Lake Merritt, looking towards the Northeast

James and I completed the lenticular murals yesterday by clear-coating them with a  protective, anti-graffiti glaze. Touching every square inch of the surface of the images reminded me how much the tiles have been handled over the past eight months, how much care has gone into realizing a hand made structure at this scale. It seemed an appropriate finale to wash them over with a final clear wash, kind of like a baptism.

At the end of the day I took a final reconnaissance tour of Lake Merritt as Ene and I think about designing a system of watershed markers for the City of Oakland. Lake Merritt has been my quiet obsession during the past month’s installation, and I continue to be fascinated with its impact on the culture of the city and its environment.

mapping the old oaks

This time around I took note of as many old oak trees as I could see from the pathways, and began to make a map of their positions relative to the lake and closest intersecting roads. I also took notice of a surprising number of churches surrounding the lake, and thought how we could potentially activate their congregations to help learn about the watershed and its natural/cultural ecology. Maybe a church could ‘adopt’ a stream or an old tree..

The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, CA

Tagged: deep craft, estuary, lake merritt, Oakland, scott Constable, watershed ecology, wowhaus

Ene, James and I worked long days in the heat and completed the Oakland Fusion murals by the end of Saturday, exhausted and relieved. Our biggest reward was when word spread among the train conductors to check out our project, and they would make a point of leaving the train to walk by the murals for the full effect, and invariably hail us with enthusiastic cheers. James and I will return to the site today and tomorrow to tie up a few loose ends, and the project will officially open in a few weeks. Here are some highlights from the past week:

Ene and James install the Chinese mandala

Straight on view of the Serape/Lace panel

Serape pattern on the left

Gluing Instruments

Tagged: jack london square, mosaic, Oakland, public art, scott Constable, wowhaus

Oakland’s main tidal outwash to the Bay

I’ve had less time to explore lower Oakland on bike as we bear down on the installation of Oakland Fusion, but have made a few early morning tours of the Embarcadero in search  of waterways connecting Lake Merritt and the Bay. I find that a bicycle is the perfect research tool for learning about a city’s watershed, both rider and water under the direct influence of gravity. Finding Oakland’s main tidal outwash (pictured above) gave me insight into the shape of the City from the perspective of water flow. As I stood over the flood of water draining out to the Bay I realized the City of Oakland is essentially a basin, with downtown flanking the banks of the Lake, and the surrounding neighborhoods branching mostly uphill, like spokes connecting to the Lake’s central hub.

I began to think of Oakland’s watershed as a tree structure, or more exactly as a root system in the broader context of its relationship to a larger body of water. There are few remaining oaks in town, but I also began to wonder where they would have naturally grown.

Tagged: deep craft, esturary, Oakland, scott Constable, urbanism, watershed, wowhaus

So far this week we’ve completed the murals facing one direction and half of the first image facing the opposite direction. Ene, James and I have established a productive rhythm that should allow us to complete the project by early next week. We’ve learned to use the shadows and the position of the sun to our advantage, trying to keep the panels cool in order to prevent the adhesive from ‘kicking off’ too quickly as the tiles are laid.

Each of the eight images for Oakland Fusion has 560 hand glazed tiles, each with a corresponding number to indicate its position within the grid. I made the tattered numbering chart (above) about eight months ago, and it has remained in tact despite daily use over the intervening months. We are still using the chart on site to orient ourselves, and it has earned the nickname ‘The Shroud of Turin’. The crew decided to take the day off today to recharge for the final push after a chain of strenuous days.

Ene and James lay tiles for the Kente pattern

I’m recouping from a second challenging week installing our Oakland Fusion project. By the end of the week we had laid up the first quarter of two murals, and got over the hurdle of working off the ground, using a new adhesive with a shorter pot life. I measure and mix the epoxy in a shady spot on the ground, then James ‘butters’ the panels, slowly combing the gew with a saw-toothed trowel. Ene applies the tiles in rows, beginning at the bottom and going up. It took us a day to get the proportions right and choreograph the moves, with the adhesive kicking off quickly in direct sun, applied to warm metal, but we were relieved to find a comfortable groove yesterday, which will carry us through the remaining installation over the next week and a half.

chef Lacey Sher, Andrew McLester (seated), Linda Braz and chef Eric Tucker

The highlight of the week was when Ene and I were invited to attend a five course, vegetarian meal conceived  of and cooked collaboratively  by chefs Lacey Sher and Eric Tucker, currently Executive Chef at Millenium Restaurant in San Francisco. The meal featured pairings of unusually distinctive wines from the Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties, distributed by Andrew McLester of Real Wines Company. Lacey lives in the building hosting our ‘residency’ where she will be opening a vegetarian wine bar this summer called Encuentro. The meal and flight of wines was intended as an introduction to the future offerings of Encuentro, and Lacey and her collaborators did a superb job introducing each new dish and flavor. The food was inventive, original, healthy, delicious and fun, and the wines tended to be mineral-y, low in alcohol and strong with simple, fruity nose and deep texture. Ene and I both had a wonderful night and left feeling oddly happy and alert. Here’s the menu:

Appetizer: sweat pea cakes with curried cashew cream; pea sprouts and crisp spring onions; crispy baby fava beans; pickled baby spring vegetables

Soup: cream of stinging nettle with lemon thyme cream and popover

Salad: potato terrine wrapped in braised leak leaves with smoky pimenton aioli atop a spring salad of strawberries and marcona almonds

Entree: crisp filo purse filled with farro and goat cheese with a fava bean/asparagus and morel mushroom ragout

Dessert: a selection of cheeses; dried black mission fig tart; vice chocolates

Tagged: encuentro, eric tucker, jack london square, lacey sher, millenium restaurant, Oakland, real wines, vegetarian cuisine

This is to introduce James Crosby, a very talented sculpture student and former Skateboard Pro, who we’ve hired to help with the installation. Thanks to James’ incredible focus and good humor, we’ve been able to stay pretty much on schedule even though we lost a day and a half due to rain. By the end of yesterday, we had installed all four steel panels as substrates for the tile mural. Ene arrived yesterday afternoon, and the full crew will begin to set tiles today.

Tagged: deep craft, james crosby, Oakland, public art, scott Constable, wowhaus

I’m falling in love with Oakland all over again.
Ene and I moved here from the East Coast in 1991 after a formative time living in West Africa, followed by meandering road trips cross-country, capped off with a season of commercial fishing on a salmon seiner in Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. We spent our ‘crew share’ earned on the boat traipsing down the coast to visit friends who had migrated West from New York during the recession of the late eighties, obliquely seeking a home place along the way. We shared the dual mindset of wanting to stay in one place after over a year of travel, but still maintain the perspective of living by one’s wits we had cultivated along the way. Seattle, Portland and San Francisco were OK, but the flatlands of North Oakland where we eventually settled, bought a house and raised our daughter, appealed more viscerally. Oakland’s flatland neighborhoods felt like a cross between a West African village, a small Southern town and the best of the kind of suburban ‘craftsman’ vernacular I had only ever thought possible in theory. We fit right in, stayed for over fifteen years, shifting our global travel modality to the simple, domestic scale of the day- meals shared, childcare and getting to know the neighborhood.

Ene and my art/design collaborative Wowhaus grew naturally from our newfound domestic modality. We thrived in the Bay Area’s receptive climate, and slowly developed a market for projects that were very much an extension of our daily lives. As our projects grew in scale, we were faced with the dilemma of space; our rented warehouse and woodshop were being sold to developers, and our interests were shifting towards self-sufficiency. So we sold the house before the market tumbled and bought a small rural compound near the coast in West Sonoma County, where we can grow food, be close to nature and have plenty of room for all of our projects. Fortuitously, some of these projects have brought us back to Oakland, and my current ‘residency’ near Jack London Square lends me new perspective on my adopted Home Town after three years spent settling in up the coast. This new perspective is the subject of this dispatch, despite the biographical digression.

Lake Merritt, looking East

After a long day on site working in the sun, I’ve been winding down by riding my Dahon folding bike around Lake Merritt, just following my nose. I had only ever approached the Lake by car, usually from the North, and found the experience disorienting to the extent that we avoided the area as much as possible when we lived in the Temescal neighborhood. Approaching the lake from The Waterfront has been revelatory. Originally a salt marsh estuary, Lake Merritt is still connected tidally to the Bay, its waters flowing under roadways. On my bike, I’ve been able to intuit which roads connect to the lake, and have deciphered a new pattern to the inner logic of the City based on its relationship to the Bay, to sea level. This has been especially enlightening as we begin research on a new commission to design a system of Watershed Markers for the City of Oakland.

Ene joined me on site for a day this week as we raised the first steel substrate panels for Oakland Fusion. She loved working on the scissor lift, despite her aversion to heights.

We sneaked a peak at a heroic bronze sculpture just in front of our mural project, apparently of the father of Ron Dellums, Oakland’s current Mayor.  The sculpture is housed in a protective crate, and is currently coated with construction dust from a small opening in the crate.

The first ten foot by ten foot panel is up, ready for tiles!

Tagged: deep craft, lake merritt, Oakland, public art, vacation rental, watershed, wowhaus, wowhaus studio retreat