people's work and i don't put my work on it and it is basically, i thought, what can i do something like interview magazine like warhol did? i have the tools and i started five years ago and it has grown into huge proportions, i think when i checked there are 150,000 unique visitors a month reading it. so it has gotten quite an audience, but really it is something that i would love, it is just pure passion and it is also a self-education of mine on display and my own interest. and i think i will wrap it up. thanks. [ applause ] >> so for those of you who came in late, if you could hold your questions, we are not going to do a formal q, and a, but i will ask each of the panelists to stick around and if you want to chat with them one on one,

they will be veil for a little while to do that. our next panelist is melissa. they earned her ba in 2005 and her ma in 2007. she worked in new york at christie's auction house and the time warner center, the museum experience includes the research positions in new york and the victor annual beter museum in london. she has been a member of the curtorial team of san francisco since 2008. and currently holds the position of assistant curator for european art. it has supported works from the 15th century, such as the mourners, cultures from the court of bergandy to the 19th century, including van gogh, and beyond master pieces.

and she served as the assistant curator for the blockbuster, girl with the pearl earrings, including impressionists on the water and matice from sf mona to be honored later this year. we invited melissa to speak because he told me that his cloud series was inspired by growing up looking at dramatic skies in dutch landscape painting. welcome. >> thank you to everyone who came out this evening to the main branch of the public library, i felt like it was encased in a cloud with all of the fog and the rain and everything and so i have literally taken on this assignment with a great personal interest and i am seeing clouds everywhere. and when they first called one

morning, and introduced herself and told me a little bit about this panel and this project i thought great, i know about clouds i see them every day and i work at the legend of honor, exposed to the sea with the massive mountains and clouds and i thought a piece of cake and i will just talk about clouds. it became a much deeper project but i started this talk thinking about my own biographical relationship with clouds and i was trolling through the photos on the computer and i realized that a lot of the moments that i felt important to capture, have something to do with the drama of the sky and the clouds and so here i did my masters degree in london and this is where i did a lot of research. and you get these amazing low lying clouds and of course this

all resonates with the paintings that i look at and the work that i curate and this is the region of honor looking out across the golden gate bridge where we get some of the most dramatic and beautiful skies. and i recently had the opportunity to go to the national gallery of art in washington, d.c. and i was walking through the gallery and i got totally photo happy taking these pictures of clouds. and i realized that i needed to self-curate and refine it because when i was flying home to san francisco i was taking pictures of the clouds outside of the window of the plane and i thought that i just need to synthesize this and i did a little bit of looking around of what other art historians have said about clouds and land scapes there is a wonderful series called the met connections and the met museum of art has created this of

talking about themes or other ideas that have to do with their permanent collection and of course, what did determine the european paintings department and assisting in nothing other than clouds. so i am in pretty big company here trying to talk about 550 years of clouds and art. but i will do my best in 15 minutes. i also found out in talking about clouds and conversation with other curators that there was an exhibition of the center for british art that existed the work of a man named mark lenard who was a painting at the getty museum and now at dal ace and he has worked on constable clouds and was so inspired by the work that he has done that he actually responded to the clouds in his own works. so clouds are very timely topic on many forums. and i just wanted to show you

an exam el, the many, many types of studies of clouds trying to understand their three dimensionality and not giving you anything else on the composition other than the shapes of the clouds. even though the picture was made in 1822 it is very contemporary without the space. >> and back to the point of self-curating, and i started to think as an art historic when i became aware of clouds, when i start to think about them? we did an exhibition in 2011 at the duyong new see um which some of you may have seen was drawn from the collection in vienna and i brought an essay including saint sabastian and there is a detail in the clouds where you have a rider in the clouds. and art historians have not been able to agree on exactly what this figure is it a king,

is it someone from mythology, but in any case, he has taken that childhood pass time of trying to see the shapes in the clouds and has created the shapes in the clouds of this painting. >> and some of you may have also seen our current exhibition with the girl with the pearl ear ring, there are not any clouds in this composition and i could not fabricate them and so i wanted to speak about this painting that is also in the collection of the maritz house it actually has three competitions and this was probably the most famous in the works in the collection up until the publication of the novel girl with the pearl ear ring and i will be doing a conversation with her next thursday, the 28th and that will be live google plus streamed. all sorts of fun technology. but before the publication of

her book, and the subsequent film, this was probably one of the most famous compositions by verm ere, certainly the most famous, and has three paintings and i love that the way that the clouds hang so low and it is actually much darker on my screen, but this kind of balance between the rain clouds and the white pufffy clouds and the way that they interacts with the buildings in the city. this competes with two other paintings in the exhibition and i will not say which ones they are and it competes for my favorite painting in the exhibition it is view of harlem with bleaching grounds in the foregrounds and one of the most important innovations for the 17th century, dutch landscape painters was the way that they approached the sky. for any of you who have traveled to the netherlands you know that there is a low horizon line and i have been told that the dutch people and

i can be corrected. that they call their clouds the dutch mountains because the landscape is so low that really you get these massive clouds in the sky and that is the kind of important topography to talk about. this is another example by the same artist and it is a winter scene, and as i move through these images of different paintings from various national schools. i don't want to talk too much over them but to let you feel how the atmosphere and the mood is changed by the different kinds of clouds that the artists have chosen to depict. and i wanted to also var clearly indicate it was interesting when putting together this powerpoint, i don't typically like to put any words on the images on the slides because i like the images in that way to speak for themselves, i feel like your eye competes between the words and images but i felt that it was important to differentiate

between what is in our current exhibition and our permanent collection. so this is in the temporary exhibition as well. and then i wanted to let the paintings and the temporary exhibition and our permanent collection speak to each other and i started going through the permanent collection thinking about all of the ways that the clouds are represented in paintings starting with this early 16th century paintings by an artist nameds chima and i liked the way that the cloud offers like an extension of his halo and then you have this dramatic painting where the clouds are parting and it is like he is parting the red sea in the sky in this dramatic and emotional way that the clouds are not just offering but a part of the action and a part of the drama. and then you have got somebody

like el greco who uses the clouds in this really violent and really nervous and really tense way. the clouds are vibrating with energy and they surround the figure of st. john the baptist in this very expressive way. so different than the other kinds of clouds that we were just looking at. and this is a painting by a norwegian artist named doll and i liked it because we have a nighttime scene and so you think about seeing the clouds in the daytime or the rain clouds or competitions of clouds that are over beautiful land scapes but what do the clouds do in this picture, when we are looking at the moon through the view of the clouds? and this is a painting that is particularly close to my heart. it is mid victor an artist named john martin and this painting is his depiction of the aftermath of the great

biblical floods and so the clouds and waters are parting and you can't see it in this slide reproduction but in the actual painting very far in the horizon line you have noah and the arc. but the way that the clouds almost start to take on a figural representation, it is like there is a movement of hope and promise coming in the sky and of course the skies have this long history of being associated with the heavens and mythology. and you can't talk about clouds without talking about the impressionists. also on my mind since we are planning for the impressionist on the water exhibition which opens at the legend of honor june first. and this is a painting by the very-well monet and i was thinking back to constible. clouds where you don't get a figure you have a horizon and you get more of a sense of space and it is not just the

clouds. but the whole canvas is taken up by water and sky and it is very architectural wave that he has construct td the brush work of the waiveds tossing in front of us. and then, imented to talk a little bit about the surrealist and i am about to install these paintings into what is traditionally our impressionist gallery. but they are some of the most popular paintings in our collection and when we don't have them i get people asking what have you done with them? and i think that doli's approach to many things is idiocyncratic and these clouds have a view, and they almost seemed figure all to me but they have this really expensive intention for lack of a better way to describe them. i don't know that he would have

wanted me describing them. >> i really love this image, and i think as we have heard from the other panelists, clouds and space and landscape have a personal meaning and what we project on them is very subjective and i think that in my own attempt to synthesize art history in 15 minutes and looking at clouds and skies, i came to realize that there is a personal vocabary that we project on to these images. and so i felt honored to have participated on this panel and so i feel like it is really changed the way that i look at so many kinds of paintings and i thought about creating a

exhibition on clouds and trying to take this project even further and i think that there is really a lot to be said for something that we take for granted perhaps on a daily basis, but much deeper meaning to be read. thank you to meg and the panelists and thank you to the audience. [ applause ] >> 550 years in 15 minutes. nicely done. i want to thank our panelists so much. let's give them a hand. thank you. >> i want to leave you with a few thoughts. conversation six, i don't know if many of you know this, but is our final exhibition in our current space in main gallery in the veteran's building, that whole building is being retrofit for two years. when we reopen in 2015, we will have 4400 square feet.

and we have 900 square feet right now. so it is going to be a remarkable new space. and we will be doing a lot of sort of institutional soul searching as to how we can serve the public and create an exhibition program in the large new facility that fills in gaps here in our cultural stratta and how we can serve a wide variety of artists and communities, and represent san francisco in a way that we do currently which is by showing regional artists alongside of artists from other places, developing a dialogue between the local, the national and the international. so we will carry that forward in the new facilities. in the meantime we will continue to program at city hall and at the window installation sites. so we are not going dark. we are just, we are putting on hold one of our three different

programs. and i want to leave you with one final thought. for the last week bear not has been here and i have been witnessing him make a cloud in the green room of the veteran's building which is on the second floor of that building and overlooks for a balcony that overlooks city hall for those of you who have been there for private functions. >> it is an extraordinary room, it is the american pizza hut version of the hall of mirrors one might say. it is a gorgeous room. and we were reviewing the final edit of this new piece that will enter into the nimbus series and it will be on view at the gallery in a couple of weeks and again, watch your e-mail and we will let you know

when it arrives and you can come and look at it. there will be two images chosen from this large multiday, one is a large print that will be on view in the gallery and is an addition of six. and then, we have been sort of talking about addition size and then there will be a version that is about this big. that is an addition of 30 and available for purchase at a affordable price. so let us know if you are interested in that and watch the e-mail and the funds will go to both support the artist and support the programs at the arts commission as we move forward. so sign up for our eblast and keep in touch and thank you so much for coming tonight. we will hang out for just a little bit and answer questions, and you can come by and see the exhibition wednesday through saturday, 12 to five. thank you so much.

>> it has been amazing. the people have been so gracious and so supportive of what we're doing. the energy here is fantastic with so many couples getting married. it's just been an absolutely fantastic experience, so wonderful. >> by the power vested in me, i declare you spouses for life. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> to actually be able to get married and be a part of this time in history and time in our

history is amazing. >> this is a momentous occasion for us to be able to actually have this opportunity to have equal rights. >> we have been together for 14 years. everyone is so welcoming. it's been all set up and people have guided us from step to step. it's been easy. there was live music. people are so friendly and excited. so excited for us. >> it's really great. >> yeah. >> and salvador is party a here to known as party a. >> on the out it looks pretty simple. you come in, you made your appointment. you pay. you go here for your license. you got there to get married. you go there if you want to purchase a certified copy. behind the scenes, there was just this monumental just mountain of work, the details into everything that we had to do and we quickly realized that

we were not ready to issue the numbers of licenses that people are anticipating that we would need to issue. we definitely did not want people waiting in long lines. this is somebody's wedding. you want to be able to plan and invite your family and friends. know what time you are able to get your marriage license, know what time you're going to have your ceremony. >> thanks for volunteering. >> we got city volunteers, we got members of the public volunteering. we had our regular volunteers volunteering. we had such an overwhelming response from city employees, from the members of the general public that we had way more volunteers than we could ever have hoped for. we had to come up with a training program. i mean, there are different functions of this whole

operation. you were either, you know a check-in person. you were a greeter. you were part of the license issuing unit. you were deputy marriage commissioner, or you were on the recording side. each one of those functions required a different set of skills, a different oath of office if they needed to be sworn in as a deputy county clerk to issue marriage licenses or as a deputy county recorder if they were going to register the marriage licenses or the deputy marriage commissioner if they were going to be performing ceremonies. >> donna, place the ring on her ring finger. >> the marriage commissioner training was only about a half hour. it was very simple. very well run, very smooth and then we were all sworn in. >> they said we would get our scheduled sunday night and so 7:00, 8:00, 10:00, you know, i got it at 11:00. this person who was orchestrating all of the shifts and the volunteers and who does

what, you know, said from her office sunday night at 11:00. they are just really helping each other. it's a wonderful atmosphere in that way. >> have you filled out an application? >> not yet. you want to do that. >> take this right over there. >> all right. >> take it tout counter when you're done. >> very good. >> congratulations, you guys. >> for those volunteers, what a gift for them as well as us that they would take up their time and contribute that time, but also that they would in return receive so much more back because they're part of the narrative of someone else's love and expression of love in life. >> this isn't anything that we had budgeted for, so it was basically we asked our i.t. director to do the best you can, you know, belling, borrow, steal if you have to and get us what you need to do this. and he knew what the mission was. he knew what our goal was. and, you know, with our i.t.

grids and our software vender, they really came together and pulled it together for us. it made it possible for us to be able to serve as many couples as we have been. >> so once you're ready, you and your husband to be or wife need to be need to check in here and check in again, ok. are you also going to get married today? >> yeah. >> let's process you one by one. do your license in, exit and re-enter again check in at that desk. >> our wedding is at 3:00. >> as long as we get you in today. >> we're getting married at 2:30. >> don't worry about the time line. we're greeting people at the doorway and either directing them to the services they need on this side which is licensing or the services on this side which is actually getting the ceremony performed. >> this is an opportunity to choose to be a part of history. many times history happens to us, but in this case, you can choose to be a part of it.

this is a very historic day and so i'm very, very proud to be here. >> i have been volunteering. last monday i performed 12 different marriage smones. the least amount of time that any of the couples that i married have been together is two years. most of the couples have been together eight, nine, 10, i'd say 70% have been together at least that long if not longer. >> there is a lot of misconception about who gay and lesbian people are. it's important that people see that we love our husbands and wives to be and love our children and have the right to have families just like everyone else. >> it's important that we have experienced our own families, our own friends, and the excitement of the volunteers when we get here has made us

feel wonderful and accepted and celebrated. >> there is a lot of city agencies, city departments, divisions that offer up their employees to help us out since overwhelming response, it's unbelievable at how city government works. this is the time that san francisco city employees have really outshined san francisco's clerk's office didn't need to hear from the mayor to say what's your plan. they offered a plan and said here is our strategy. here is what we can do. we can add all of these computers here and there. we can connect our databases, we can expand our capacity by x. we can open up early and stay late and stay open on the weekends. it's unbelievable. we can coordinate all of the training for our volunteers and them in as deputy marriage commissioners and make sure it's signed and certified. that's an example and a model for others. this is -- what happens is when

people prove that things can be done, it just raises the bar for what is possible for everyone else. >> it kind of went cooled plan and this is what we planned for. in some respects, people have kind of commented to me, oh, my god, you were a part of history and how many couples did we mary? how many families did we start? how many dreams did we make come true? the whole part of being part of history is something that we are here and we are charged with this responsibility to carry out. >> the annual celebration of hardly strictly bluegrass is always a hit now completing itself 12 year of music in the

incredible golden gate park. >> this is just the best park to come to. it's safe. it's wonderful and such a fun time of the year. there is every kind of music you can imagine and can wander around and go from one stage to another and just have fun. >> 81 bands and six stages and no admission. this is hardly strictly bluegrass. >> i love music and peace. >> i think it represents what is great about the bay area. >> everyone is here for the music and the experience. this is why i live here. >> the culture out here is amazing. it's san francisco. >> this is a legacy of the old warren hel ment and receive necessary funding for ten years after his death.

>> there is a legacy that started and it's cool and he's done something wonderful for the city and we're all grateful. hopefully we will keep this thing going on for years and years to come.

>> good morning, everyone. i'm tailor stafford, president and ceo of pier 39 and on behalf of our grateful water front family, it is my privilege to extend a sincere thank you to the port of san francisco for all that you have done, and continue to do to build the best water front in north america. pause plause [ applause ] >> from at&t, home from the world champion san francisco giants to the building, to the new exporatorium, and new cruise ship terminal to pier 39 and all of the restaurant and businesss in between, we are all proud to wish you, the port of san francisco a