That's mad, man! Will Godfrey's new office.

​It was business as usual for Will Godfrey. Well, except that his office was in a parking spot on Sansome Street, had no roof, and looked like it had been lifted straight from the set of Mad Men.

"You can sit down," he said, gesturing to the modern red and orange chairs surrounding him.

Work outside on a sunny Friday morning in a 1960s office space? Who was spying on our dreams and turning them into reality? Woody Allen, is that you?

Alas, this was not the San Francisco version of Midnight in Paris. Rather, throughout the city and the nation today, people are celebrating PARK(ing) Day by converting metered parking spaces into parks, offices, or whatever they desire -- as long as it is within legal limits and gets the community to rethink what can be done with urban space.

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The Museum of Craft and Design's temporary location.

​Sculptor Andy Vogt makes art out of old houses. When homes are demolished, he picks up scraps of wood called lath that used to make up the walls.

"It's the most unwanted building material which you could find, other than plaster dust," he says. "It's the guts of San Francisco Victorian-era houses."

So Vogt gives the lath new life.

On Sunday, Vogt brought a stack of lath to the chain-link fence at the corner of Octavia and Hayes and started to build a lath installation in the fence. Vogt's work is part of the Museum of Craft and Design's latest pop-up museum, the first of three "place-making" events at the museum's new temporary home in Hayes Valley.

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Kate Stirr

Ardent Evolution

​"Sometimes it's not obvious how one can relate to a trout," says artist Karl Cronin.

Um, yes. That would probably be true for most people. But maybe we should give it a try, suggests Root Division's upcoming interdisciplinary exhibition A Live Animal, which explores the relationship between humans and other species. It opens Saturday at Root Division.

A Live Animal presents the works of more than 20 artists from a diverse range of art disciplines, all seeking to explore aspects of interspecies exchange and to understand what other species have to teach us about our own nature.

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We San Franciscans have our pick of blockbuster museum shows this summer, including a huge Picasso exhibit as well as two shows on Gertrude Stein and her family's art collection. Those are great destinations if you want to see famous paintings from the past. For a taste of what is happening in the present, there's Bay Area Now 6, which opens with a party Friday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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A very cool project

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S. F. artist Brian Goggin, of Defenestration fame, has set his sights on a new project of mammoth proportions. In a bid to remind the public of the effects of global warming, Goggin has decided to travel to Greenland, extract an "enormous monolith" of 100,000 year-old rare blue basal ice, and transport it back to Manhattan. Sounds crazy? Totally. But it only gets better.

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Michael Garlington

​It's easy to dismiss this exhibit as one big gimmick. A house made of photos and their frames, in the middle of a gallery, covered on the outside with dark eyes and darkish images of beautiful naked women? But walk inside this so-called "Photohouse" and you realize that appearances are deceiving.

Here is the antithesis of that apparent gimmick: row upon row of faces and hands in jars that emphasize the interior's white background. Theatrical nakedness gives way to intense close-ups of strangers old or odd. Darkness recedes into bright light. It's stirring enough to inspire this critic to address the artist directly: Thank you, Michael Garlington.

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The environment of "Are We There Yet?" fosters listening and contemplation.

​In today's Too-Much-Information Age, we want answers and we want them fast. Whether it's web searches, e-mail, Tweeting, updating Facebook, or downloading an app, we'll do whatever is necessary (and, don't forget, convenient) to find information now. In the Contemporary Jewish Museum's media installation opening today, "Are We There Yet?", Bay Area artists Ken Goldberg and Gil Gershoni challenge us to do the opposite -- slow down, ask questions, and embrace contemplation. For they believe that it's questions - not answers - that help us understand the past and propel us forward in society and in our lives. That overarching theme turns out to be a strength as well as a weakness in an exhibit that's overall worth seeing -- and, er, hearing.More >>