SF Museum of Modern Art

On my way to the SF MOMA I went to look at the outside of the Contemporary Jewish Museum.  It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, one of the group who designed the One World Trade Centre and built in 1994. It is a bit odd. A rectangular reddish brown building that used to be a power station with a shiny black cube on 1 corner next to it. It is right up close to other buildings, 1 a church, and it is impossible to get a good photo of it - well, impossible for me.  Nearby is the new  Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in a new park, about the size of a whole block, with garden beds, lawn and seating.  There is a memorial to Martin Luther King which was quite moving. You could walk behind a large, long waterfall and there were excerpts from his speeches on the wall.

The SF MOMA,  another new building was built in 1994. There were 6 floors of exhibits. I sat looking at a Rothlo for a while. The colours seem to get more intense the longer you look, or is it a mind trick.  There were lots of groups of children with their teacher scattered around the gallery. There was a painting by Edward Hopper of a single woman in the corner of a theatre. I listened for a while while the teacher asked what his 12 15 or 16yr old boys thought she was thinking about. Several thought she must  be lonely. To me she looked like many of his single women, alone but quite self- contained and not lonely.

When I was in Washington I saw an exhibition in the Guggenheim gallery of John
Chamberlain's 20 or so old cars that he painted bright colours and then squashed . I could not see the,point. Today I saw a washing machine that he had squashed. The label associated with this work says " metal from an old washing machine was thoughtfully crushed and fitted together to create this torquing form. Hmm. 'thouhtfully'?

There were some lovely sculptures by Alexander Calder that made me smile.  Then I enjoyed a proper cup of coffee before walking a bit to the start of another cable car line. I rode  to the end, then started to walk back but stopped in an Italian restaurant for a salad and some gf pasta. Delicious.

I went to look at Grace  Cathedral, the main church of the Episcopal Diocese of California , mainly because it has 2 labyrinths, one inside and one outside, both based on the labyrinth of Chartres cathedral. When I was in sydney , I walked around the newish labyrinth in centenial park which is similarly based on the Chartres one.  Today, I could not see the inside one because of the yearly performance of the Messiah that is performed in this cathedral and the one outside was disappointing to me because it was hemmed in by a stone wall , a building and was overlooked by several buildings.  So I was a bit grumpy when I went to look at other things inside.  There is peaceful,  modern AIDS memorial interfaith chapel.

That was it for the day.  The temperature had dropped and I was not aware at the time,  but it was also at 3.30 getting a bit dark because my photos that I
took on the way home are a bit dark.