Voting and Fingerpainting at City Hall

The San Francisco Department of Elections has set up a nifty early voting operation in the basement of City Hall which will be open every day through Tuesday, November 5th. It's a quick, fun and easy alternative if you actually happen to work during the week and Tuesday voting in your own precinct is painful.

The entrance is on Grove Street and as you are walking to the voting area, be sure to check out the art exhibit with an unwieldy title: Brian Belott’s RHODASCOPE: Scribbles, Smears, and the Universal Language of Children According to Rhoda Kellogg.

According to the SF Art Commission website: "Rhoda Kellogg (b. 1898, Bruce, WI, d. 1987, San Francisco, CA) was an early childhood scholar, theorist, educator, author and activist. She amassed an extensive and wide-ranging collection of child art—numbering over a million pieces—through her travels in 30 countries around the world and through her work with children at various preschools including San Francisco's Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool (part of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association) from 1966-1986. Kellogg earned an international reputation for her pioneering research in children’s art through lecturing, teaching, and publications, notably in her books What Children Scribble and Why (1955), The Psychology of Children’s Art (1967), Analyzing Children’s Art (1969) and Children’s Drawings, Children’s Minds (1979).

Brian Belott is an East Coast children's art theorist and collector who ten years ago discovered the warehouse in Connecticut where Kellogg had stored her insanely huge collection.

Some of the children's fingerpaintings are richly gorgeous enough they wouldn't be out of place at SFMOMA.

As for voting, my only advice is on the San Francisco District Attorney race. Vote in order of your own preference for Chesa Boudin, Nancy Tung and Leif Dautch. Do NOT darken a circle next to the name of candidate Suzy Loftus who has a long history of incompetence at the SF Police Commission and as a lawyer at the SF Sheriff's Department, and who was recently appointed to the empty DA seat by Mayor London Breed. Plus, the ads praising her and attacking Chesa Boudin from the San Francisco Police Officers Association approach Willie Horton levels of lying, racist nastiness. And if you happen to live in District 5, please vote for Dean Preston over Vallie Brown, another Breed-appointed hack who urges everyone to vote for her simply because she is a woman.