My name is Priscilla and I am here to tell the story of my aunt, Marion Osborn Cunningham.
She was a vital member of the San Francisco art community during the 30s and the 40s.
She was born in Indiana in 1908 but her family had moved to Idaho for health reasons.
This is an early photo we have of her at 18 months and as you can see her career is already set.
Six months after this photo was taken the family was driven from their home by this huge forest fire called the Big Burn.
This fire burned 3 million acres over a period of two days.
It moved at a mile a minute and fell the trees like matchsticks and 3 million acres is about the size of Connecticut.
The smoke from the fire was seen all the way to Watertown, New York.
My grandparents were destitutes. They had lost $30,000 worth of timber.
My grandmother wrote, Marion weighed 30 pounds and I had to carry her out 12 miles over brush and rock where there was no trail.
After the fire my grandfather who was an attorney worked in the sawmill, got some cash together and moved with his family to California.
Mainly because he had a sister living in California.
He decided after looking up and down the state that the best place to open a law practice would be Bakersfield. Hot, dusty and tough.
They arrived at the Southern Pacific Railway Station in early 1911.
They had all their possessions in a few suitcases but they had to duck back into the station because there was a shootout going on on the main street.
As a child Marion was an habitual do-er and she took sketching and painting in high school in Bakersfield and exhibited at the county fair.
After high school she went on to study at Santa Barbara College and then at Stanford where she met her husband Ben Penningham.
This is their wedding photo. They were bohemian. There was no white dress or anything like that.
He was a Coytower muralist and he painted this imaginary fresco which you can see at Coytower on the second floor and you can only go to the second floor on Wednesdays at 11.
He later went on to New York and taught at Cooper Union and the Art Students League.
He experimented with color and optics. He was called by some the father of art but everyone said he really hated that term.
His work can be found in the collections of MoMA in New York, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian and others.
Here he is depicted in the murals at the B-Shelly done by Lucia LeBeau.
Ben is here with the green hat and suit. Over the murals is written, Fair City of My Love and My Desire.
In 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, American needs a new deal. Over 5,000 artists and writers were employed by the WPA all across the country and it had an electric effect on what was known as the San Francisco Art Colony.
The Coytower murals were the first big public art project of the new deal.
And here is Edith Hamlin, one of the artists in front of her fresco. She said, we all felt stimulated. We felt lucky too.
John Kingman said, an angel descended upon me. He was assigned to the watercolor division.
Sergeant Johnson, the African American sculpture who was very good friend of my father said, the WPA was the best thing that ever happened to me.
My family thought that all artists were drunkers and everything else.
Benny D'Fonno said, the WPA has free music, American art. Ben Cunningham was a junior administrator on the Coytower murals.
And this is what my aunt wrote to her mother about what was going on behind the scenes. All the artists are thrilled and afraid of being left out or that someone will work who is not entitled, et cetera, et cetera.
Politics is rife and backbiting is in evidence.
Marian and Ben were part of the Bohemian community in San Francisco. It had been described by Kenneth Rexroth as a tiny enclave in Italian North Beach, a speakeasy, a few shacks around the goats and dirt roads of Telegraph Hill, and the Montgomery block.
This magnificent building was built in 1853 and when it was built, it was the largest commercial building west of Mississippi. It always housed artists and writers.
In the earlier days, it housed people like Mark Twain, Brett Hart, Ambrose Beers, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London.
In the thirties, it was known as the Monkey Block, affectionately, and it housed artists like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Benny Gufano, Ralph Staple, Mayna Dixon, and Doral Thea Lane.
Diego Rivera had been invited to San Francisco in 1929 to paint a mural at the Stock Exchange. He was denied a visa because he was a Mexican communist. Sound familiar?
The visa finally came through with the help of an art patron named Albert Bender and in 1930, Diego and Frida settled in to the Montgomery block.
Frida was known as the Queen of Montgomery Street.
During this time, Marion and Ben lived on Telegraph Hill. She used a glassed-in room on top of her building as a studio.
She loved Chinatown, she loved Chinese food, she was adept with chopsticks, and she brought home lots of crazy items all the time from the herbalists just because she liked their shapes.
In an interview with the Indianapolis Star, she said of San Francisco, it is a paintable city. I love these hills, the color, the way of living. That is what I try to put into my work.
She worked modeling dresses for $4 a day and at the aggressive graph company in the evenings for another $4.
She said what she did at the address graph company was to diddle the damn scrap iron. She said that the first night she worked there, somebody sneaked in two bottles of bourbon and everyone got typed.
She saved her money and wrote to her mother with the enormous amount of money I have saved.
I am going to art school on my own hook. I will draw and draw. I think I will make a go of it.
Pastels were her favorite medium during the 30s and during these times she had 12 one-woman shows.
In 1941, she worked on the first San Francisco open art show that took place on Holey Plaza, which is close to Jackson Square.
Here is a photo of her at the open art show with Ralph Stackpole and Luke Gibney. Ralph Stackpole was a leading artist of the day.
He chiseled 15 tons of Yosemite granite to make this statue industry, which you can see today at Sandsam and Pine. He also did the 80-foot high Pacifica for the World Fair at Treasure Island later in 1939.
Let's talk about that in a little bit. Marion was also friends with Luke Gibney. I almost forgot Luke Gibney.
Luke Gibney was also in the photo. He was the bartender at Vesuvios and he was a portrait painter.
The word was that Henri Lenoir, the owner of Vesuvios, said that he was always trying to get Luke to paint because people were always buying the portraits off of the wall.
So that's Luke Gibney. Marion was also friends with Henry Miller, William Siroyan, Anzel Adams, and Kenneth Rex Ross. San Francisco had a very busy and fun nightlife in those days.
And here's all the stuff going on, including my mother playing the harp at the Clint Hotel.
There were lots of parties. And now I am going to read from a letter that Marion wrote to my mother about these parties.
I have a very brightly colored kimono. I made it into a King Tut dress and it is just the same.
I wore a dog collar around my neck, suspended with plastic spoons and forms, painted gold. It made a very gaudy necklace.
I wore a gilded flower pot, balanced on my head in the Egyptian manner. I wore my hair down. I wore gold paper bracelets on my ankles.
I danced barefoot all night with no ill effects. Come up soon and we'll go dancing.
In 1939, sponsored by the WPA, San Francisco hosted a World Fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.
It was a celebration of two new bridges and of the unity of the Pacific Rim culture, which shortly after didn't really hold.
It even worked in the Art in Action program at the Fair, along with Diego Rivera, Mexican artist Miguel Coveruvia, and many, many others.
It was described as a three-ring circus of art, with lots of ateliers, sculptors, painters, etchers, mythographers. It was a place where people could come and actually see art being created right in front of them.
Inspired by the Fair, and especially by Miguel Coveruvia, who painted these two paintings, my Marian set out from Mexico in 1939.
She just had to see the women of Tuana Peck in their matriarchal society.
She took art classes at San Miguel de Allende for a few months, and then traveled extensively around the country by second-class bus and on foot.
My mother joined her in Mexico City, and they went on to Oaxaca, hoping to go to Tuana Peck from Oaxaca.
But, once in Oaxaca, they realized there was no bus service, that the train would take a lot of doubling back, and so they set out over the mountains on foot.
A five-day journey by donkey at night.
They were the first Caucasian women to be seen in the area.
They were accompanied by Charles Fry, an itinerant explorer, who they met at the fair where he was selling popcorn to finance his next travel pictures.
Fry later went on to discover the Mayan ruins of Bonaparte in Chiapas.
One night, they stayed in a small town called San Miguel de Viejo.
My mother wrote that they shared the room with one cow carcass and three deer carcasses.
She said that the fleas had a gluttonous... the fleas had a gluttonous bake with that night.
After her return from Mexico, Maryam became interested in silk screen prints.
The silk screen unit of the WPA had opened in 1938, and a lot of the WPA artists, especially in the poster division, were experimenting with silk screens.
She also wanted to make art that people could afford, and in any case, couldn't afford to paint in oils herself.
From... oh, there's been coming down!
That's his white power!
Beginning in 1942, along with her able assistant, Minnie Wong, they produced 20,000 prints and 75,000 reading cards.
She moved her studio into a former speakeasy at 338 Clay Street.
It had black walls, flecked with gold, but it had a great dance floor where she could lay out all of her prints and let them dry.
These were tumultuous times with the advent of World War II.
In 1942, FDR signed the War Relocation Act, which excluded all persons of Japanese ancestry from within 100 miles of the Pacific coast.
The forced expulsion of over 110,000 people took place in less than six months.
Father and father, shown here with Marion in the middle, and Marion, crowned their apartments with the belongings of their Japanese friends.
And my father took a pickup truck full of oranges from Chinatown to the Salinas detention camp every Sunday.
Much later, in 1947, the San Francisco government, in its wisdom, decided to do away with cable cars.
Just get rid of them!
Marion worked on the first Save the Cable Car campaign, and her images were used to gain support for the campaign.
Friedel Klusman, it was a committee mostly of women, and Friedel Klusman, the head of the campaign, said,
Nothing scares politicians more than a band of women marching on City Hall.
The cable cars won a resounding victory, 170,000 to 50,000.
Marion's last work were a series of what she called Polynesian prints.
They were commissioned by the Matson Line for the state rooms of their ships.
Back in those days, the Matson Line ran what we would call today cruise ships between Los Angeles and San Francisco and Hawaii.
Covarrubias, her great hero, did the menus for the same ships.
In late 1947, Marion began to have trouble with her eyes.
Despite the fact that she had almost no peripheral vision, she set out for North Africa for what was to be a sketching trip of North Africa.
She got as far as New York, where she became gravely ill and was scheduled for brain surgery.
She wrote to her parents, I'm having a little surgery for my eyes, don't worry.
She did not survive the operation.
Her death was commemorated in San Francisco by the Museum of Art, Grace McCorley Mann and others.
And her doctor, a renowned surgeon, wrote my grandparents a very kind letter about her,
saying that he would never forget her as she walked into the hospital with grace and aplomb, a veil covering the upper half of her face.
It was rumored that he had fallen in love with her. Thank you.
Thank you.
