Art and Nature in Golden Gate Park

On a classic June Gloom afternoon, we rode Muni to Golden Gate Park yesterday for a picnic and a museum visit.

When asked if he wanted to go to the Crystal Fair at the SF County Fairgrounds off Ninth Avenue, Austin replied, "They couldn't pay me enough to go in there."

So we continued next door to the Botanical Garden...

...which was was one of the few places in this section of the park which was not overrun with people...

...possibly because they charge non-San Francisco residents an entrance fee.

Across the street at the public restrooms near the baseball fields, there was bizarre professional signage: "CLOSED DUE TO A SEWER LINE BREAK".

Portents of doom continued as we walked by the back of the California Academy of Sciences building which was disgorging a huge crowd all at once.

A fire alarm had gone off in the building and it was taking a very long time for fire engines to make their way through park traffic jams to check the situation out.

We continued on to the de Young Museum across the concourse for an Ansel Adams photography exhibit.

The lady in the festive outfit was in line for the museum's annual, week-long fundraising event...

..."Bouquets to Art" where local designers create floral arrangements to complement various artworks in the permanent collection.

The galleries were so crowded, however, that it felt like we were helping to incubate a new pandemic, so we only lasted about five minutes.

The Ansel Adams exhibit downstairs was less congested and was an interesting mixture of Adams's far-ranging work from the 1930s through the 1970s, arranged among photos from a few contemporaries along with younger artists that he influenced. As a teenager, I lived and worked in Yosemite National Park for a summer as a dishwasher at the Ahwahnee Hotel. Adams's images were being sold in every gift shop, and I grew contemptuous of the work, wondering why people didn't just concentrate on looking at the real thing, in living color, rather than having it mediated in black-and-white by a photographer. Seeing some of these same images fifty years later, however, has changed my mind. The lighting contrasts and the artistry still pop in surprising, unexpected ways.