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The New de Young Museum to Open in October 2005 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
3/6/2005 New Design Showcases the de Young's Growing Collections and Opens Museum to its Natural Surroundings Building and Capital Campaign Mark Largest Privately-Funded
Cultural Gift In City History;
$178 Million Raised to Date for Expansion and Endowment
San Francisco, February 2005--The de Young museum will reopen in Golden Gate Park on October 15, 2005, in a landmark new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron. With a groundbreaking design that dramatically integrates art, architecture, and nature, the new building presents the de Young's diverse collections--encompassing American painting and decorative arts, and arts of the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Africa--in specially designed galleries that allow visitors to experience, under one roof, both the distinctions and the connections between the art of different cultures and eras.
Founded in 1895, the de Young museum has been an integral part of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for over 100 years. After sustaining extensive damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the old de Young building was closed in 2000 to make way for a new, seismically stable home for the city's treasured art collections. Designed to complement its natural surroundings, the new de Young will encourage museum guests and park visitors alike to travel effortlessly from the park’s pathways to the museum’s entryways and to the sculpture and children’s gardens. With 105,000 square feet of education and gallery space, the new de Young’s design offers twice the exhibition space of the old building and allows access to a third of the museum free of charge. The project campaign, led by President of the Board of Trustees Dede Wilsey, exceeded its original goal of $165 million and has reached $178 million to date, making the new de Young the largest privately funded cultural gift ever made to the city of San Francisco.
The de Young’s primary designers, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, are collaborating with the principal architects of the building, San Francisco-based Fong & Chan Architects. The landscape design, by Bay Area landscape architect Walter Hood, expands the institution beyond its own walls by further integrating the museum and its gardens into the setting of Golden Gate Park. The de Young and its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, together make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco--the largest public arts institution in the city of San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
“The new de Young is the culmination of a multi-year effort on the part of the Board of Trustees and thousands of generous supporters in the Bay Area and beyond, who have effectively secured a vital future for one of San Francisco’s most treasured cultural resources,” said Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “This remarkably innovative and thoughtful building will showcase the de Young’s unparalleled collections of world art and serve as a gateway to these cultures for generations of museum visitors.”
The Design for the de Young
The new three-level, 293,000-square-foot building reduces the de Young’s footprint by 37% and returns nearly two acres of open space to Golden Gate Park. The building is threaded with a series of courtyards that draw visitors and the landscape into the museum’s interior. The exterior is encircled by ribbons of windows that reflect the landscape and allow park visitors glimpses of the art within the museum, while simultaneously providing museumgoers with panoramic views of the park.
The museum’s unique copper façade is perforated with a design that mimics dappled light filtering through a canopy of trees, creating an abstract pattern on the face of the museum that resonates with the de Young’s wooded setting. Over the course of seven to 10 years, the building’s skin will progressively fade from a bright copper to a cinnamon color, and eventually will assume a rich green patina that will blend gracefully with the surrounding natural environment.
To showcase the variety of the de Young’s collections, Herzog & de Meuron have designed galleries that complement the different facets represented therein, consciously striving to create an atmosphere that reflects the museum’s diverse collections of world art. Galleries designed to showcase objects from the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific convey the grandeur of the collections by exhibiting them in free, open spaces and allowing objects to be viewed in three dimensions. The American paintings, sculptures, and furniture of the 17th through the 19th centuries will be on view in classically proportioned rooms, and contemporary art will be housed in open, expansive galleries that utilize natural light. In addition to the exhibition spaces, the new building also provides state-of-the-art storage and conservation facilities.
The Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Education Tower, one of the largest spaces in an American art museum devoted exclusively to education, is located on the west side of the building. It gently twists to form a parallelogram as it rises to a height of 144 feet, aligning at the top with the grid formed by the streets of the Park’s surrounding neighborhoods. Considered a national leader in arts education, the de Young’s Education Department has grown in recent years through such initiatives as its award-winning Museum Ambassador Program for low-income Bay Area high school students, and the Artist Studio Program, which offers workshops and demonstrations by local artists. With the reopening of the de Young, the Education Department will present Collection Icons, a series of multimedia installations designed to introduce children and first-time visitors to important works of art in the museum, and Get Smart with Art, a series of nine new curriculum guides and online activities designed to address the California state-mandated standards for social studies, visual arts, and language arts.
Landscape Design
Highlights of the de Young's landscape design, created by Bay Area landscape architect Walter Hood, include a public sculpture garden and terrace and a children’s garden. The exterior environment is specifically designed to create a tangible link between the museum building and the surrounding park. Using iconic elements from the old de Young, the landscape architecture incorporates the original sphinx sculptures, the Pool of Enchantment, and the historic hundred-year-old palm trees. Redwood, cypress, eucalyptus, ferns, and other native and non-native plants will be planted both inside and outside the museum, echoing the vibrant cultures showcased throughout the museum’s collections and creating a sense that the park and museum flow into one another.
Permanent Collection and Special Exhibitions
The de Young’s permanent collection comprises American art from the 17th through the 20th centuries, art from the native cultures of North, Central, and South America, art from the Pacific Islands and Africa, and textiles of many eras from throughout the world. Featuring work from nearly 30 countries, the de Young's broad collections are especially noteworthy for their pre-Columbian pieces, art from sub-Saharan Africa, Maori sculptures from New Zealand, and an encyclopedic collection of New Guinean objects of exceptional quality, many of which are on loan from John and Marcia Friede. The Museum’s Rockefeller Collection of American paintings is the foremost collection of its kind in the Western United States. It includes works by John Singleton Copley, Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The de Young also holds more than 6,000 objects of American decorative arts and sculpture, ranging from Paul Revere silver to furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright to contemporary craft from the Saxe Collection. The sculpture collection continues to grow with works by such renowned artists as Isamu Noguchi, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg and James Turrell.
Recent Acquisitions
Throughout the rebuilding project, the de Young has continued to gather major works of art from around the world. Recent major 20th-century art acquisitions include Zig V, a monumental painted steel sculpture by David Smith; Ocean Park 116, a significant painting by Richard Diebenkorn; a Willem de Kooning drawing; sculptures by Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Hepworth, and James Turrell; and paintings by Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. Also recently acquired were one of the oldest and best preserved sculptures from West Africa's Dogon culture and a rare eighth-century Maya stela. The new museum will also feature a grand mural room to showcase 10 of the 14 historic murals by Gottardo Piazzoni, which were formerly housed in San Francisco’s Main Library.
Site-Specific Commissions
The de Young has commissioned four of the world’s leading contemporary artists, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), James Turrell (b. 1943), Kiki Smith (b. 1954), and Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956), to create site-specific works for the new building. Gerhard Richter will fashion a large-scale mural for the de Young, created from digitally manipulated photographs that together form a geometric black-and-white motif. The monumental piece, titled Strontium, is constructed of 130 digital prints mounted on aluminum with plexiglass coating. A gift from Diane B. Wilsey in memory of her husband Alfred S. Wilsey, the mural spans a total of 31 by 29.86 feet and will be installed in the Diane B. Wilsey and Alfred S. Wilsey Court, the central public gathering space inside the new de Young.
A second commission, of a “skyspace” for the museum’s Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden, marks the first work by by native Californian James Turrell to enter the museum’s collections. Titled Three Gems, the piece is Turrell’s first “skyspace” to adopt the stupa form, a dome shape that in Buddhist practice is used to house relics or commemorate an important event. Three Gems will be built into a hill within the garden and features a view of the sky altered by lighting effects that will change with light and weather conditions outside. Three Gems is a gift of Bernard and Barbro Osher.
Sculptor Kiki Smith has been commissioned to create a reinterpretation of The Mason Children: David, Joanna and Abigail, a 1670 American painting already in the de Young’s collection, attributed to the Freake-Gibbs painter. Smith, whose work is characterized by unique representations of women and their bodies, will incorporate in silhouette the images of Joanna and Abigail Mason, using gilt and copper leaf that will echo the museum’s exterior. Smith’s commission is a gift of Dorothy and George Saxe and the Friends of Art.
The fourth commission, by Andy Goldsworthy, is a gift of Lonna and Marshall Wais and takes its inspiration from the unique character of California’s tectonic topography. Working with Appleton Greenmoore stone imported from Yorkshire, England that will surround the new de Young building, Goldsworthy will create a continuous crack running north from the edge of the Music Concourse roadway in front of the museum, up the main walkway, into the exterior courtyard, and up to the main entrance. Along its path, this crack will cleave in two several large rough-hewn stone boulders that will serve as seating for museum visitors.
Inaugural Exhibition
In addition to showcasing the permanent collection, the new building will enable the de Young to once again serve as the Bay Area’s premier venue for special exhibitions, both organized by the de Young and other institutions throughout the country and the world. The de Young will inaugurate its new special exhibition galleries with an ambitious exhibition showcasing objects from Egypt’s Golden Age, Daughter of Re: Hatshepsut, King of Egypt, on view from October 15, 2005 to January 29, 2006. The exhibition focuses on the reigns of New Kingdom Rulers Tuthmosis I, Hatshepsut, and Tuthmosis III (1504-1425 B.C.). It was during this period that Egypt created an empire that stretched from the Sudan in the south to Syria in the north. Over one-hundred objects from this period will be on view, including treasures from these conquered territories, ornate royal possessions, and monumental sculptures and reliefs. Daughter of Re was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with works on loan from museums worldwide, and will tour to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kimball Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
Project Leadership
Through the leadership of Dede Wilsey, President of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Board of Trustees, and the guidance of Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the new de Young museum will proudly re-open its doors to the public on October 15, 2005.
Mrs. Wilsey, who has served as Chairman of the de Young’s capital campaign since 1995 and President of the Board of Trustees since 1998, has remained steadfast in her conviction to build a world-class museum in Golden Gate Park. After the museum narrowly lost two city bond initiatives, Mrs. Wilsey, as Chairman of the capital campaign, successfully led the museum in securing over $178 million in funding, from nearly 7,000 private donors. In her role as President of the Museums’ Board of Trustees, Mrs. Wilsey mobilized a broad spectrum of support from trustees, museum members, community leaders, and politicians to advocate for and contribute to the new de Young, ultimately ensuring the museum’s reinvention into a world-class institution. In addition, Mrs. Wilsey has greatly contributed to the de Young’s collection, most recently through the gift of the Gerhard Richter mural for the de Young’s Diane B. Wilsey and Alfred S. Wilsey Court.
The new de Young museum will come to fruition under the directorship of Harry S. Parker III. During his tenure, Mr. Parker, who has served as Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco since 1987, has significantly contributed to the growth and enhancement of both the de Young and the Legion of Honor through building and expansion projects, acquisitions, and by reorganizing and differentiating the museum’s collections. In addition to overseeing the construction of the new de Young, Mr. Parker oversaw the restoration, expansion, and seismic upgrade of the Legion of Honor from 1987 to 1995.
The de Young is the first major museum built from the ground up by 2001 Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, based in Basel, Switzerland. Their previous arts-related projects include London’s Tate Modern Bankside, the Goetz Collection gallery in Munich, Germany, and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, opening in April 2005. In Northern California, the architects have also designed Yountville’s Dominus Winery.
The San Francisco-based architecture firm of Fong & Chan Architects has collaborated closely with Herzog & de Meuron to execute the de Young’s design. Fong & Chan’s expertise and knowledge of constructability issues, technologies, and local construction materials and building codes helped to ensure that the museum’s complex design became a reality. The firm has extended its rigorous project management system to the construction administration phase, ensuring the smooth and efficient realization of the project.
Walter Hood is a Professor and the former Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and principal of the Oakland, California-based urban landscape design firm Hood Design. He is best known for his innovative public design projects, which are tied to urban redevelopment and the revitalization of underserved communities. Hood’s current projects include San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Lane and the Poplar Street Improvement Project in Macon, Georgia.
The de Young Museum is located at 50 Tea Garden Drive in the heart of Golden Gate Park. For public information, call (415) 863-3330 or visit www.thinker.org.
The de Young Museum is located at 50 Tea Garden Drive in the heart of Golden Gate Park. For public information call (415) 863-3330 or visit www.thinker.org.
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