Portable Parks and Bonnie Ora Sherk were recently cited and credited for the now popular Pop-up urbanism, or tactical urbanism as it’s sometimes called, in the Friday, February 24th national edition of Streetsblog Network.  Read article here:  Pop Up Urbanism: The Origin Of A Movement.

The author, Angie Schmitt, cites another article, Catching Up To 1970 from Pattern Cities, by Aurash Khawarzad with the quote:

Her interventions, titled “Portable Architecture,” began in 1970 by essentially doing what’s now known as Park(ing) Day around strategic points in San Francisco. This incredibly prescient intervention foreshadowed a theme in urbanism that would gain widespread support 30 years later: the culture of DIY, combined with place-making in city streets.

Ms. Ora Sherk’s original Portable Architecture installations revealed the potential for artists, and public art, to inspire improvements to infrastructure, but they also revealed the weakness in not skillfully connecting public art projects with how public space plans are developed and implemented.

40 years later, we have a chance to capitalize on the vision of what Ms. Ora Sherk presented to us in 1970. But in the meantime, she is working with graduate students at the Otis College of Art and Design to create a new series of Portable Architecture. See a video for their successful Kickstarter campaign below."

Portable Park lV - past, present, future = A Living Library by Bonnie Ora Sherk opened on January 29 at Santa Monica Place in Santa Monica, CA. as part of The Getty Public Art & Performance Festival and PST.  This multi-sensory, living sculpture landscape, replete with sounds of singing birds and crickets, served as both metaphor and actual design in the shape of The Flower Unfolding.  The fragrant piece, viewed from above or from ground level had multiple evergreen and deciduous fruit trees, rose bushes, herbs, vegetables, and flowers. 

The piece which was an update from the original work, Portable Parks l - lll from 1970, was developed in conjunction with the MFA Public Practice Program of Otis College of Art & Design, and Karen Moss, Curator and Acting Chair of Otis.  High School Students from the Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences led by Pam Posey made beautifully painted fruits and flowers that were added to the bare branches of the deciduos fruit trees and rose bushes and labels for the Herb Lanes.

See link to the The Getty Website:  
Portable Park IV: Past, Present, Future = A Living Library

Read a review from the Santa Monica Mirror:  Portable Park At Santa Monica Place Through Sunday

And, have a look at some pictures of the artwork.  People of all ages seemed to enjoy it ! We hope you do too !

Portable Parks l - lll (1970), an early artwork by Bonnie Ora Sherk, (with Howard Levine), that transformed three barren, sterile, urban "dead spaces" into green, living environments replete with sod, palm trees, and live animals is being featured in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  The show, Fifty Years of Bay Area Art and the SECA Art Award, opened on December 7 and continues through April 3, 2012.

Portable Parks l - lll, won the 1st SECA Vernal Equinox Award that year, and for four days the performance installation moved to three sites in San Francisco:  the former James Lick Freeway that crossed over Market Street; two concrete islands adjacent to the  Mission/Van Ness Offramp; the whole street of Maiden Lane between Stockton and Grant.

In her Catalog essay for the Exhibition, SFMOMA Curator, Tanya Zimbardo says about the work:  "Bonnie Ora Sherk’s first public artwork (p. 40) temporarily revitalized the dead, mechanistic urban spaces of San Francisco through “bucolic demonstrations” in the form of portable parks featuring plants and animals.7 The onus was on the artists to find sites for these installations and obtain the necessary permits. As Sherk has explained, “with the Portable Parks it was necessary for me to deal with certain established systems, communicate with them, and convince them of the rightness of the work.” 8 A recent resurgence of interest in 1970s street actions like Sherk’s has coincided with a growing focus among a new generation of artists on temporary installations that fuse environmentalism and urban planning."

7. San Francisco Museum of Art, “SECA/VESA Award 1970,” news release, 1970. Carton 10, Folder 56, “Vernal Equinox Special Award, 1970–1972,” Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Records, 1960–2010; SFMOMA Archives. Sherk’s Portable Parks were staged at the following locations: Portable Parks I: June 25 on the James Lick Freeway near the Oak Street on-ramp; Portable Parks II on June 26 at the corner of Mission, Otis, and Duboce at the freeway off-ramp; Portable Parks III on June 27–28 at Maiden Lane from Grant Street to Stockton Street. Sherk would expand these one-day parks on a much larger scale with the alternative space Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974–80) located on land parcels underneath a freeway interchange (and even later with A Living Library.)

8. Linda Frye Burnham, “Between the Diaspora and the Crinoline: An Interview with Bonnie Sherk,” High Performance (Fall 1981): 58.

As Zimbardo suggested in her essay, Portable Parks l - lll, was a pioneering artwork that predated and influenced the current interest in Parking Day and Parklets in San Francisco and other cities.

Portable Parks l - lll and Sherk's Sitting Still Series are included the Orange County Museum of Art exhibition, California State Of Mind, part of the Getty's large initiative, Pacific Standard Time.

Sherk's new work, Portable Park lV -  past, present, future = A Living Library, in conjunction with Otis College of Art & Design, the City of Santa Monica, Maserich,  and featured in the Getty's Performance & Public Art Festival will open at Santa Monica Place in Santa Monica, California on January 27 - February 4, 2012.  View link on The Getty's PST Website:  Portable Park lV - past, present, future = A Living Library

A review of the SFMOMA show in the December, 2011 issue of San Francisco Magazine can be seen below:

Early performance, environmental, and public practice art by Bonnie Ora Sherk is being featured in two simultaneous art museum exhibitions in Southern California, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) as part of The Getty's, Pacific Standard Time.

These early life frames evolved to become A Living Library, or A.L.L., for short, with its systemic, place-based framework, strategies, and methodologies for making ecological change in schools and communities.

They also led to the founding of Life Frames, Inc., non-profit sponsor of A Living Library and Branch Living Library & Think Parks in diverse communities, and her work with developing multiple opportunities for the Islais Creek Watershed, such as the Bernal Heights Living Library & Think Park Nature Walk To Islais Creek, which includes the great potential for day-lighting portions of the Creek, among other features and elements.

There are many wonderful synchroniscities that occurred when this early work was being made, while others continue to emerge, and are still being created and discovered today !

MOCA - Under The Big Black Sun
Curated by Paul Schimmel

On view at MOCA, featured in Under The Big Black Sun, is the artist's 2005 multimedia installation on Crossroads Community (the farm), a pioneering, collaborative, hands-on, urban agriculture, environmental education and multi-arts community center,  that began in 1974, and nonchalantly incorporated a major freeway interchange and inspired the transformation of close to 7 acres of disparate land fragments into a new city farm and park.  The Farm, as it was affectionately known, was also one of the first Alternative Art Spaces in the country.

Bonnie Ora Sherk was the Founding Director and President of the non-profit she set up (1974-80), to reconnect the land fragments and residents of the four communities severed by the 101 Freeway Interchange, (Mission, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, Bayview) with each other, and diverse species of plants and animals.  She saw The Farm and the adjacent freeway as a dyptych, and created  a conscious juxtaposition of non-mechanized nature in relation to the technological monolith of the freeway.

The site is also at the convergence of three hidden Creeks - the Islais, Precita, and Serpentine (the northernmost frame of the Islais Creek Watershed that is she is still working with).  The original drawing and plan for The Farm, and the land, was to incorporate the Creek water into the new park and develop ponds and windmills, creating an ecological, agricultural, and bucolic landscape.  Many lush gardens were created by school children and adults, including gardens alongside, and in the middle of, the 101 Interchange, which at the time, was a safer and healthier place than today.

Children from over 75 schools in the area came as part of their school day, after school, and weekends, to the The Raw Egg Animal Theatre (TREAT), at The Farm, to have experiential involvement in nature and the arts, and visit the farm animals who lived there.

Below is Bonnie Ora Sherk's original drawing, the first proposal for The Farm, made in 1974.  Its frayed edges are due to her carrying it over many years, rolled up, under her arm, to show mayors, supervisors, city and state agency heads, community groups, and others about the potential to acquire the property and invest in its future.  The resulting park there today, is called, Potrero del Sol, filled with community gardens and multiple, adjacent, artists' live-work studios, all a reminder of The Farm's legacy.

Click links to view video on The Farm and original text by Bonnie Ora Sherk from 1977:

Video: Crossroads Community (the farm) - Excerpt from Evolution of Life Frames © 2002 Bonnie Ora Sherk
Text: Crossroads Community (the farm) - © 1977 Bonnie Sherk

A Book of the Exhibition is available.

OCMA - State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970
Curated by Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss

The Sitting Still Series and Public Lunch, are currently on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach, as part of California State of Mind:  New California Art ca. 1970.

Sitting Still 1, in which the artist inserted herself as a seated human figure dressed in an evening gown into a found environment of garbage, water, and an overstuffed armchair adjacent to a freeway construction site, is considered by her now, to be her Watershed Piece.

Although not apparent at the time, (she thought she was merely demonstrating how a seated human figure could very simply transform the environment by facing an "audience" of people in slow-moving cars), she was actually facing her future: the site of what would become The Farm, and the 101 Interchange and Cesar Chavez Street, both comprising the northernmost frame of the Islais Creek Watershed.  She was also sitting in water from the Islais Creek that had collected due to the 101 Freeway Interchange being built.

She says about this work: "For me, this is an extremely profound piece and addresses the deep power of art and water, and its spiritual dimensions."

After performing Sitting Still 1, the artist took the idea of the seated human figure, and moved with an armchair to diverse urban environments:  Mission & 20th Streets; Market & Church Streets; California & Montgomery Streets; Bank of America Plaza; Golden Gate Bridge; and various Indoor/Outdoor Cages at the San Francisco Zoo.

These works culminated in the Public Lunch, in which the artist had a human meal during the public feeding time for the lions and tigers in the Lion House at the San Francisco Zoo.   As she says about this work:

"Public Lunch, was the culmination of the Sitting Still Series, which initially began as an exploration of the nature of performance, and demonstrated how a seated human figure could transform the environment by simply being there, although, as it turns out,  Sitting Still 1 was much, much more.

Public Lunch was a seminal piece for me.  During the course of the performance, I paced, ate my human meal, climbed up the ladder to the platform above, wrote what I was thinking and feeling (on Waldorf Astoria stationary), lay down, and rested.  As I was lying down, gazing through the beautiful skylight above, viewing the clouds and birds flying overhead, the tiger in the adjacent cage, got up on his haunches and peered over at me.  I thought, "This tiger is perceiving me; he is looking at me.  What is he seeing ?  What is he thinking ?  What Is he feeling ?"

This was a profound experience to  think about the potential of another creature's intelligence, perception, feeling states, and communications.

In the cage with me at the Zoo, was another cage with a white rat in it.  I brought that cage and animal within, to demonstrate, a cage, within a cage, within a cage.... Who is in the cage ?

As a result of the tiger's actions, I decided to bring the white rat back to my studio.  I created a pristine, elegant environment for her.  Between two pillars in the space, I built a "Rat Run", with sod at the bottom and wire mesh on the sides.  But, I left it open at the top, so the rat could leave if she chose to.  She decided to stay, and I named her "Guru Rat".  She was the first animal I lived with, and gradually introduced other species into the environment and studied their behavior and interactions with each other.

At the time, the field of ethology, or the study of animal behavior was new; there was very little literature to read and study.  But, I learned tremendously, by doing and creating experiences.  The animals were performers, as was I; beings in our own right.  This work led me to understand ecology and natural systems, which at the time, was not popular, well-known, and part of the zeitgeist, as it is today.

This work eventually led to the creation of The Farm and The Raw Egg Animal Theatre. I was determined to create a situation where people could learn about, and appreciate the natural intelligences of other species. I saw this as a direct analogy to, and metaphor for, issues of racism, sexism, and child abuse."

These works and the exhibition will travel to UC Berkeley Art Museum next year, and thereafter to the Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, B.C., and Site Santa Fe in New Mexico.  Public Lunch will also be featured in an exhibition at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago next year.

A Book of the Exhibition is available, published by University of California Press