Excelsior Branch Library Arts and Culture Salon on Wednesday, April 18, 7-8:30pm

Join us for a slide show and lecture on Georgia O'Keeffe by art historian Marlene Aron.

From her large, sensuous flowers and her expansive, beautiful landscapes, to her soaring skyscrapers and starry nights, Georgia O'Keeffe created a uniquely personal art with a vision that was clearly her own. She captured the very essence of everything she drew and painted. During this lecture, view over 100 slides of the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as photographs by her husband, noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

City of Secrets: An Author Event with Kelli Stanley - Wednesday, February 15, 7-8:30pm

Join us for this month's Excelsior Branch Library Arts and Culture Salon with local mystery author Kelli Stanley. She will talk about her latest novel, City of Secrets, the second mystery in the Miranda Corbie series set in 1940s San Francisco (after City of Dragons). Tough-talking PI Miranda Corbie searches for the killer of two young women, both brutally murdered with an anti-Semitic slur written in blood on their bodies.

A book sale and signing will follow this event.

The Life and Art of Vincent van Gogh, Wednesday, December 7, 7pm

Join us for a lecture on the life and art of Vincent van Gogh for this month's Excelsior Branch Library Arts and Culture Salon!

Discover the joy, beauty, sorrow and genius of this amazing artist. View over 100 slides of van Gogh's art - paintings, drawings, lithographs, etchings - including rarely-seen childhood drawings, those from his early Dutch years, and photographs of him and his family. Hear stories about his life, his childhood, places he lived and jobs he held before he became an artist.

Marlene Aron is an artist, educator and published poet. She was educated in The Netherlands at the Vrije Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, and in the United States, receiving her Master of Fine Arts Degree from California College of the Arts.

Stories from the Road - Bonda Lewis presents Sara Bard Field on Wednesday, November 16, 7-9pm

The Excelsior Arts & Culture Salon presents Bonda Lewis performing her one-woman show as Sara Bard Field.

Addressing a suffrage meeting, Sara Bard Field tells stories of her eighty-eight day cross-country automobile trip in 1915, carrying a petition to Congress for the immediate adoption of the Susan B Anthony amendment giving the right to vote to all women of the United States. Sara and two other feminists departed from the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco with 500,000 signatures of California women, who had already won the vote in 1911, and enfranchised women from 11  other western states. In the months prior to this journey, the National Women’s Party had maintained a booth in the Education building to collect the signatures. To help reach the goal of universal suffrage, the three women endured the rough drive to Washington, D.C., on the brand-new Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road in the U.S., a road that was mostly unpaved, largely unmarked, and always without the amenities of rest stops or motels.

Please join actor Bonda Lewis for the live performance and a question-and-answer session to follow.

Excelsior Arts and Culture Salon, Wednesday, October 26, 6:30-8:30pm

Join us on Wednesday, October 26, for La Bamba: Latinos in Vintage Rock, Pop, and Soul.

Local rock historian Richie Unterberger will present this curated video-program of Latino performers from the 1950s through the 1980s focusing particularly on Latino music from New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, and San Francisco. Included will be clips by artists such as Santana, Malo, Ritchie Valens, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Linda Ronstadt, Jose Feliciano, and Los Lobos, among others.

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music currently on view in the Skylight Gallery of the Main Library. American Sabor was created by Experience Music Project and organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibition, its national tour and related programs are made possible by Ford Motor Company Fund.

Classical Chinese Dance - Excelsior Arts & Culture Salon

The Excelsior Arts & Culture Salon and the Adult Summer Reading Program present Classical Chinese Dance. Cecilia Xiong of the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts California teaches classical Chinese dance, a dance that expresses inner feeling and grace. Chinese dance has developed over the course of the 5,000 year history of Chinese civilization. By learning this ancient art form, one can become familiar with this profound culture, a culture based on the philosophies of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The class size may be limited to 15 adults.

To get a free ticket, speak to a librarian at the branch.
Wednesday, June 22, 7:00-8:00 pm

The Water is Wide - Songs of the Seas and Rivers

A favorite of library audiences for his uplifting renditions of popular American folksongs, Tim Holt performs and discusses our heritage of sea chanteys, whaling songs, traditional songs ("Shenandoah" and "The Erie Canal"), and Woody Guthrie's Columbia River songs promoting public power. He also includes an original song, "Sailing Down My Mountain Stream," adapted from a Pete Seeger song about cleaning up the Hudson River. Holt's version focuses on a more recent effort to restore wild salmon to the upper reaches of the Sacramento River.

Note that, in a break with the usual pattern, this Excelsior Arts and Culture Salon offering will be on the second, instead of the fourth Wednesday of the month.

Wednesday, May 11, 7:00-8:30 pm

Call+Response

This April, the Excelsior Branch Arts & Culture Salon features Call+Response, a film about modern day slavery.

Join Director Justin Dillon at this screening of Call + Response, a pioneering documentary that exposes the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before. Call + Response goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving, from the child brothels of Cambodia to the brick kilns of rural India, revealing that in 2009, slave traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks together. Prominent political and cultural figures such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd and Nicholas Kristof offer firsthand accounts of this 21st century trade. The film features performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Talib Kweli and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dillon will answer questions and discuss the film with the audience following the screening.


Wednesday, April 27 @ 7:00 pm

Diane di Prima - Writing for Fun - POSTPONED

EVENT POSTPONED
Wednesday, March 23

The Excelsior Branch Library regrets to announce that this event has been postponed.

Please watch this space for a future event with San Francisco Poet Laureate Diane di Prima.

Excelsior Salon - Vincent Van Gogh - November 17th

Vincent Van Gogh and the Post-Impressionist Movement

Marlene Aron presents the life and art of Vincent Van Gogh, whose intense passion for people and the land drove him to create some of the most beautiful, vibrant, and deeply-felt art ever seen. He, along with Paul Cézanne, Emile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin, responded, through their art, to the world in ways that had never been done before and journeyed into a realm of personal expression that was to become the Post-Impressionist Movement. This event coincides with the de Young Museum exhibition: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay.

Wednesday, November 17th @ 7 p.m.

Excelsior Salon - Maid as Muse - October 27th

In Maid as Muse, Aife Murray explodes the myth of the isolated genius and presents an intimate, densely realized story of joined lives between Emily Dickinson and her domestic servants. Part scholarly study, part detective story, part personal journey, Murray's book uncovers a world previously unknown: an influential world of Irish immigrant servants and an ethnically rich one of Yankee, English-immigrant, Native American, and African American maids and laborers, seamstresses and stablemen. Murray reveals how Irish immigrant Margaret Maher and the other servants influenced the cultural outlook, fashion, artistic subject, and even poetic style of Emily Dickinson.

Local scholar and author Aife Murray says Maid as Muse came about because of a visit to the Library. She recalls "I was standing in this reading room of the main library in San Francisco one afternoon wondering how Emily Dickinson – prize-winning baker and astonishing poet – managed to turn out so many poems (and breads and cakes). 'Did she have help?' I asked myself. I pulled a popular Dickinson biography from the shelves situated in the far back of the reading room. The book naturally opened at a photographic plate labeled 'the Dickinson domestics, circa 1870.' Three Irish faces stared out just as the photographer depressed the bulb. He let a little light leak into the studio so that a side of Margaret Maher’s beautiful face is bleached out. The man in the center looked a lot like my grandfather.... Seeing that image changed my life."

Join us for an exciting reading and discussion of this below-stairs, bottom-up portrait of the artist and her family. The kitchen pantry where Dickinson spent a good portion of each day was headquarters for people mostly lost from the public record - and it was her interactions with them that changed and helped define who Emily Dickinson was as a person and a poet.

Wednesday, October 27th @ 7 p.m.

Dark Water Rising - Excelsior Salon on September 22

Over 50,000 dogs and cats were left behind in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This forced separation created America’s first-ever major animal rescue. A dedicated and compassionate group of volunteer rescuers and animal welfare groups from around the world risked their lives to sledgehammer down doors and brave toxic floodwaters in a truly heroic effort to save nearly 10,000 animals. This film tells uplifting stories of hope and survival as pets are reunited with their owners while other lucky animals find loving new homes. It will renew your faith in the American spirit.

Wednesday, September 22, 7:00 pm

Adult Summer Reading Party - August 25th

On August 25th, come celebrate the first Adult Summer Reading Program at the Excelsior Branch and meet fellow bibliophiles. Everyone who registered for the Adult Summer Reading Club at the Excelsior Library is invited to a wrap party and discussion at the Branch. Light refreshments will be served and prizes will be raffled.

Wednesday, August 25th - 7 - 8:30 p.m.

Diane di Prima - Excelsior Salon on July 21st

So, you've been writing, painting, dancing. You've got a band, or a performance piece. How do you reach out to others? Find folks of like mind? Get the work out there? How do you create a community of artists & friends who will support each other?

In this informal reading/talk, Diane di Prima, San Francisco's Poet Laureate, will talk about making your art and getting it into the world "by any means necessary"—whatever comes to hand—in good times and bad. She will also address the importance of creating a sense of community.

Diane will speak from her own life experiences on the practicalities of survival as an artist during the red-baiting and repressed 1950s. She will tell us how she self-published her first book, and distributed it around New York from the back of a baby stroller. She will trace how some of the artists of the 50s became activists in the 1960s: how a sense of community led to the early communes.

Diane’s presentation will be a rare opportunity to glimpse an important and seldom-acknowledged part of Bay Area cultural history through the eyes of someone who lived it. Dialogue with the audience will be invited and encouraged throughout the presentation.

Wednesday, July 21st - 7 - 8:30 p.m.

Face to Face - Excelsior Arts & Culture Salon - June 23rd

Join us for an evening of images and stories about children living in the shadow of AIDS in Africa. Award-winning writer Ruthann Richter and San Francisco documentary photographer Karen Ande trekked through the slums of Nairobi and villages of East Africa to meet children orphaned by the disease or grappling with HIV infection themselves. Their new book, Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa, is a beautiful and moving blend of photography and narrative that takes you straight into the world of these children. It is also a story of hope. All profits from the sale of Face to Face will be donated to organizations dedicated to helping African children.

Wednesday, June 23rd @ 7 p.m.

Speaking in Tongues - Arts & Culture Salon - May 26th

Winner of the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, this film follows four students of diverse backgrounds who are enrolled in San Francisco public school immersion programs. We witness the challenges and delights they encounter as they become fluent in other languages, and see how the experience changes them, their families, their communities - and maybe even the world.

Wednesday, May 26th @ 7 p.m.

The Legacy Film Series - April 28th

The Arts & Culture Salon presents The Legacy Film Series which showcases older adults telling their stories with eloquence and grace. The films that will be shown are Why, an animated explanation by the filmmaker about why she went to art school in middle age; My Father's Hopes, a poetic and moving short documentary about the filmmaker's father, who studied art as a young man; and Bella Bella, the latest chapter in the life of major Bay Area sculptor, Bella Feldman.

Wednesday, April 28th @ 7 p.m.

Abigail Powers Fillmore & the Creation of the White House Library - March 24th

Abigail Powers Fillmore and her husband, President Millard Fillmore, created the first official library in the Executive Mansion. Abigail held salons in the White House, welcoming such cultural and political icons as Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum, Dorothea Dix, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Winfield Scott, Washington Irving, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In this month's Arts & Cultural Salon, librarian and author Elizabeth Thacker-Estrada presents a slideshow and discussion that illuminates the life of this worthy yet now obscure First Lady.

Wednesday, March 24th @ 7 p.m.

Woody Guthrie and the Great American Folksong - February 24th

Join us at the February Arts & Culture Salon where Tim Holt presents a brief history of the American folksong, from the old time ballads of Appalachia to the ramblin' Depression-era songs of Woody Guthrie. He will also talk about the origins of our folk music in the British Isles and West Africa. Along the way, Holt will sing a variety of American folksongs representing aspects of our history and culture, including songs of westward settlement.

Wednesday, February 24th @ 7 p.m.

Claude Monet - Lecture and Slideshow - Excelsior Arts & Culture Salon - January 27th

Artist Marlene Aron delivers a beautiful slide presentation on the work of one of the most brilliant painters of the Impressionist movement. From his early work on the Normandy Coast to his final years in Giverny, we'll rejoice in the glow of Monet's water lilies, rose gardens, wisteria, and his luminous paintings of the river Seine. It was Monet's painting, "Impression: Sunrise", which gave the Impressionist movement its name. Claude Monet lived in his beloved Giverny, just outside of Paris, for the final forty-three years of his life. And it was here that he painted some of the most extraordinary and personal work of his career. His paintings, along with the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, signaled the beginning of the Modern Art Movement. Come celebrate with us as we view over one hundred slides of the wonderful art of Claude Monet: Painter of Light.

Wednesday, January 27th @ 7 p.m.