Native San Franciscan Susan Leurey grew up in an Italian household where the stirring music of Puccini, Verdi and Rossini operas undulated throughout. When her mother took her and her sister to the summer Stern Grove Festivals, Leurey also developed a love of symphonies. “It took about 10 seconds after I retired to decide to ...
Corey Weiner was shocked when her portrait of an elderly woman was selected for exhibit at The de Young Open, an online celebration of the museum’s 125th anniversary. For one, odds were against her; 11,500 individual artworks were submitted by 6,190 artists from the nine Bay Area counties. The work of only 763 artists made ...
Blandina Farley arrived in San Francisco in 1971 and fell in love – with North Beach. It was to be a long-term relationship, a kinship of spirits. Home of the Beats, Italian immigrants, musicians, artists, writers and the strip club industry, North Beach in its heyday was flamboyant, full of color and passion. Lenny Bruce, ...
The hardest decisions Eng Ng ever had to make – though they meant family separations – turned out to be the right ones for herself and her family, she said. Four years after she was born, in 1948, Burma shed British rule to become a newly democratic socialist country. Her father and a partner started ...
Casinos like the Tropicana, the Sahara and the Sands sprung up in Las Vegas in the 1950s. Big bands backed top entertainment like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Elvis. In this heady environment, Tom Zimberoff came of age. “My father played violin in the big bands at the time when big bands had string ...
Despite winning a hard-fought scholarship to study commercial art at the University of Miami, Katherine Campbell stayed less than a year. It was 1969 and the school had only integrated a few years earlier. A handful of unsettling encounters left her feeling unwelcome and somewhat traumatized, so she returned to San Francisco and enrolled in ...
