Labor Day Weekend in San Francisco (Day One)

Maneki-neko at the San Diego Airport.

The maneki-neko (Japanese: 招き猫, literally "beckoning cat") is a common Japanese figurine (lucky charm, talisman) which is often believed to bring good luck to the owner. It must've worked. We traveled and landed safely.

The silliness begins.

South San Francisco - Grand Avenue Library.

Cable Car Cafe for breakfast. It was a long flight . . . you know, 44 minutes.

National AIDS Memorial Grove

“We must continue to work together as a nation to further our progress against this deadly epidemic, and while we do so, we must remember that every person who is living with HIV or AIDS is someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister, parent or grandparent. They deserve our respect and they need our love.” – President Bill Clinton

During the late 1980s, reeling from the grief that came as a result from dealing with the effects of AIDS, a small collection of San Francisco residents decided to act upon their loss. They imagined a calming natural scene where memorial services and private refection could take place. Drawing from a blueprint of heartache, a host of landscapers, architects, designers, and volunteers pooled their energy together to produce a tribute filled with life that would pay homage to love, friendship, healing, and existence.

The National AIDS Memorial Grove is located in Golden Gate Park. Walk down Nancy Pelosi Drive (grr . . .), past the Shakespeare Garden and you'll stumble toward the Goethe–Schiller Monument.

The original Goethe–Schiller Monument (German: Goethe-Schiller-Denkmal) is in Weimar, Germany. It incorporates Ernst Rietschel's 1857 bronze double statue of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who are probably the two most revered figures in German literature.

In 1895 in San Francisco, California, the Goethe–Schiller Denkmal Gesellschaft (Goethe–Schiller Monument Company) was formed for the purpose of raising a version of the Weimar Monument in Golden Gate Park. Instead of the Munich foundry used to cast the original statue, the foundry in Lauchhammer was contracted to make a new bronze casting. The molds were prepared from Rietschel's original forms at the Albertinum in Dresden; the work was supervised by Rudolf Siemering, a Berlin sculptor. The statue was installed on a granite pedestal and steps that closely copied those of the Weimar original.

The monument was dedicated on August 11, 1901, with 30,000 people in attendance according to the souvenir book published shortly thereafter. The festivities continued throughout the day and evening.

Over the next decade, three additional monuments based on Rietschel's bronze were raised in Milwaukee, Cleveland Syracuse.

Nearby is a statue of Robert Emmet, an Irish nationalist and Republican, orator and rebel leader born in Dublin, Ireland. He led an abortive rebellion against British rule in 1798. In 1803 he was captured, tried and executed for high treason.

The Emmet statue shows the 25 year old making his famous "Speech from the Dock" during his sentencing.

". . . When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done."

It appears the statue was donated in 1919 by former SF Mayor James D. Phelan and is one of several copies, including one on display in Washington DC. It was unveiled in front of the California Academy of Sciences building, where is now displayed, by Eamon de Valera.

The artist was Jerome Connor who created the bronze in 1916. Connor was born in 1874 in County Kerry, Ireland. When Connor was 14, his father sold the family farm, literally, and relocated the family to Holyoke Massachusetts, a typical destination for emigrants from this part of Ireland. In 1899, Connor joined the Roycroft arts community where he assisted with blacksmithing and later created terracotta busts and reliefs. He was eventually recognized as Roycroft's sculptor-in-residence. After four years at Roycroft, he went on to work with Gustav Stickley and became well known as a sculptor being commissioned to create civic commissions in bronze. Connor was a self-taught artist who was highly regarded in the United States where most of his public works can be seen. He died in Ireland in 1943 of heart failure, and reputedly in poverty.

There's probably a lot more to the story than just that, but it seems that Mayor Phelan was sympathetic to the causes championed by Emmet and de Valera, and San Francisco had a sizable Irish population at that time, making the statue seem like a gesture of solidarity with the Irish who sought independence from Great Britain.

Next, on to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, commonly referred as "The de Young," opened in 1895 as an outgrowth of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (a fair modeled on the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of the previous year).It was housed in an Egyptian revival structure which had been the Fine Arts Building at the fair. The building was badly damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and was closed for a year and a half for repairs.

In 1921, de Young added a central section, together with a tower that would become the museum's signature feature, and the museum began to assume the basic configuration that it retained until 2001.

In 1929 the original Egyptian-style building was declared unsafe and demolished. By 1949, the elaborate cast concrete ornamentation of the original de Young was determined to be a hazard and removed because the salt air from the Pacific had rusted the supporting steel.

The building was severely damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It in turn was demolished and replaced by a new building in 2005. The only remaining original elements of the old de Young are the vases and sphinxes located near the Pool of Enchantment. The palm trees in front of the building are also original to the site.

At the main entry.

IN the main entry. Admission was FREE for me (a Veteran) and one guest.

A lot of Rafa's ancestors were there, highlighted in the Mayan exhibit!

Urn in the form of K'inich Ajaw, the sun god - Maya Artist - Mexico - Early Postclassic period: 1100-1400 CE - Earthenware and post-fire paint.

Plate with supernatural fish - Guatemala, Norther Petén, Maya

- 600-900 CE - Earthenware and pigment.

Vase or incense burner in the form of a dog carrying a spiked vessel - Guatemala, Maya

- 10th-13th century - Earthenware.

Bowl with rabbit - Mimbres artist - United States, New Mexico - 1000-1130 CE - Earthenware and pigment.

Bear figure - Haida artist - Canada, Haida Gwaii - ca. 1870 - Wood and pigment.

Mask - Tony Hunt (Canadian, Kwakwaka'wakw, b. 1942) and Calvin Hunt (Canadian, Kwakwaka'wakw, b. 1956) (second cousins, I found out through some research . . .) - 1978 - Alder wood, acrylic paint, human hair and mink fur.

Passage of Spirits - Abraham Anghik Ruben (Canadian, Inuit, b. 1951) - ca. 2006 - Steatite (soapstone), caribou antler, musk ox horn and cotton.

I absolutely LOVE this piece. It is "ten figures in a boat with a drummer at the bough, a sedna face on the bough of the boat, caribou antler used as sails. Some figures have human faces and some have animal faces." I'm pretty sure that it represents a dying humans last boat ride, into death.

Idolo - William Morris (b. 1957) - 2003 - Blown and formed glass.

Mother, Springhouse (Oakland Plantation Series) - Richard Cleaver (b. 1952) - 2005 - Ceramic, wood, freshwater pearls, garnets, glass crystals, bronze wire, metal, gold leaf and oil paint.

Cleaver lives on the grounds of the former Oakland Plantation in Baltimore. Mother, Springhouse was inspired by the intertwined histories of the plantation's owners and its enslaved African

American workers. At the base of the sculpture is a model of

the Spring House, a neoclassical building designed as the plantation's food storehouse by the famous architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820).

The Madonna-like central figure represents an enslaved nursemaid whom Cleaver imagined might have lived on the Oakland Plantation. She holds a white child (probably the son of the plantation owner) whose masklike face opens to reveal an African American child (likely the nursemaid's own). Dogs, often used to track runaway slaves, snarl at the nursemaid's feet, while the twin white girls flanking her hold threatening wood switches. Raised a Catholic and influenced by the sacred rituals and reliquaries he observed as a child, Cleaver's iconlike work glows with an aura of commemoration and reverence.