The beautiful location in San Fransisco Bay

The Wave Organs in the San Fransisco Bay is made by the artists Peter Richards and George Gonzalez, Exploratorium artists in residence, 1986.

”The Wave Organ is a wave-activated acoustic sculpture located on a jetty in the San Francisco Bay. The concept was developed by Peter Richards and was installed in collaboration with sculptor and master stone mason George Gonzales. Inspiration for the piece came from artist Bill Fontana’s recordings made of sounds emanating from a vent pipe of a floating concrete dock in Sydney, Australia.”

Place your ear here

Art with a view

”The Wave Organ is located on a jetty that forms the small Boat Harbor in the Marina district of San Francisco, walking distance from the Exploratorium. The jetty itself was constructed with material taken from a demolished cemetery, providing a wonderful assortment of carved granite and marble, which was used in the construction of this piece. The installation includes 25 organ pipes made of PVC and concrete located at various elevations within the site, allowing for the rise and fall of the tides. Sound is created by the impact of waves against the pipe ends and the subsequent movement of the water in and out of the pipes. The sound heard at the site is subtle, requiring visitors to become sensitized to its music, and at the same time to the music of the environment. The Wave Organ sounds best at high tide.”

The sound of the ocean

Waiting for the tide

Information about this piece is quotations from  Exploratorium and the trip was founded with a grant from The American Embassy in Stockholm.

San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) has not only a great little collection of some of my favorite painters but also a very nice cafe on the roof top with Minimalism inspired treats. The cake reminds me of my favorite artist Agnes Martins striped pastel paintings and at the same time the cream colored building material in the work of Clay Ketter.  Maybe I got so inspired because I miss my studio and painting, anyway, the absolutely best part was the solo exhibition with the photographer Rineke Dijkstra. I seen her work many times before; strong and simple portraits with great presence. They always get stuck in my memory and it was great to see both the work I never seen before and the ones I only had in my mind.

Photo made by the artsit Rineke Dijkstra

Here are some of my favorite paintings:

Louise Bourgeois

Julie Mehretu

Ellsworth Kelly

Helen Frankenthaler

Phillip Guston

Vija Celmins

Noel showing one of his mom's paintings

The last stop on our trip was San Francisco. We visited my friend and fellow artist Ida Rödén who lives and work in the city. Ida is a very talented artist and gave us a wonderful stay in her town. She also is an assistant at the legacy of Joan Brown, a figurative Californian artist. Brown’s works is colorful, cartoonish and seems to carry a lot of personal symbols. Her son, the artist Noel Neri is taking care of her estate and where kind enough to show us his mother work to us while we where there.

"Noel and Bob"

The work of Joan Brown (1938-1990)

The Archive

Michael Heizer’s ”Double Negative” located in the Moapa Valley on Mormon Mesa (or Virgin River Mesa) near Overton, Nevada. To get there we drove through the National Park ”Lake Mead”, with beautiful red stone mountains. To drive on the mesa was scary because you are driving on a plateau that you are not sure where it ends; and we where heading right towards the edge of the cliff where the Double Negative is.

We arrived safe, realizing how huge the two negatives are. We climbed down into both of them, which gave me a very strange feeling. The freedom of standing on the plateau was contrasted with the feeling of being buried  alive inside the negative. The complexity of the space was more striking than I expected.

Double Negative was completed in 1969 by Heizer who is still working with land art.  His latest work,”City” in the Nevada dessert, is a piece he has been working with since the ninetieths but it is still not available to the public.

Inside the negative

View from the mesa

Looking down and beyond