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On a Thursday in June 1970, a San Francisco police officer was freaking out as drivers entering the busy Central Freeway near Market Street slammed their brakes, startled by an unusual sight. On what had been bare ground the day before, a young woman was sitting on a bale of hay surrounded by potted palm trees and 4,000 square feet of green grass, stroking a Guernsey calf tied to a banister.
“Move those cars!” According to an account in the Los Angeles Times, the unnamed officer shouted.
“It could be a terrific backlog,” he added.
The woman in the straw bale was Bonnie Ora Sherk, and the temporary roadside attraction (created with the approval of highway officials) was the first of a series of conceptual artworks she called “Portable Parks.”
“I love the element of surprise,” he told the newspaper, explaining that the idea was to re-imagine empty spaces and inject a humanistic element into places defined by anonymity and sterility.
“The highways are beautiful, but they need to be softened,” he said. “Why do you only use them for cars?”
An artist and landscape architect, Ms. Sherk has continued to pursue a career in extraordinary art projects that explore humanity’s relationship with nature. His sister, Abby Kellner-Rode, said she died in a nursing home in San Francisco on August 8. He was 76 years old.
Ms. Kellner-Rode did not give a reason. The death has not been widely reported before.
“Miss. San Francisco-based Sherk was among a group of artists, mostly women, in the late 1960s and early 1970s who sought to push the definition of art beyond painting and other traditional genres, creating momentary conceptual pieces that were spatially tailored and performance-based. .
A few months after he and Guernsey surprised drivers that June, they were outside the San Francisco Museum of Art with 80 sacks of crushed ice, and he and some of his assistants turned into an October snowball rush; The show ended with the handing over of raspberry snow cones to passersby. The following year, for a piece he called “Public Lunch,” he sat in a cage at the San Francisco Zoo and ate at a beautifully set table while being fed jungle cats in the cage next door.
“Female artists working in the 1960s and 70s like Bonnie Ora Sherk sought to interrupt and subvert how audiences perceived art, power, gender, and place,” said Jennifer McCabe, director and chief curator of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. . by email. “He used the performance as a way to explore fragile and threatened environments and challenge the concept of audience through spontaneous performances.”
Having featured Ms. Sherk’s work in an exhibition last year, Dr. McCabe, “Counter Landscapes: Executive Actions from the 1970s – Now,” He said the work of Ms. Sherk and others in the 1970s continued to resonate.
“Artists who emerged in the ’80s and then combined these performance and place strategies to address issues of social and environmental justice,” he said, “including race and gender as well as borders, migration, the climate crisis and economic inequalities.”
One particularly ambitious project spearheaded by Ms. Sherk was called Crossroads Community, often abbreviated simply as The Ranch. He transformed a six-acre parcel of land in the middle of the complex Army Street (now Cesar Chavez Street) highway intersection in San Francisco, with crops, livestock and educational components, into what Ms. Sherk describes as an “environmental sculpture”; schools would bring students to learn about agriculture.
“Things in the city tend to be very fragmented, and the highway is a symbol of that fragmentation,” he told The Associated Press in 1977, two and a half years after the founding of the Years Farm. . “We’re trying to reconnect people and humanize environments.”
Ms. Sherk saw growing vegetables and creating art as close cousins.
“Learning to be a farmer is delicate, as is learning to be an artist,” he said. “The growth process in life is like the creative process in art.”
Bonnie Ora Kellner was born on May 18, 1945 in New Bedford, Massachusetts and raised primarily in Montclair, NJ. Her father, Sydney, was the district director of the American Jewish Committee and lecturer in arts and archeology, and her mother, Eleanor (Lipskin) Kellner, first He was a classroom teacher.
His father worked with various organizations that promoted cooperation between people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, which brought him in touch with some important figures. A meeting brought Eleanor Roosevelt to Montclair, which made an impression on young Bonnie.
“He had to take her home after the meeting,” Ms. Sherk recalled in her interview series “My Life in Art” last year, “so my sister got in the front seat with her and I got in the backseat. and we took him back to New York.”
He studied art at Rutgers University, where artist Robert Watts, a professor, trained him in the avant-garde Fluxus movement. After graduating, in the late 1960s, she went to San Francisco with her then-husband, David Sherk. (The marriage ended in divorce.)
Another early art series came about in 1970 when he noticed a plot of land at the Army Street junction, which he would later help convert, flooded and soaked by stormy currents, and an overstuffed seat fell into the rubble.
“I immediately realized that this was a great opportunity to show how a seated human figure can change the environment just by being there.” said In an interview with the Berkeley Museum of Art and the Pacific Film Archive. “I went home and put on an evening dress and came back, got into the water and sat in a chair for a while, looking at the audience of people in passing cars.”
He later sat in armchairs in the Financial District and various other parts of the city, calling it the “Still Sitting Series”.
His sister, Rachel Binah, said he was flamboyant, theatrical, and unpredictable in his art and everyday life.
“She loved the costumes – during performance and in everyday life,” Ms. Binah said via email. “When she worked the night shift at Andy’s Donut Shop in San Francisco’s Castro district, she wore a big fluffy wig and a pink waitress costume.” Also, “Bonnie would shave one leg and one armpit when the women around her were shaving their legs or not.”
He was survived by his sisters.
Behind his work was serious thought, especially regarding ecological themes. He began developing what he called himself in the 1980s. Living Libraries and Think Parks, small plots, and nature trails in San Francisco and elsewhere that invite the community to learn about a place’s past and help develop its future. Many people said 2013 interview “Having a sense of wonder about the wealth that surrounds them” with SFAQ magazine.
“We have to learn how to expose it,” he said.
Miss Sherk is survived by her sisters.
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