Join us for a guided tour in partnership with Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP) that celebrates 100 years of the Legion of Honor. 

Led by historian John A. Martini, WNP Executive Director Nicole Meldahl, and curator Isabella Lores-Chavez, this tour begins inside the museum with an intimate look at Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor, an exhibition curated by Lores-Chavez. Then, Martini and Meldahl will take you outside to explore the museum’s grounds, highlighting the area’s origins as City Cemetery before it became host to a museum and Lincoln Park Golf Course, as well as the women who are memorialized outside. This unique program contextualizes the museum as a vibrant part of San Francisco’s western neighborhoods and will give you a new appreciation for the Legion of Honor, inside and out.

About the tour guides

John A. Martini is a native San Franciscan and a life-long researcher into the history of California and the American West. He worked as a National Park Ranger for more than 25 years at parks around the country including Fort Point National Historic Site, Alcatraz Island, the National Maritime Museum, the USS Arizona Memorial, the Presidio of San Francisco, and Teddy Roosevelt’s estate at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site. 

Nicole Meldahl, an award-winning journalist and community historian, joined WNP as a volunteer in 2012 and took over as executive director in 2019. Originally from Southern California, she’s worked in San Francisco for almost 20 years as an archivist and curator at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the California Historical Society, and the Walt Disney Family Museum before joining WNP full-time. Her work focuses on women’s stories, cultural studies, and fostering a deeper sense of place by sharing history that resonates in the present.

Isabella Lores-Chavez is associate curator of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she is responsible for the collection’s Dutch and Flemish paintings. She is the curator of the exhibition Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor. She completed her PhD in art history at Columbia University in 2022, with a dissertation about plaster casts in 17th-century Dutch paintings. Her doctoral work was supported by fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP), founded in 1999, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that preserves, interprets, and shares the diverse history and culture of San Francisco’s west side. In support of this work, WNP launched the OpenSFHistory program in 2014 to digitize and make accessible online thousands of historical San Francisco images, and they have stewarded the Cliff House Project since 2021. Learn more on the WNP website and by listening to their weekly podcast, “Outside Lands San Francisco” (available on Spotify, iTunes, and streaming via 102.5 KSFP). 

Contact info

Public Programs
publicprograms@famsf.org
415.750.7694