SF 2023

– Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas

Our trip started just north of San Francisco in Forest Knolls California with visits to the glass studio of Marty Meade (interview with Marty will be posted soon), and the ceramics studio of Bud Meade. We hiked around several of the trails close by to check out some big redwood trees and attended the Annual Spring Art Exhibition at the San Geronimo Community Center. The high-powered opening featured the work of 100 visual artists and a 15 musician-bluegrass-jam session. We also got over to Richmond for a session of Kevin Meade’s band ‘Highway One’.

In San Francisco, with Marty and Bud, we visited the Kehinde Wiley exhibition at the de Young Museum, and, at the corner of Haight-Ashbury we visited the pop-up poster exhibition of the artist Zoltron. On another day, we dug around in the City Lights Bookstore and Chinatown and saw the Emile Norman’s ‘endomosaic’ at the Masonic Temple in Nob Hill. We walked and rode the cable cars to experience some of the City’s famous hills and recorded sound and visuals as we travelled.

We then rented a car from May 7-15 and headed east to experience two earthwork sculptures: the Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Corinne, Utah, and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative on the Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada. In between visits to the Spiral Jetty and the Double Negative, we hiked in the back country of Utah to find the Escalante Natural Bridge.

Ours was a whirlwind tour looping back north to see Marty and Bud before flying back from San Francisco. We hope to use some of the recordings from this packed 2 weeks toward our new collaboration: The Alice Time Project.