Living sculpture and gym-sized beehive: Bay Area creatives rethink museum

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The building at 500 Kapp Street in Mission is not just an old house. It is a living sculpture with lamps in the form of earrings, an archive in the grotto, and plaques with scratches on the floor and walls.

Conceptual artist David Ireland lived and worked in the 1886 Italianate house for 34 years after purchasing it from accordion maker Paul Grubb. Since Ireland’s death, preserving the home as a work of art has become a personal mission for SFMOMA trustee Carly Wilmans.

“It looks like a jewelry box,” says Lian Ladia, exhibition and program curator for the 500 Capp Street Foundation.

According to Ladia, each tour of the house is unique and tells a different story, so no two experiences in this space are the same.

The house provides an alternative to the traditional museum experience, sensory and experiential, and shared with the Headlands Arts Center across the Golden Gate Bridge referenced by 500 Capp within its walls.

Take the honey jars stacked together on the mantle for 500 Capp. What looks like someone’s forgotten products are actually a reference to semaphore, the work of artist (and beekeeper) Mark Thompson, which can be seen at the Headlands Art Center.

semaphore transforms the gym at the Headlands Arts Center in Sausalito into an immersive beekeeping experience. The speakers, strategically placed throughout the amber room, emit a constant hum that sounds different depending on where you stand.

Thompson recalled exploring the abandoned gym with a flashlight on New Year’s Day 1984, around the time of the founding of the art center, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

“There were dusty footprints, dead birds and mummified mice,” Thompson said. “The only life was from the hives outside.”

Thompson’s current concept art installation in the gym is a tribute to that first experience, giving the viewer a sense of total immersion. Throughout the Headlands Center space, there is an opportunity to see how art is created in real time – 28 artist workshops work on its territory.

“It’s like a long excursion,” Thompson said of the ability for interdisciplinary artists to exchange inspiration during their time at the center. The artist likened the Bay Area to a breeding ground for artists, a generative space for ideas and experiments.

Across the street, in a former military base turned artist haven, there is another experiential piece of art to dine in.

Artist Anne Hamilton transformed the former military compound’s dining room into an artists’ dining room with a carefully curated collection of mismatched chairs and hand-decorated wallpaper. To make the circular references between the two institutions complete, Hamilton’s enlarged scans of objects from the Irish Archives hang in the Sausalito Art Centre.

“We are reimagining art and what art is,” said Ladia.

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