Aquatic Model of SF Bay and SJ Delta Open in Sausalito

San Francisco Bay Model, Sausalito

Mary Ellen Hunt

Published 05:57 p.m., Wednesday, July 18, 2012

[From San Francisco Chronicle]

At first sight, the San Francisco Bay Model is utterly overwhelming.

Standing on the observation platform, above the acre-and-a-half scale reconstruction of the Bay Area's waterways, you can scan from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta across San Pablo Bay to the Pacific Ocean. As you descend the ramps to walk closer to the edge of the waterways, you can examine the Port of Oakland and Alameda, or gaze across the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate and beyond.

This fascinating and unique facility is one of the Bay Area's best open secrets - a remarkable tool that enables visitors to visualize and put the ecology of the bay's watershed into context. It's a terrific way to educate kids about the effects humans can have on our natural water systems. Best of all, it's free.

Built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1957 as a way to examine the impact that John Reber's proposed dam system would have had on the bay, the model demonstrates in a concrete way the delicately interlinked natural and man-made systems that bring fresh water from the Sierra Nevada, down rivers and creeks, to meet the salt water of the Pacific Ocean.

After a two-year renovation, the Bay Model reopened earlier this year, and longtime fans will be happy to know that the familiar spots around the San Francisco Bay are all still there - including the miniature Golden Gate Bridge straddling the deep channel that leads to the ocean and the Splash Zone miniature ballpark.

Clever pumping systems enable hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to ebb and flow in tides that cycle every 14 minutes - if you watch carefully, you can actually see the water flowing through the Golden Gate, or creeping through the Suisun Slough. In 2000, when computer modeling became a more efficient way to study the impact of changes to the watershed, the Army Corps of Engineers turned the model into a one-of-a-kind educational tool.

It will take at least an hour to fully appreciate the entire facility, and scattered throughout are plenty of hands-on exhibits and video kiosks that the kids will find interesting.

What effect did dredging new shipping channels in the San Joaquin River have on the delta? How did runoff from mining during the Gold Rush change the rivers? How big is that system of dikes and levees in the delta, and what would happen if the levees failed? If you or the kids have walked along the Napa River or driven over the Carquinez Strait, if you've visited Alcatraz or landed on the runways by the bay at SFO, the Bay Model will put all your travels around our waterways into perspective.

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/San-Francisco-Bay-Model-Sausalito-3717931.php

Donating Artifacts to a Museum Affected by Policy

IN the three decades since David Dewey of Minneapolis began collecting Chinese antiquities he has donated dozens to favored museums, enriching the Institute of Arts in his hometown as well as Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied Mandarin.

Enlarge This Image

Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times

David Dewey bought these Yuan dynasty artifacts from a dealer 15 years ago, but many museums now seek a more extensive provenance for gifts. 

But his giving days are largely over, he said, pre-empted by guidelines that most museums now follow on what objects they can accept.

“They just won’t take them — can’t take them,” Mr. Dewey said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, is in a similar bind. An antiquities collector, he is eager to sell an Egyptian sarcophagus he bought from Sotheby’s in the early 1990s. But he is stymied, he said, because auction houses are applying tighter policies to the items they accept for consignment.

“I can’t get proof of when it came out of Egypt,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Across the country measures taken to curb the trade in looted artifacts are making it more difficult for collectors of antiquities to donate, or sell, the cultural treasures that fill their homes, display cases and storage units.

Museums typically no longer want artifacts that do not have a documented history stretching back past 1970, a date set by the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose guidelines most institutions have adopted. Drawn up in 2008, the rules have been applauded by countries seeking to recover their artifacts and by archaeologists looking to study objects in their natural settings.

To read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/arts/design/antiquity-market-grapples-with-stricter-guidelines-for-gifts.html

America's Portraitist

                                 Thomas Hart Benton  (1889-1975)

          He wanted to be an artist. His father, who considered art an unmanly trade, was furious; the two were never close again. But with the support of his mother, Lizzie, a strong-minded woman with social ambitions, Benton embarked on what would be a long, awkward and episodic cultural ­education.

Still in his teens, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on illustration and newspaper cartooning. But he soon became interested in painting and decided to head to Paris, where he landed with little money, no French and only a vague idea of how to wield a brush. He stayed for three years, splitting his time between copying old masters in the Louvre and immersing himself in a modern art scene that was, in the years before World War I, on the boil.

Benton’s character, as depicted by Wolff at this point, will remain consistent: a combination of combative self-­confidence and profound uncertainty. In Paris, he played the roustabout bohemian to the hilt, wearing artsy clothes, acquiring a mistress, reading Ruskin and Hippo­lyte Taine, drinking all night, getting into fights. But his painting was shaky, as he tried out a range of styles — Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, abstraction, one after the other, often in combination — with dispiriting results. Whenever he felt he was on to something, he slapped himself down, in a self-destructive pattern that would take other forms later on.

The experimentation went on for years after he returned from Paris to the United States, this time to New York City. Yet once back on native turf, he gradually became a different, definite kind of artist, mostly through a process of rejection. Out went the Left Bank wardrobe, the mistresses, Ruskin and Taine, and interest in any European painters apart from old masters. He decided that he despised most modern art, and the artists who made it. Emboldened by newfound confidence, he insisted on sharing his views, as well as an enemies-list-in-formation — Alfred Stieglitz and the young Stuart Davis topped it — with whoever would listen.

It’s possible to read all this as a defensive tactic, a pre-emptive repudiation of a game he suspected he had lost. At the same time, he was finally coming into his own. By the early 1920s, he had worked out a distinctive brand of stylized realism inspired in part by the twisty figures of Mannerist and Baroque artists like Jacopo Pontormo and El Greco. And he had found an application for that style in the vision of a populist, working-class America remembered from his childhood.  [From a book review by Holland Cotter in the New York Times Book Review dated July 1, 2012]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/books/review/thomas-hart-benton-by-justin-wolff.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books
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