Singing Out for MLK

Especially to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. during his birthday week, the wonderful UCSF Gospel Choir will perform in Cole Hall on Wednesday, January 20 at noon.

The Gospel Choir concert is free, and as you know if you've heard this gifted and enthusiastic group, their rhythmic singing will lift your spirits and make your day joyous.

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Ravel for Strings

Another kind of musical joyousness highlights the next day, Thursday, January 21, also in Cole Hall, when the delightful Chancellor's Concert Series continues with a lovely work by the French master Maurice Ravel, an Impressionist painter in sound.

Concerts are free. Cole Hall doors open at 12 noon for seating and brown bag lunch. Music from 12:15 to 12:45.

Suzanne Leon, violin
Tanya Tomkins, cello
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Sonata for violin and cello

While living in Paris for five years and teaching at the Sorbonne, Suzanne Leon was concertmaster of both the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris and the Orchestre Internationale de Paris. She performs frequently in a violin duo with sister Kelly Leon-Pearce, both members of the SF Symphony since l990.

Tanya Tomkins has performed extensively throughout Europe, primarily as a chamber musician. As a member of the Euridice Quartet, she has recorded the quartets of Ravel and Debussy for Vanguard Classics. She divides her time between Holland and the Bay Area, where she performs this season as a member of Philharmonia Baroque.

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Looking at Ourselves

San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has two intriguing new shows. Of course, it has many other fascinating artworks to see, as always, among them now the first exhibition in the Bay Area of the 29 works by Roy Lichtenstein, one of America's most prominent contemporary artists, particularly noted for his cartoon-like Pop Art, which have come to SFMOMA on long-term loan.

Looking at Ourselves : Women Artists from the Logan Collection and Mirror Images: Surrealism and Self-Representation are two adjoining and interrelated shows whose images are mind-opening. I found that a number of them remained vividly in the mind's eye long after leaving the museum.

The 22 works in the first show were created in the l990s, by women artists looking at themselves from many different perspectives and in many different media, from charcoal to photographs and video tape. For thousands of years, women have been represented in art but only recently have they emerged in significant numbers as makers of art. The forms of women's reflections of self are "gender-inscribed," in the words of guest curator Daniela Salvioni, and radically different from those of men, and the works in this selection, as she says, "are alternately challenging, incorporating and manipulating accepted notions about the self and about the very process of making images."

Illustrated is a life-size 1993 sculpture by Kiki Smith, Virgin Mary in cast bronze and silver with concrete. Like the other works in this show, it comes from the extraordinary contemporary collection of Vicki and Kent Logan who have made a fractional gift of 250 works to SFMOMA.

Surrealism has always aimed to "epater le bourgeois," to shock the conventional. Even though we have grown accustomed to Picasso's three-eyed women and Dali's dripping watches, at the end of its century surrealist art can still stop us in our tracks.

In SFMOMA's related exhibition, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, are 85 paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures dating from l928 to 1996 by three generations of women artists associated with or influenced by the Surrealist movement. The 22 artists represented are from North and Central America, Europe, and Japan.

Frida Kahlo, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo are some of the women who -- influenced by Surrealism in Paris in the l930s and 40s -- explored the self through visual art, bringing to bear a wide range of literary and cultural traditions. An utterly different concept from that of Frida Kahlo's tortured Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird is reflected in two haunting works by another Mexican artist, the visionary Remedios Varo, l908-63. Her paintings have the magic of ancient legends: one is The Flutist, whose face is mother of pearl, forever moonlit, and another The Alchemist, a woman in a vaulted chamber mixing mysterious potions, both exquisitely painted.

Mirror Images also features work by Louise Bourgeois, Eve Hesse and Yayoi Kusama whose creativity matured from the l940s through the 60s. Considered to be female role models in contemporary art, they challenged the gender biases through which modernist art was considered as primarily a masculine expression.

The third generation of these women artists is expanding the exploration begun during Surrealism, working with social rituals of femininity, trying to destabilize themselves as objects of desire in ways such as costumed self-portraits and fantastical representations of the body.

In "Knife" (l985) Cuban-born Marta Maria Perez photographed her own nude pregnant belly, her right hand gripping a carving knife. Virgin Shroud of l993 by Dorothy Cross would be a familiar-looking silk gown on a dressmaker's mannequin if not for the cowhide draped over it, with the cow's teats as a headdress.

Femme-Maison (Woman-House) of l945 by Louise Bourgeois asks whether the woman is the house or the house is the woman. And whose legs and feet are on the other side of the door?

Both exhibitions opened on January 9 and will be on view through April 20 at SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, between Mission and Howard. Open every day except Wednesdays 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Half-price admission Thursdays 6-9 p.m. Free admission first Tuesday of every month. Excellent gallery tours free with admission. Information 357-4000.

Our SFMOMA stands high among the country's premier showcases of 20th-century art not only for the exciting architecture of its building but now for its collections as well. Capping a year of unprecedented acquisitions, in late l998 the Museum added its first work by the surrealist master Rene Magritte; an Andy Warhol; a work by Marcel Duchamp (whose Nude Descending a Staircase set off the famous furor of l914 over "modern" art) and sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Robert Arneson, and Doris Salcedo, among other purchases.

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A Common Vision

From the uncommon visions at MOMA, take a funny and insightful bumper-car ride of a romance with SF's Magic Theatre which opens its new season with the world premiere of Neena Beber's A Common Vision.

The play revolves around Dolores, played by Anne Darragh, who has been seen in unusual circumstances causing six people's lives to collide over love, death, faith, and flying saucers.

A Common Vision, directed by Magic Theatre's Associate Artistic Director Mary Coleman, opens January 19 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan, where there is plenty of free parking. Performances Wed-Sat 8 p.m., Sunday 2:30 p.m. until Feb. 14. Student and Senior Rush tickets are $8 and may be purchased half an hour before curtain when available. Call 441-8822.

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Bone, Shells & Strings

SF Performances Jazz Series opens with Bone, Shells & Strings featuring Bay Area native and jazz trombonist Steve Turre and his non-traditional ensemble, which includes strings as well as his signature conch shells. Jazz violinist Regina Carter is a featured member of the group, along with cellist Akua Dixon, pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Ray Drummond, and drummer Winard Harper.

When the late saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk once brought his conch shell to a gig, Turre asked if he could try it. When blowing it, he says, "not just your head but your whole body vibrated differently." Since his first shell concert in Mexico City, when relatives told Turre shell playing was part of his Mexican-American heritage, he has become the leading shell player on the music scene today.

Steve Turre Sextet with Strings, Friday, January 22, 8 p.m., Herbst Theater, Civic Center, Van Ness & McAllister. Tickets by phone from City Box Office, 392-4400.

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Berlin in the Twenties

The brilliant, daring, and decadent decade of the l920s is the theme of Humanities West's February program. Two days of lectures, performances, and films will explore Berlin in the fabulous Twenties when it was the artistic and intellectual capital of Europe, producing such artists as the architect Walter Gropius, the painter George Grosz, composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht, and movie pioneer Fritz Lang. Marlene Dietrich was there, as were the characters in Christopher Isherwood's I am a Camera and in the movie and Broadway show Cabaret.

Berlin Cabaret is the center of events on Friday evening, February 26, including performances by the contemporary Berlin cabaret artist Tim Fischer. Berlin as Metropolis on the Edge is described in Saturday's all-day series of illustrated lectures by leading artists and historians.

Since l983 Humanities West has presented programs to illuminate the human spirit by evoking historic times and places. Berlin in the Twenties is sure to be one of the most popular, so don't delay ordering tickets for one or both days. Programs at the Herbst Theater in Civic Center, Friday February 26 from 8 to 10 p.m., and Saturday, February 27 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets from City Box Office, 153 Kearny Street, SF, 94108; phone 392-4400, fax 986-0411. 

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