstone. Sydney-based architect, artist, and sculptor Robert Barnstone is known for his use of recycled materials. “I draw in metal and I don’t try to create images, only abstractions. These sculptures are handmade and cold-forged from recycled metal objects I’ve found along the way.”
The exhibition will be on view at our studio until the end of January 2020.
IMAGINARY BEINGS PAINTINGS – IN PIXELS AND WOOD // WOODCUT AND DIGITAL MEDIA BY JANE R WILLSON
OPENING – FEBRUARY 19,2015 6-9PM 1286 SANCHEZ STREET SAN FRANCISCO, CA
In this series, Jane Willson explores the realms of the unreal through a mix of woodcarvings and digital paintings, inspired by myth, folk and fairy tales, and her own imagined narratives. Using these elements, she paints a parallel universe of imagined beings, beasts and lands, replete with handy maps that lead to nowhere, suggesting that reality is relative.
Levy Art & Architecture is pleased to present “Reintroductions” by Todd Gilens, an exhibition of photographs and a newly commissioned installation. This show extends the Endangered Species Project that Gilens completed with San Francisco MUNI in 2012. The intent is to bring attention to our environment through fauna that are endangered, central to the San Francisco Bay ecosystem, and largely unseen by the local human population. The show runs from March 28th through June 30th; there will be an opening reception on Thursday April 17, 2014 from 6-9 pm. The installation will be in place for 6 months.
Inside the gallery are photographs based on Gilens’ 2011-12 Endangered Species project, in which he designed four buswraps for San Francisco Muni buses, each wrap an enlarged photograph of a local endangered animal. As these buses circulated from route to route, the artist followed them with his camera, on foot, by bicycle, car and motorcycle, photographing them all around the city. The photographs document the juxtaposition of the wrapped buses as they travel through the urban context. This is the first San Francisco exhibition of theses photographs.
A new project commissioned by Levy Art and Architecture for the gallery’s facade extends this work by returning images of the Sacramento Sucker (Catostomus occidentalis) to Noe Valley. The LA&A studio is immediately adjacent to the historic course of Precita Creek, that these fish likely inhabited. The creek ran from Twin Peaks to the Bay shore, along what is now upper 24th Street, prior to the development of the area in the early 1900’s. This hundred and fifty square-foot print installed on the studio façade brings the fish back to an original habitat through our collective imaginations. The exhibition coincides with the 2014 “bio-blitz” a project sponsored by National Geographic and The GGNRA to discover, count and document the living creatures in the parks.
By reproducing images of these animals at larger than life scale and installing them in unexpected ways, the artworks emphasize the precarious situation that these creatures, and their human counterparts, are in. They serve as reminders of our mutual dependence or as Gilens says, “no species goes extinct in isolation; extinction is also the loss of relationships.”
He continues: I think of these projects as collections of metaphors, unfolding physically and conceptually, from the structure and systems of the city and adjacent open spaces, through the presence of the buses with their images of animals in their habitats. Photographic prints are another level, where what is common, like buses in public space, becomes rare, as limited edition prints – just as animal, and also human populations, may move between common and threatened or extinct. Yet the prints are stable, whereas the buswraps have been destroyed, are only a memory. Part of the work is always a bit elsewhere in time, space or meaning. This may be what I’m really working with, opening a space for considering relationships, for asking about vulnerability and rarity, about how priorities are assigned and managed.”
Todd Gilens is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His website is Follywog.com.
Deborah Sibony’s work and aesthetic derive in large part from her heritage — North African — and her formative cultural experience growing up in Italy. She starts her prints by traveling into history, memory and imagination; interested in patterns and boundaries, both physical and cultural. What happens when you get near? What crosses over, what is connected and what is repeated? She hopes to reflect transitions and overlapping experiences that give form to the contemporary world and shape our experiences. Sibony uses a variety of printmaking methods to connect and assimilate a progression of ideas. Deborah uses visceral properties of paint and the power of color to convey the drama of emotions. As the layers change and become more complex, history and memory become part of the conversation. The visual language is primordial, melodic, baroque and industrial.
Please join us on Thursday September 5th from 6-9 for the opening of:
Composition – Decomposition
by Sharon Risedorph
at Levy Art and Architecture,
1286 Sanchez St., SF, CA
visit us at levyaa.com for directions.
Sharon Risedorph’s recent work at Pier 70 looks directly at the early twentieth century waterfront landscape and finds in it a wealth of inspiration. These works do not illustrate the size, scale, type or texture of the historical places; rather they find a wealth of raw material that is employed to create works of special presence. These are pure renditions of light and form, “made” in a creative process that is the result of exploration, observation and opportunism. Sharon uses the lens to produce works that are at once crisply photographic and richly abstract. They embody space and form in the same way that James Turrell’s works render light as physical matter. These images take the everyday, the discarded, the common and reposition it, elevating it to the level of abstraction that inspires curiosity and introspection.
