The Art, Music and Recreation Center Poster Collection

The Art, Music and Recreation Center has long encouraged local arts organizations to send us copies of their brochures, fliers, and posters which we display and make available to the public. Once the advertised events are finished, we add these materials to our vertical files. We also have built up a collection of local posters. Because we have not yet been able to catalog these items, we have set up a display case where we rotate a selection of these posters for the public to view.

This month we are featuring theatre posters. Anyone needing visual resources on the Bay Area performing and visual arts can make an appointment at our reference desk to arrange to see more of the collection.

Frank Koci: San Francisco Beat Era Painter

Image from a 1976 gallery announcement in the Artists File

Join us in celebrating the dynamic life and art of San Francisco painter, Frank Koci (1904-1983) on Saturday, August 25, 2007 from 2-4 p.m. in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room located in the Lower Level of the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Library. This event will be an opportunity for immersion into Koci’s art and thought. The program consists of a slide presentation of his art, a short documentary film including interview with the artist, and readings from his personal journal.

Koci, an active painter in San Francisco from the 1950s until his death in 1983, is known for his painterly-synthesis of Expressionist influences from artists such as Beckmann, Nolde, Kirchner, Soutine and Grosz. He was a close observer of the North Beach Beat scene and his paintings were sold by Henri Lenoir from within his now-famous bar Vesuvio. Thomas Albright, in Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980, has written that Koci’s “strongest work represented a remarkable union of naïveté and canny sophistication.”

The details of his life are as fascinating as his artwork. Koci worked as a cowboy, farmhand, silent film extra, theater actor, and merchant seaman, in addition to being and outsider artist and self-taught painter. In his obituary from the April 8, 1983 edition of the San Francisco Examiner (found in the Library’s Artists File) he was described as “a kind of peoples’ artist, a very unusual man.”

All programs at the Library are free and open to the public. For further information contact Darbyinn@sonic.net

This program is supported by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

San Francisco Opera Season Preview

Every year the Library presents a series of lectures and film screenings for the upcoming San Francisco Opera Season. This month we will present abridged performances of four operas preceded by commentary provided by members of the San Francisco Opera Guild. Each screening will be approximately 60 minutes in length and will be shown in the Koret Auditorium on the Lower Level of the Library at 12 noon.

August 2 – Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner. A 2004 Oper Zurich production conducted by Franz Welser-Most starring Peter Seiffer (who will sing this role with the SF Opera) as Tannhäuser, Solveig Kringelborn as Elizabeth and Roman Trekel as Wolfram von Eschenbach.

August 9 – La Rondine by Giacamo Puccini. This 1958 production at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples stars Rosanna Carteri, Ornella Rovero, Giuseppe Gismondo and Giuseppe Vladengo.

August 16 – Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi. Carlos Alvarez as Macbeth, Roberto Scandiuzzi as Banquo, and Mario Guleghina as Lady Macbeth. Bruno Campanella conducts the Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in this 2004 recording.

August 23 – Ariodante by Georg Frideric Handel. This 1996 co-production of the English and Welsh National Operas stars Ann Murray, Joan Rodgers, Gwynne Howell and Christopher Robinson.

Note – there is no program on August 30.

These programs are co-sponsored by the Art, Music and Recreation Center and Audiovisual Center of the San Francisco Public Library and are supported by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. All programs at the Library at free.

Wolfram's "Song to the Evening Star" from Tannhäuser
from Das Buch der Motive aus Opern und Musikdramen Richard Wagner's