“I think in clay. Clay was the earth that grew our food, was the house we lived in, was the pottery we ate out of and prayed with,” Simpson told a de Young Museum audience at a very personal lecture she delivered earlier this year. “My relationship to clay is ancestral and it has a deep genetic memory. It’s like a family member for us.”
On Nov. 9, the Legion of Honor began its 100th anniversary celebration with festivities including a cake picnic, screen-printing press and portrait station with the museum’s most prominent sculpture, a bronze cast of “The Thinker,” by Auguste Rodin (1904). A performance from the George Washington High School marching band ushered in the party with heavy drums and harmonic brass. As part of the Free Saturdays program, Bay Area residents delighted in free admission to the museum.
“Botticelli Drawings,” the newest exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, is not going for the obvious in exploring the work of the Italian painter of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli (full name: Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filippa). Viewers won’t see his most iconic painting, “The Birth of Venus” (1485-1486). Nor will they be disappointed.
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 