Art at UCSF Parnassus

"The UCSF Art Collection on the Parnassus campus comprises an eclectic group of artworks dating from the 1930s to the present. It not only reflects the diversity of artistic disciplines and points of view but also that of the campus community and campus architecture. As well, the collection includes purchased, commissioned, and donated artworks by internationally known and emerging artists."

Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann In the context of exploring the humanistic relationship between art and science, the Chancellor's Committee on

Art, Honors, and Recognition had as its mandate the enhancement of the public spaces of the campus,

including the Kalmanovitz Library and Laurel Heights campus. The committee, appointed by the Chancellor,

included UCSF students, staff, faculty as well as local community members. With the guidance of an

independent art advisor, the committee provided advice and recommendations to the Chancellor regarding the

acquisition, acceptance, and placement of artworks.

Art at UCSF Parnassus

Charles Ginnever Juana Alicia

Kostas Georgakas (Greek, 20th century)

Bill Woodrow

Born and raised in the Bay Area and currently residing at his studio farm in rural Vermont, Charles was a pioneer in the revival of outdoor sculpture and public art in America in the 1960s and 1970s and is best known for his large-scale geometric abstraction in steel. His works are in major public and private collections throughout the United States.

Within Tandem II, each parallelogram exists in a harmonious, yet dynamic, balance that seems to move, and somehow deny gravity. This perceptual puzzle is intensified as viewers move around the work—the formal relationships within the sculpture seem to shift with each new point of view.

Hippocrates, circa 1970, is a sculptural example of five other versions of a marble sculpture attributed to Kostos Georgakas. Although mostly of historic and traditional value and not necessarily required by medical schools, the oath is considered a rite of passage for practitioners of medicine in some countries.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Juana moved to the Bay Area in 1973 and works in a variety of media as a muralist, illustrator, print maker, and painter. She is best known for large-scale murals, particularly in San Francisco and Central America that are infused with social, political, and spiritual themes.

Juana Alicia’s SANARTE: Diversity’s Pathway represents healing traditions worldwide, community cooperation, the internal work we do to heal ourselves as well as the social and natural movements that have brought about diversity, with a focus on the special history of UCSF. The murals are the result of in-depth historical research and design development, in dialogue with students, staff, and community members.

Born around 460 B.C.,Hippocrates is credited with being the first person to believe that diseases were caused naturally and not as a result of superstition and Gods, believing and arguing that disease was not a punishment inflicted by the gods but rather the product of environmental factors, diet, and living habits. While little is actually known about who originally wrote the Hippocratic Oath, is an oath historically taken by doctors swearing to practice medicine ethically.

Jim Barnes

Currently residing in Seattle, Washington, Jim was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. He graduated from the

University of Delaware with a BFA in fine art photography in 1984. He learned welding from a friend and has concentrated on steel sculptures for most of his career.

Bather is an excellent example of the sculptures of Jim Barnes, which are reduced to their essential elements similar to the works by Alexander Calder as well as reminiscent of Matisse's cut out pieces in their elemental simplicity.

Bill Woodrow

Currently living and working in London, Bill is considered one of the most important sculptors in contemporary British art. He is part of a group called "New British Sculpture," a term applied to the work of a loosely connected group of sculptors who came into prominence at the beginning of the 1980s and who continue to exhibit and influence the younger generations of artists.

Regardless of History is a quarter scale version of a sculpture with the same title created for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, England. Woodrow chose to explore a recurring theme in his work—challenging and questioning man's inability to learn the lessons of the past. A critic has observed that by placing the book over the man's ears and the tree's roots over his eyes, Bill implies that mankind listens to history but cannot see the lessons. We carry on 'regardless of history'—an appropriate symbol and reminder for the entrance to a library. The work also evokes the theme of human frailty and of the strength and importance of knowledge and understanding.

Robert Cremean

Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Robert has spent his adult life in California and has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout his career, most notably in 1968 at the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and now works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Bust of R. de la V., 1964 is a great example of Robert Cremean's work. He adopted the human figure as his main subject in the early 1950s. Combined with abstract

signs and symbols, the figure is employed to address such universal themes as religion, sexuality, war, genocide and bigotry. Yet, even though he takes on strong themes, Robert’s work has always been dream-like and draws from the surrealist painters of the earlier part of the century.

Helaman Ferguson

Helaman Ferguson is an American sculptor and a digital artist specifically, an algorist, often representing mathematical shapes in his works. Born in Salt Lake City and raised in New York, he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Washington. Helaman's mathematical research produced new algorithms, most notably the PSLQ algorithm which some have called one of the "Top Ten Algorithms of the Century."

The Umbilic Torus is a single-edged three-dimensional figure created as a mathematical artwork. The lone edge goes three times around the ring before returning to the starting point. A cross section of the surface taken from an umbilic torus corresponds with a hypocycloid.

Sarah Sze

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1969 and currently living and working in New York City, Sarah Sze holds a BA from Yale University (1991) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York (1997). She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious art museums and institutions. In 2003, she was one of 24 recipients of the McArthur Fellows, known as the “Genius Awards” and she currently is an adjunct professor of visual arts at the School of Arts, Columbia University, New York.

Installed in the three-story windows of the stairwell of Kalmanovitz Library, The Distance Where Magnets Pull is a suspended spinning metropolis. A delicate climbing structure, made out of stainless steel, creates a dynamic environment hovering across the glass façade forming a floating and disorienting landscape of ladders, architecture, and sky.

The evolution of the sculpture will be discovered as the viewer moves through the stairway. This trail of activity can be viewed in intimate detail along the interior stair, while the entire composition is visible from the street, through the three-story window. During the day, the artwork is lit with natural light casting shadows across the stairs and interior wall. During the evening, when seen from outside, the artwork is lit from behind by the interior lighting and will be seen in silhouette.

R.C. Gorman

Born and raised on an Indian Reservation in Arizona, R.C. is considered by many to be the one of the premier Native American artists. The New York Times called him the "Picasso of American Indian art."

Natoma is an excellent example of R.C. Gorman’s bronzes. He first showed his work professionally in 1965 and three years later became the first Native American to run his own fine arts gallery. R.C. has since earned an international following for his distinctive lithographs, bronzes, oil paintings, ceramics and silk screens that have been shown around the world.

Georges Mathieu

George Mathieu attached elaborate titles taken from battles or other events in French history, reflecting his philosophy that he was a history painter working in an abstract means. During the 1950s, Georges exhibited internationally with one-person shows in major museums in Paris, Tokyo, and New York as well as at "Documenta II" in 1959. He has works in the permanent collections of major museums throughout the world.

Arrivee De Bohemod, 1957, illustrates the sweeping gestures typical of work by the French painter. Georges gained an international reputation in the 1950s as one of the leading artists along with Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, and Wols of the group known as “Art Informel” or “Tachism.” The group was known for its expressive abstract paintings seemingly produced spontaneously.

Georges was particularly known for his sweeping impulsive gestures, almost calligraphic, sometimes squeezing paint straight from the tube onto the canvas.

Fred Reichman

Fred was born in Bellingham, Washington, and moved to San Francisco in 1934, becoming a popular artist and art instructor. After receiving his BA and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and living in Europe, he taught at various Bay Area institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Davis, and the San Francisco Art Institute. His paintings are in many public collections including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

After traveling in Europe and seeing the great Asian art collections with an emphasis on Japanese art, Fred Reichman's mature style and inspiration evolved from a combination of Western European, West Coast, and Eastern influences. Fred's work was based on personal observation of the intimate with "a focus on nature with compression and economy of means."

Beniamino Bufano

Born in San Fele, Italy, in 1898, Beniamino came to the United States at the age of three and spent his childhood in New York City. "Bene," as he became known, first came to San Francisco to work on a sculpture for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In 1921, Beniamino settled permanently in the Bay Area. He taught at the San Francisco Institute of Art, the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of Arts.

By the late 1920s, Beniamino Bufano had developed his signature style of simple and smoothly rounded animals and human forms in granite and icons sheathed in stainless steel of which there are many examples in public places, particularly in the Bay Area. Bear and Cubs in front of the Kalmanovitz Library, California Bear in front of the Marilyn Reed Lucia Child Care Study Center, and Madonna in Saunders Court are examples of this signature style. He was highly regarded and his works were much sought after during the mid-twentieth century.

Lalo Cervantes

Bay Area artist, Lalo Cervantes, has a background in theater, furniture design, and the visual arts. Lalo holds degrees from California College of the Arts where he was awarded a Community Faculty Fellowship and studied furniture design and woodworking at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He has been a resident playwright and artistic director for a California Hispanic Theater Company. In addition, his plays have been performed in theaters in California and New York.

The title, Confluence, for the benches was inspired by the confluence of the environment in and around the School of Dentistry courtyard. The sweeping contours of the benches are informed and inspired by the topographical lines of the gentle hill where the courtyard exists. The bench profile is an extrusion of a Victorian Italianate architectural profile with its heavy cornice work that exists in the surrounding neighborhood.

Nathan Oliveira

Nathan was a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California, to Portuguese parents. From the late 1950s on, he has had nearly one hundred solo exhibitions in addition to having been included in group exhibitions and at important museums and galleries worldwide, among them several Whitney Museum of American Art

Annual exhibitions. He graduated from San Francisco’s George Washington High School and attended college in Oakland—first at Mills College, and later at California College of the Arts where he received his MFA in 1952. Nathan also taught painting for several decades, first at the California College of Art in Oakland and then at Stanford University. Figure Three, 1982 is an excellent example of Nathan Oliveira’s figurative work. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of the return to the figuration in American painting that originated in the California Bay Area in the 1950s.

Bernard Zakheim

Bernard Zakheim, a Polish artist, born in 1898 in Warsaw, Poland, immigrated to San Francisco via New York in 1920. Continuing the art studies he had begun in Europe, he visited Diego Rivera in Mexico in 1930. Then, he went to France in 1931 to give himself a "sabbatical" and pursue an art career without the worries of business. Upon returning to San Francisco, he painted murals for the Jewish Community Center, the Alemany Health Center, and Coit Tower. In 1935, Bernard Zakheim began work on two frescoes at UCSF.

The History of Medicine in California is the title for the murals by Bernard Zakheim in Toland Hall. Illustrating facets of medicine in San Francisco, these frescos portray with emotional swirl and color the contrast between the long tradition of superstition, wishful thinking, and irrationality associated with the development of medicine during the past, with the cool, direct scientific approach to modern medicine. Many of the individuals show on the panels were on the staff of the University of California Medical School in 1936, when the panel was designed. He executed the murals in Toland and then Cole Hall between 1936 and 1940.

Ellen Harvey

Born 1967 in Kent, England, and currently living in New York, Ellen was trained not only as a painter but also as an attorney. With her university degrees from Harvard and Yale (JD), she received her training in art at the Independent Study Program at Whitney Museum of American Art. After completing this program in 1999, Ellen spent two years working in anonymity on her New York Beautification Project (1999–2001), a simple guerrilla intervention into public space. She “tagged” various unloved bits of city real estate with small Hudson

River–style landscape vignettes, challenging accepted notions of vandalism and accepted and highly valued artistic traditions.

Ellen Harvey’s The Forest of Parnassus celebrates the longest living inhabitants of the UCSF Parnassus campus—its trees—creating an iconic record of the campus as a habitat for nature as well as its human population. Ellen painted 28 panels, each measuring 30 x 30 inches and comprising a portrait of a tree or cluster of trees on the Parnassus campus with the buildings as background. The works will be clustered and hung in prominent interior spaces throughout the campus and can be relocated when necessary. The initial sites are the walls along the corridor at the entrance to Irving Street in the ACC Building and the entrance in University Hall.

Deborah Oropallo

Born and raised in Hackensack, New Jersey, Deborah received her BFA from Alfred University in Alfred, New York and her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Deborah’s paintings and prints are included in numerous museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 23 Cents, 1997, a woodcut and etching, is an excellent example of Deborah’s ongoing interest in depicting everyday objects that are rarely seen as beautiful and not normally the subject of art.

She creates an ambiguity between the arrangement of the pennies and the exact number inviting the viewer to come to their own conclusions if there is meaning to the work or simply a visual delight.

Mark Citret Born in Buffalo, New York, Mark grew up in San Francisco and received both his BA and MA in Art from San Francisco State University. He began photographing seriously in 1968, and has worked on many photographic projects over the course of his career, and continues to do so.

The black and white photographs located in the main hallway of the Medical Sciences Building at 513 Parnassus Avenue were taken as part of a multi-year commission from the University of California San Francisco, photographing the construction of the 43-acre Mission Bay life-sciences campus as well as views of the Parnassus campus.

John Rubin

Jon Rubin is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. Rubin currently teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Columns encompasses all sides of the three pillars leading to the main entrance of UCSF. The permanently covered in photographic enamel steel panels display over 30,000 yearbook-style portraits of individuals throughout UCSF's more than 100-year history. The images were culled from yearbooks, ID data-bases, as well as contemporary photo shoots.

Douglas Cooper

Medical Sciences Building Mural is a 72-foot long and 270-degree panorama of San Francisco and has as its focus the history and mission of UCSF. The mural, located on the second floor of the Medical Science Building, was a collaborative project bringing together the artist, Douglas Cooper, Andrew Mellon Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Gregoire Picher, an anthropologist; and a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University, with UCSF faculty, staff, former patients, and long-time residents of San Francisco.

The mural presents a panoramic view from Mount Sutro and the Golden Gate to Mission Bay with multiple time periods existing side-by-side. Present-day views of the city are interspersed with buildings, events, and personalities from the past. Many of the drawings and memories collected at these interviews have been integrated into the mural in a white on black frieze that arcs in and out of the mural at its base. The mural is unique in its perspective and compilation of both universally shared images and individual experiences.

Jim Campbell

Currently living and working in San Francisco, Jim Campbell received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. Since then, Jim has pursued careers in technology and art. His video- and technology-based art has gained national recognition and respect.

Ocean Mirror with Fragments is approximately a five-foot square grid of 100 glass blocks with white LED lights mounted within each glass block controlled by an electronic circuit to create an overall moving image of ocean waves.

The ocean image displayed is from a video taken directly west of the artwork’s location of the Pacific Ocean creating a mirror back to the ocean. Three to seven glass blocks are scattered within the green area near the large video, each synchronized to a different block within the main work creating the effect of ocean waves going beyond the display grid into the garden area.

Robert Arneson Born and raised in Benicia, California, he is internationally recognized for his innovative approach to ceramics, establishing clay as a major sculptural medium, and his use of humor to comment on contemporary cultural and political issues. As a professor of art at the University of California, Davis, from 1962 until his death in 1992, his legacy of looking to traditional forms and subject matter, then radically transforming them to create new art, encouraged experimentation and exploration in his students.

The set of four bronze sculptures were cast from ceramic works created as part of one of his last series in 1992. The sculptures, titled Base for Easy Listening, Column for a Toupee, Head Stand for Naught, and Pedestal for Self-Evaluation playfully combine classical column forms with Robert Arneson's self-portrait.

Michael Dennis

Michael was born in Los Angeles in 1941. His background was as a doctor in the field of neurophysiology, and as a professor at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Gradually, Michael left the medical world, moving in the 1980s to Canada where he lives today.

Untitled (Figure) is an example of Michael Dennis’s work, which is inspired by essential elements of the earth and the ancestral heritage of humankind. With natural materials such as wood, he creates often massive figures in a simple and direct manner that communicates the essence of artistic form while leaving their natural state undisguised.

Wendy Maruyama

Currently head of the Furniture Design Program at San Diego State University, Wendy has been at the forefront of contemporary studio furniture makers since she entered the field in 1979. Rather than treating her furniture as a traditional object of utility, her work assumes a sense of character and human emotion. Wendy's commissions and experimental works combine traditional techniques and training with a commitment to sculptural shapes, painted surfaces, and expressive content.

September 11 2001 is emblematic of Wendy Maruyama’s inclination to pack meaning into all aspects of her art. To Wendy, the destruction of the World Trade Center metaphorically represented a sense of duality on many levels—the conflicts of

vulnerability vs. strength, the vitality of a city and a nation that has to become more aware of their surroundings, and the horror, which then brought a nation together. By using different materials for the benches and creating a backing with two different shapes and colors, Wendy is visually expressing the many layers of the event. The core material and support for the benches is corten steel featuring an overlay of brushed stainless steel with the seating area made from cast concrete. Wendy has created two benches—one installed in the Saunders Court and the other in the courtyard outside of the View Café at Laurel Heights. The benches are commissioned by the University of California, San Francisco.

Stephen De Staebler

Born in St. Louis in 1933, Stephen graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and after serving in the army, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, completing an MA in 1961 under the tutelage of Peter Voulkos. He continued to live and work in the Bay Area along with Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson, and is regarded as expanding the media of ceramics into the fine arts arena.

In the early 1980s, Stephen de Staebler began fabricating in bronze to realize works that could not be created in clay. The pair of figures, Seated Man with Winged Head and Seated Woman with Oval Head from 1981 are precariously balanced on their thrones in a manner that could not be accomplished in clay. While many of his fragmented figures are androgynous, the pair are clearly male and female seeming to rise from or to be carved out of their wood thrones.

Catherine Wagner

For over twenty years, the San Francisco artist, has been a keen observer of the built environment. Whether she is creating small-scale photographs or large-scale public art projects, her process involves the investigation of systems people create, the love of

order, ambition to shape the world, the value placed on knowledge, and the way people choose to express themselves.

Cell Wall II is the frieze located at the entrance to the School of Nursing. The piece is fabricated from porcelain enamel and was created by scanning electron microscope images of biomineralized sea sponges, a multi-cellular organism. This image was appropriated from an archive at the Weizman Institute of Science of biomineralized specimens. Catherine Wagner reworked and digitally cloned the image thousands of times over to create the appearance of floating cells.

Naomi Kremer

Naomi Kremer was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA from the University of Rochester in 1975, an MA in Art History from Sussex University, England, in 1977, and an MFA with High Distinction from California College of the Arts in 1993.

She has taught and lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad, including at CCA, San Francisco Art Institute, Oxford University, and Syracuse University’s program in Florence, Italy. She currently lives and works in the Bay Area and in Paris, France.

Untitled comprises the four banners hanging in the interior of the café that are based on the painting, Prelude, 2000. Each panel represents a section of the painting and can be seen as individual images or as a complete whole.

Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev

Born and raised in New York, Hank Willis Thomas graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in 1998 and received an MFA in 2004 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Born in Bulgaria and raised in the Bay Area, Ryan Alexiev received a BA from University of California, Berkeley in 1994 an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007. He began practicing graphic design in 1995 and, since that time, has held senior art director positions at several companies.

The Truth is I Am You is a poem installed as a series of twelve speech balloons that line the covered walkway linking the School of Nursing and the School of Dentistry. The 300-foot installation highlights the diversity of cultures that exemplify the UCSF community. Each balloon displays a single line from the poem translated into one of 24 languages spoken by the student body including Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, and Urdu. Placards containing a phonetic spelling in English accompany them, so that any person can learn to say each line. An inverted map of the world (with the North and South poles reversed) accompanies the poem, as well as a lenticular print of a man translating a line from the poem into sign language.