Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Eunice Chee entered her "shedding phase" a few years ago. Her late husband, Donald Chee, "was a born collector," and she had lived among his possessions since his death in 2002. While cleaning out a drawer, she came across a surprising aggregate, one she had forgotten about: a complete collection of Fast Passes.

Don's collection should not be confused with the insipid, plastic Clipper Cards we now use. First introduced in March of 1975, the paper passes each bore a unique design, enabling drivers and fare collectors to quickly discern whether the card was valid. Each month exhibited a distinct design.

As Eunice reacquainted herself with the passes - including ones she had contributed when Don was away - John Hogan was contemplating ways to celebrate MUNI's 100TH birthday on December 23, 2012. Hogan manages the San Francisco Railway Museum, a compact cultural institution, located on Steuart Street and...Don Chee Way.

Courtesy of Eunice Chee

Don Chee aboard his beloved F Line

Don was a San Francisco Municipal Railway project manager who was responsible for, among other significant projects, Muni's F streetcar line. He spent 25 years working for the city, but his passion for classic streetcars was unparalleled. Ordinarily reserved, Don became the F line's ardent spokesman, determined to get the historical fleet run. "It sparked a creativity that I had never seen before in Don," remembers Eunice. To this day, the F line remains one of the world's most outstanding vintage lines. A week before Don died of cancer, his colleagues at MUNI submitted a resolution to name the street after him.

"I knew immediately who should be the keepers of the collection," said Eunice, who had been donating Don's MUNI related possessions to the museum since 2006, when it opened its doors. Her donations are made free and clear, without any stipulations. Eunice was moved when to see that John had immediately put the passes on display. Calling her own Clipper Card "pretty boring next to the old fun passes," Eunice lists the March 1976 pass as her favorite, and hopes that visitors will leave excited by them.

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Edward Hopper

Heres how seriously SFMOMA takes Intermission (1963) -- we bet you won't read it all: Collection SFMOMA, purchase in memory of Elaine McKeon, chair, SFMOMA Board of Trustees (1995-2004), with funds provided in part by the Fisher and Schwab Families; © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art; photo courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Next Thursday (May 17), moneyed admirers of American artist Edward Hopper can bid on the painting Bridle Path (1939) at Sotheby's for an estimated $5 million to $7 million. SFMOMA described the work as being "of interest to Hopper scholars as an atypical work by the artist." In the very same press release, the museum announced the acquisition of Intermission (1963), which is "recognized as one of his best works."

But this is not an article about SFMOMA's recent acquisition, or even its "deaccession" of Bridle Path, which might confuse regular readers of this series. Recent Acquisitions has reported on additions to Bay Area cultural institutions, whether esoteric pieces or adorable fuzzy animals. It is important to understand, however, that acquisitions have a necessary accomplice within the world of collections strategy: the deacqusition, better known as the deaccession.

Institutions are rarely as forthcoming as SFMOMA, and with good reason: Certain news organizations have treated the process as scandal. When mistakes were made, they made headlines. Any sale, trade, or donation might ignite a firestorm of controversy, creating a false sense of urgency.

This unwanted attention has put cultural institutions on the defensive. Indeed, it was challenging to find arts employees willing to discuss the subject on record, if at all, but transparency is imperative - particularly when the process of deaccessioning is not only crucial, but necessary.

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Sylvia Sleigh

The man's exposed ankle in Lawrence and Susanna Delagado in an interior (1968) is more significant than it looks.

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

In one painting, a nude man poses as a reclining odalisque, a female slave in an Ottoman seraglio. In another, a man's bare back meets the viewer as he directs his attention to five male companions. Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) had no problem challenging art history in her paintings, exposing traditional themes as stereotypical at best, and degrading at worst. Women had too often been "painted as objects of desire in humiliating poses," Sleigh once said. "I don't mind the 'desire' part, it's the 'object' part that's not very nice."

Sleigh's subjects were no gods of antiquity favored in Renaissance art, but rather their human counterparts, resplendent with body hair and contemporary apparel. By inserting the male figure into the traditional female role in the 1970s, Sleigh criticized traditional gender roles.

Many of Sleigh's works, however, sought to equalize the genders on canvas. One such example, Lawrence and Susanna Delagado in an interior (1968) was exhibited in November at the SOMArts Gallery, to be placed at a Bay Area cultural institution upon the show's conclusion. Sleigh's estate tasked the Women's Caucus for Art with placing the oil painting, and group president Janice Nesser-Chu contacted Dr. Stephanie Hanor, the director of the Mills College Art Museum.

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Eadweard Muybridge

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Curator Jamie O'Keefe was conducting a standard inventory check at the San Francisco Fire Department Museum when she noticed tiny lettering in the corner of a photograph: Muybridge Studio.

O'Keefe was floored. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was best known for his pioneering work in motion photography. (Read a review of his 2011 exhibit at SFMOMA, "Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.") The photographer was known for using 12 to 24 cameras at a time and his own shutter in an attempt to create images of suspended motion, resulting in a visual illusion of movement. He has been the focus of major exhibitions worldwide, most notably at the Tate Britain, the Smithsonian, and the Bay Area's own Cantor Center at Stanford University.

What's left of his portfolio is sought after by serious collectors and pre-eminent institutions across the globe -- and the images don't come cheap. Artnet estimates that Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion plates sold, at auction in 2009, for a $45,000.

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Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

To my knowledge, real estate maneuvers and pinball machines have little in common, but when Michael Scheiss offered to explain, I went to Alameda in search of answers.

Scheiss' Pacific Pinball Museum is open to the public, but his warehouse is not. Let's just say I knocked on a slew of unmarked doors lining a seemingly abandoned "street" before a big metal portal swung open. I tentatively stepped inside and stopped in my tracks, met with the incredible sight of more than 1,000 pinball machines and related effects, from 15-foot murals to unidentifiable thingamabobs, crammed into an elephantine space.

When my eyes adjusted, I was warmly greeted by two middle-aged gentleman in stonewashed jeans and shirts bearing script that time has made indecipherable, unwrapping sandwiches atop a card table. I politely declined half of Scheiss' turkey on white.

I came for the Foos.

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Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

By now, you know the acquisition story: Museums tirelessly pursue a coveted addition to the collection, lobby the higher-ups for approval, and emerge triumphant. Cue the happy ending. The exhibition goes up and invigorates the city as a whole. Academics find the missing link in their society-altering research. Readers kindly stay tuned for next Friday's post.

But surely that's not the end. How do the materials survive various distressing elements -- air, fire, water, and the very worst of them all, humans? Often working offsite, clad in white coats whose pockets are crammed with book brushes and minarettes, the conservationists and their gloved hands are hard at work. They mend tears, clean fibers, reinforce weaknesses, and strengthen substrates.

"Die on some other day!" they exclaim upon reading the solubility tests, laughing manically from their light-protected labs.

That speaks to what we'll call "analog artifacts." But how are the newest innovations saved from digital obsolescence? This is a major concern for San Francisco's Long Now Foundation, which has been creatively fostering long-term responsibility for the future -- or at least the next 10,000 years. The latest project of Long Now, located at Fort Mason Center, is predictably far-reaching: a nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. These are not digital encodings of long, numerical sequences. Each page on this "Rosetta Disk" is an image readable by the human eye through optical magnification. Resting in a sphere of stainless steel and glass, the disk can endure exposure to the atmosphere with minimal care.

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Patrick Clifton

No More Words, We Want Action

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Patrick Clifton now spends his days teaching high school in the East Bay, but his Facebook page serves as a retrospective of his former life as an activist photographer. From 1986 to 1991, Clifton focused his camera lens on his San Francisco community, capturing militant AIDS activism through the medium of black-and-white film.

Gerard Koskovich, a curator at the GLBT Historical Society, met the photographer during the high-queer era of the mid-1980s, when the newly discovered human immunodeficiency virus had already infected a large percentage of the city's queer men.

There was no treatment, and the federal government responded at a glacial pace. Homophobic politicians and alarmists in the public sphere attempted to dominate the discourse, using the epidemic to spread hate and fear while the death toll steadily mounted.

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Pig-like? Maybe. Pigs? Definitely not.

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

There have been a lot of rumors about the San Francisco Zoo's most recent acquisition, and the curator of Hoofstock and Marsupials is here to set the record straight.

"First of all, peccaries are not pigs," asserts Jim Nappi.

The confusion is frequent, and understandable: Peccaries certainly look like wild pigs. Both belong to the Suidae family, but Peccaries evolved separately from the Afro-Eurasian varieties.

Peccaries were believed to be extinct, then discovered alive, but on the brink of extinction. When scientists found fossil remains in the 1930s, they believed peccaries to be an obsolete species of the past. More than four decades later, the animal was found in the Chaco region of Paraguay. (It also lives in Bolivia and Argentina.) While natives have long known and lived alongside peccaries, modernity has escalated human encroachment. Their habitats are in peril, and the endangered peccaries increasingly find themselves without a place to live, eat, or propagate. They are extremely vulnerable to hunters.

These peccaries came to the San Francisco Zoo as part of the AZA Species Survival Plan, a program that represents species that urgently need to be conserved and protected. A little more than a month ago, the three females arrived from the L.A. Zoo.

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Ray Johnson

Man O' War

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Last fall, Larry Rinder found himself standing before artist Ray Johnson's Man O' War in Manhattan's Richard L. Feigen Gallery. Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, was transfixed by Johnson's collage. At the same time, BAM/PFA Chief Curator Lucinda Barnes was in the throes of planning an exhibition highlighting Johnson's work (among other things) yet the museum owned none of his pieces.

Johnson (1927-1995) is remembered as "New York's most famous unknown artist." He founded the "Mail art" cultural movement in the 1960s, wherein visual art is sent through the international postal system. He was closely connected to major artists at the time, including Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. He participated in performance art as part of the Fluxus movement, and many still speculate his suicidal leap off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, was a final realization of his work.

Barnes believes Johnson remained in the shadow of his better-known contemporaries "because of the very nature of his art-collage, mail art, and performance." She sought to rectify this through the acquisition of Man O' War, now on display in the exhibition "Tables of Content: Ray Johnson & Robert Warner Bob Box Archive/MATRIX 241."

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The Detwiller Vibrator is powered by gas.

Most curators in San Francisco's arts community have degrees in disciplines such as paintings or textiles, but Carol Queen is the first sexologist/curator I've encountered. Queen started working at Good Vibrations while completing a doctorate in human sexuality; she stayed on with the company to be not only its staff sexologist but also the curator of the store's Antique Vibrator Museum.

The acquisition budget is tied to fortunes of the company, which were in good shape when Queen recently spotted an antique Detwiller Vibrator on eBay. The vibrator, patented in 1906, was secured with a bid of $204.29. While the museum has a vast collection of vibrators from the late 1800s through the 1970s, this is the first pneumatic vibrator Queen has found.

"The literature on antique vibrators covered steam, electric motor, and hand-crank types," she says, "but when you think of gas powered items, tools come to mind, not body-care objects."

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