Museum on the Edge

On the evening of June 19, some 100 protesters gathered at the Music Concourse in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The oval-shaped expanse includes a columned, half-domed band shell, the Spreckels Temple of Music, anchoring the south side; an open plaza of trees and fountains in its center; and museums—the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum—framing it to the east and west, respectively. Since March, an empty white Ferris wheel installed in once-hopeful celebration of the park’s 150th anniversary has fanned 150 feet above the north side, directly behind a memorial to Francis Scott Key, national anthem lyric author and slave owner. Monuments to other figures pepper the concourse at irregular intervals, their relevance obscure (why Goethe and Schiller? why Leonidas or Cervantes?).

The protesters on this Juneteenth had come for the statues. Like people across the world in the month since George Floyd had been murdered by police in Minneapolis, they came with signs and slogans, many dressed all in black. They also brought paint and ropes, soon pulling down a 30-foot effigy of Saint Junípero Serra, founder of California missions and enslaver of Native Americans, along with his even taller cross. Then they moved on to Francis Scott Key, followed by Ulysses S. Grant.

By the time the crowd dispersed, statues were on the ground, benches and fountains vandalized, Cervantes defaced. Among other messages scrawled across the concourse, the words “OLONE [sic] LAND” were written in yellow spray paint on Serra’s empty base, calling to mind a line from a traditional Ohlone song that feels especially relevant right now: “On the edge of the world, I am dancing.”

Thomas Campbell, who’d been the director of the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor (collectively known as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, or FAMSF; disclosure: Alta editor and publisher William R. Hearst III is a FAMSF trustee) for less than 20 months, could not have anticipated a global pandemic and protests, much less iconoclasm, just yards from the de Young’s doors. But no stranger to turmoil, he’s willing to pursue possibility in the breach—a dance on the edge of what’s precarious and what’s possible.

Three months earlier, on the evening of March 13, the de Young had closed its doors in response to. The theme would be “On the Edge.”