Gold Rush . . . Then, World War II

This photograph is from the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation photo collection. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember the men and women who went off to war and never returned. But it is also fitting on this day to recall the soldiers, sailors and Marines who served in World War II and came back.

Those men and women and their families set off a huge postwar boom that completely changed the Bay Area - and produced the region that today's residents have inherited.

World War II had a huge impact on the Bay Area. It resulted in major changes in the area's racial makeup, its economy, even its physical appearance.

The conversion of the orchard-rich Santa Clara County from "The Valley of Heart's Delight" into Silicon Valley can be directly traced to wartime electronic research.

Author Marilynn Johnson studied the impact of the war on the East Bay, where Oakland and Richmond were turned into boom towns. She called it "The Second Gold Rush." The war, she said, "marked the coming of age of West Coast cities."

"The city still looks the same. It is still beautiful, but it's a totally different place than the one where we grew up," said Wallace Levin, who was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in the city during World War II. Levin is coordinator of Monday's Memorial Day ceremonies at the Presidio.

Shipbuilding boom

After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Bay Area became a centerpiece of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy."

Shipyards went up with lightning speed to construct the ships that would take the war to the Japanese in the Pacific. In San Francisco, the executives of the Bechtel Corp. got a telegram from the government on March 2, 1942, asking if the company would be interested in building and operating a shipyard on San Francisco Bay.

The answer was "yes," and within 10 days, Bechtel began clearing marshland in Sausalito for a shipyard called Marinship. Just over three months from the call from Washington, the keel of a freighter was laid, and in September, the ship, named for William Richardson, the founder of Sausalito, was launched.

In the East Bay, Henry J. Kaiser built three shipyards, which during the war built 747 large ships - one in only four days, a world record.

During the height of the wartime shipbuilding boom, 244,000 people worked in Bay Area shipyards - a workforce equal to more than 13 Army divisions.

Fort Mason, on San Francisco's northern waterfront, became the main port of embarkation for the Pacific war.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/27/MNMV1ONR0I.DTL#ixzz1wBmVyAT8

Education's Going On At The Museum

Currenty, the Whitney Museum in New York is carrying on educational activities such as these.  But, they are preparing to move to a new museum site in New York's meat-packing district which will provide ample space to continue this teaching:

“So often education is a behind-the-scene activity either
relegated to a wing by itself or in the basement,” Mr. Weinberg said. “But for us education is part and parcel of what we do.”

The space is just the kind of thing the public wants these days. “Audiences today are more interested in participatory events, not just being talked to,” Ms. Potts said.

On a recent rainy Friday evening, a few blocks north at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a group was gathered for “Drop-in Drawing.” The program meets every two weeks in a different part of the museum, and this session convened in the new painting galleries of the American Wing.

Perched on folding seats, armed with clipboards, paper and colored pencils (all provided free by the Met), a group ranging in age from roughly 6 to upward of 65 listened with rapt attention as Pamela Lawton, a New York artist, explained how artists traditionally compose a canvas: with a foreground, a middle ground and a background.

The group then started sketching, inspired by examples of the Hudson River School painters surrounding them, including works by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Edwin Church and George Inness. After 20 minutes or so, the group moved to the nearby American Impressionist galleries, where Deborah Lutz, another artist, continued teaching.

“Programs like this are amazing,” said Kristine Mustillo, the principal of Public School 97 in Brooklyn, as she watched her daughters, Jillian, 8, and Emily, 9, create landscapes inspired by the 19th-century artist William Pickwell’s painting “Banks of the Loing.”

“Schools have cut back a lot, so you don’t get much arts education these days,” she said. “We’ve been to nearly every museum in the city.” (Jillian said her favorite so far was the New Museum because she loved the slide, by the artist Carsten Höller. Emily is a fan of the Museum of Modern Art, which has the best selection of works by Warhol, her favorite artist.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/arts/artsspecial/museums-expand-their-educational-offerings.html?ref=artsspecial

New York's Metropolitan Museum Has a New Web Site Design

By RANDY KENNEDY  (New York Times)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been trying to rebrand itself over the last year as a visitor-friendly art behemoth, unveiled a redesigned Web site on Monday, the first time the site has been thoroughly updated in more than a decade.

It includes several new features that are beginning to become standard for large museums, like a zoomable, clickable floor plan similar to one the Art Institute of Chicago created two years ago. The Met’s version allows prospective visitors to look closely at almost 400 galleries to see what to expect, and visitors already at the museum to use smartphones on parts of the site to find their way to favorite artworks.

The site also shows off the results of a huge undertaking ordered by Thomas P. Campbell, the museum’s director: that the curatorial departments make images and information available online for all of the almost two million items in the collection. About 340,000 comprehensive entries for objects are included on the revamped site, 200,000 of which have been created over the last nine months. The site also has a new multimedia section, making videos, recorded lectures, interactive educational programs and other digital projects more easily accessible.

“This relaunch represents a complete overhaul in how we support the museum’s online presence,” said Erin Coburn, the chief officer of digital media, adding that it “positions the Met to be more responsive to the ever-changing needs of the digital environment.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/metropolitan-museum-unveils-revamped-web-site/