Mississippi riverboats and Bay Area ferries have a long and cherished relationship, and the cities of New Orleans and San Francisco have become sisters due to shared cultural tastes in musical celebration.
Davis Symphony Hall will host the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band on December 15.
By Paul Duclos
Published: December, 2013
Mississippi riverboats and Bay Area ferries have a long and cherished relationship, and the cities of New Orleans and San Francisco have become sisters due to shared cultural tastes in musical celebration. On Sunday, December 15, Davies Symphony Hall will host the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band for a spirited evening of traditional New Orleans jazz this holiday season.
The band, which made its San Francisco Symphony debut in a 2009 holiday concert, derives its name from Preservation Hall, the venerable music venue located in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter, founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe. The band has traveled worldwide spreading their mission to nurture and perpetuate the art form of New Orleans Jazz. Under the auspices of current director, Ben Jaffe, the son of the founders, Preservation Hall continues.
In July of this year, Preservation Hall Jazz Band released their current recording, That’s It!, with all-original music produced by Jaffe along with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. That’s It! offers a collection of brand-new songs in the swinging blues and gospel-oriented traditions of New Orleans jazz as well as new songs co-written by several pop artists, including singer-songwriter Paul Williams and Semisonic’s Dan Wilson. For more, see www.sfsymphony.org.
Life on (and in) the water plays a big role for the most influential and best-known British artist of his generation. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, on view at the de Young Museum through January 20, 2014. Hockney has consistently displayed a passion, as Lawrence Wechsler writes in his essay for the exhibition catalog, "to look deeper and see more."
Assembled by Hockney exclusively for the de Young, more than 300 works will be shown in 18,000 square feet of gallery space, making this the largest exhibition in the history of the museum.
This first comprehensive survey of Hockney’s work since 2002 covers one of the most prolific periods of the artist’s career. Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters was published in 2001, revealing his discovery that artists had used optical devices in their working processes centuries earlier than had been previously thought. The next decade saw an explosion of activity for Hockney, including a period of two years when he worked intensively and exclusively in watercolor for the first time, followed by painting en plein air, experimentation with the iPhone, iPad drawings, oil paintings on a grand scale and digital movies.
David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition builds on a recent exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, but encompasses a much larger scope and includes many portraits, still lifes and landscapes. In addition to watercolors, charcoals, oil paintings and works in other media, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will also be the first to exhibit and publish The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen). This work consists of 25 charcoal drawings, finished in May of this year, and has been described by Hockney as capturing "the bleakness of the winter and its exciting transformation to the summer."
David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition includes some of Hockney’s grandest works both in terms of size and concept, such as The Bigger Message, his 30-canvas re-working of Claude Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount. Also included are more intimate works, like the artist’s portraits depicting friends, colleagues and family members. These reveal the artist’s personal and intimate relationships and illustrate a particularly tender understanding of his sitters. Hockney’s most recent portraits—done in charcoal—will be exhibited and published for the first time by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
This exhibition highlights Hockney’s ability to engage with—and gain mastery of—a wide variety of tools and media. Works range from simple pencil drawings on paper to Bigger Yosemite, five drawings created on the iPad that capture the majesty of the American West. "Like an artist alchemist, in one minute Hockney uses a fancy digital device to make a colorful iPad drawing; in the next he shows us that he is one of our greatest draftsmen by rendering an exactingly detailed charcoal drawing of a forest scene in East Yorkshire," notes Richard Benefield, deputy director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and organizer of the exhibition. For more, see deyoung.famsf.org.
