Musing in Oakland by the Bay

J.B. Blunk

I’ve gotten into the habit of chiding San Francisco snobs by telling them that if they miss a visit to the Oakland Museum on a trip through the Bay Area, they’ve missed the main show. Occasionally this enthusiasm precipitates itself into the allegation that “architecturally, the Oakland Museum is the greatest in the world.” Thinking back on such hyperbole, I’m often abashed by my abuse of the superlative, reluctant as I am to add any scintilla to our hype-and-hustle culture.
 
Except that every time I stop by (it’s minutes from the Lake Merritt stop on BART / Fremont), I realize that I haven’t been guilty of exaggeration. I used to fake-mock this Kevin Roche masterpiece during the Symbionese Liberation Army bad daze as the Huey P. Newton Hanging Babylonian Gardens, so massively repulsive of vandalism were its concrete walls.
 
No matter, as fortress-like as its massed bunkers look from the outside, the internal spaces are three levels of exhibition spaces softened by gardens and sculptures that never fail to turn me on, from the fondleable Bennie Bufano bear and cub at the main entrance (heh, the bear is California’s state beast, so they’re very bullish about putting it everywhere) to some constructivist abstractions.
 
Not that OM is paradise. Julien Euwell, the Smithsonian-trained first black director, has just succumbed to burnout after five years of penury and pressure. Nonetheless, the institution continues to thrive on its austerity budgets. Its vitality was most recently attested to by the transformation of its good butcher-paper bimonthly into a brilliant slick-paper, four-color job.
 
I’ve decided to drop my California magazine sub next year in favor of the OM mag. The assignment of the museum is to explain the entire culture of California, past and present, and does it cover the bases: from open air needlepoint extravaganzas to roundups by black cowboys.
 
To get into this anthropological spirit of the place, enter the shop area. Just in front of it you will find Californians of all ages lolling on what, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a humongous redwood burl sculptural settee. It’s by the luminous Inverness sculptor J.B. Blunk , and it is an emblem of the museum’s program—first floor the Nature of the state, the second floor its History, and the top, its Art.
 
The redwood burl began as a work of nature, felled by railroad development on the North California coast, transformed by the fine eye of Blunk into a permanent reminder of the museum’s mission.
 
Look at how it’s exercising its charge this holiday season with three shows running through January 3. Under Nature, they are saluting the 6,000 varieties of reptiles with funky banners separating the slimy gangs into their varied categories—turtles, (240), crocodiles (25), lizards (2,000) and snakes (2,700).
 
The miracles of their adaptations, their protective colorations of blending or warning (including the sly cases of mimicry, which simulated danger) are worthy of a Whitman.
 
Esoteric trivia, like as many as 10,000 Canadian garter snakes warming each other in hibernation, vie with gloomy data like ship captains savaging one third of a million Galapagos tortoises as cheap shipboard provender. I’m not a bio freak, but I always regret my ignorance after such a ramble.
 
History, this time, is exemplified in Harry Fonseca’s very sophisticated fiddling with the legends of Coyote, the designated trickster of the Maidu of Northern California. “I make him do all kinds of things I wouldn’t have him do if my face were up there,” the part Portuguese, part Nisenan Maidu artist explains.
 
The superficial would assign this to the third floor, but OM curators properly perceive that the artist is making his own history accessible to himself and to the country by his artful toying with his Amerind past.
 
Analogously, the Art exhibit might be sited by the unimaginative as “history.” All of us have seen the photograph of the golden spike completing the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, May 1869. Well, a satisfied patron gave the Museum the entire collection of that photographer, who raised documentary to such a finely focused art.
 
And here is that photo in the fullest context—a painting of the same event, a golden spike, a section of track, and scads of photos illuminating all aspects of life in late 19th-Century California. Alfred Leslie would be pleased, and so will you.
 
It may seem like a minor point, but the cafeteria at the museum has the greatest bargain in frozen fruit bars anywhere—35 cents a suck. Since it was a fine Indian summer day, I gorged myself to the point of embarrassment (asking for my fourth!) as I soaked up the ambient sun in an outdoor garden, assessing the newly rejuvenated Art Deco Alameda County Court House next door, a stunning rehab job.
 
Then, as I always do, I walked four blocks west on Oak Street to the public library, whose Oakland History Room is run by a guy who makes photo-caption display cases into low-tech marvels. The theme this stop was Oakland’s waterfront, from Jack London’s seafaring days to its pre-eminence as a containerized port.
 
And I caught up, finally, with Milton Pflueger’s memoir of his brother Timothy’s architectural achievements, a book that appeared just after I left the Bay. Pflueger is one of the unrecognized geniuses of American architecture—the Transbay Terminal is his, Pacific Telesis (just renewed beautifully), 455 Sutter (a medical / dental block that pioneered having its own garage), Union Square (the first underground parking garage in America), and so on and so on.
 
Never finished high school. Autodidact in the Edison / Ford / Burbank mode. And his brother’s book is a sweetly reminiscent tribute to a revered elder sibling who died prematurely at age 51 in 1946.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December 16, 1987