East Bay Diary

I recently paid a visit to the Oakland Museum just before it closed for renovation. I made the trip to view an exhibit by Squeak Carnwath, a highly regarded local artist of national renown.

Squeak’s work has had special significance for my family ever since I gave my wife one of her paintings to mark the birth of our youngest daughter. Titled “Thank You,” the work of art perfectly expressed our elation and gratitude at this special time.

My time at the museum took me on an unexpected detour down memory lane.

I remembered my mother praising the innovative design of the new Oakland Museum after she visited the complex when it opened in 1969.

As a young kid, I took the AC Transit bus from our family home in San Leandro to the Oakland Library near Lake Merritt just blocks away. I spent many afternoons combing the stacks and burying myself in books I never knew existed.

Not far away, at Frank Youell Field, I got my first glimpse of a young Al Davis pacing the sidelines as the coach of the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders would later move to the Oakland Coliseum in 1966.

A student of Coach Sid Gillman – father of the long ball – Davis believed in having his quarterback throw bombs. He was coach of the year in 1963 – 46 years ago – and he built a blue collar culture that fit the East Bay’s up-from-the-bootstraps fans. Read More »

Thomas Albright

My passion for Northern California art began not by viewing a painting but by reading a newspaperman’s book. Thomas Albright was the influential art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle when he passed away prematurely of lung cancer at 48 years old in 1984. Albright had been a legendary journalist who possessed a messianic conviction that the contributions of Bay Area artists were undervalued. At the time of his death, the hard-living and influential Albright was putting the final touches on a book he had been writing about contemporary Bay Area Art after World War II. The 350-page, coffee table-sized opus – “Art in The San Francisco Bay Area 1945 :: 1980″ – was published posthumously. TIME Magazine’s super-critic Robert Hughes wrote, “This is the best book on its subject and will remain so for years to come.” I was neither a friend of Albright’s nor knowledgeable about art. But after attending an event marking the publication, I immediately understood that Albright had focused much deserved attention on a generation of underexposed artists in Northern California who were neglected by the New York media.

From 1958 to 1966, Beat Artist Jay DeFeo labored over a painting that she layered until it weighed 2,300 pounds and was so large that the façade of her apartment building had to be removed in order to crane the painting onto a truck. Her painting titled “The Rose” was eventually hidden away behind a conference room wall at the San Francisco Art Institute. Jay DeFeo died of lung cancer in 1989 at 60 trying to resurrect The Rose from this humiliating tomb. In 2003, DeFeo’s famous work was the centerpiece of a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney. Read More »