November Centennial Celebration Includes Thrilling Roster of Local Artist Collaborators Kicking Off Year-Long Programs 

Expanded Access of Languages in Programs and Education Initiatives

SAN FRANCISCO, September 26, 2024 — Since its founding in San Francisco on November 11, 1924, the Legion of Honor has welcomed millions of locals and visitors alike with its world-class art collection and sweeping views of the Golden Gate. To celebrate the museum’s 100th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (“Fine Arts Museums”) are inviting the Bay Area communities to a dynamic series of Legion of Honor 100 events and programs. More about the Legion of Honor 100 can be found at famsf.org/events/legion-honor-100.

The Legion of Honor 100 festivities begin with a Centennial Weekend Celebration (November 9–11) featuring collaborations with a diverse group of local cultural organizations including Megan Lowe Dances, SMARTBOMB, Cake Picnic, Artivate, San Francisco Ballet, and more will also launch. Newly commissioned performances and film screenings, including an outdoor evening screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Vertigo (for which the Legion of Honor famously served as a filming location), will offer surprises and memories for all visitors throughout the centennial year. The museum’s signature Free Saturdays program will ensure free general admission to the museum and the centennial programs for all Bay Area residents through the year.

“We are excited to welcome new and old friends to experience the Legion of Honor anew, with a mixture of curatorial lectures, music, dance, and other activations taking place on Free Saturdays throughout the year,” states Devin Malone, Director of Public Programs and Community Engagement. “We look forward to amplifying ongoing relationships with local artists and organizations and launching new collaborations in a celebration of our collections and community.”

“Becoming a more accessible and people-centered museum that is locally rooted in the Bay Area has always been one the goals of Free Saturdays, and the Centennial Weekend Celebration programs and partners represent these same values,” adds Maria Egoavil, Public Programs Manager. “These collaborations are motivated by our commitments to engage with local artists and creatives who reflect the multicultural populations of the region.”

CENTENNIAL WEEKEND CELEBRATION DETAILS

SATURDAY, November 9: The public celebration for the Legion of Honor 100 kicks off with the first Free Saturdays event of the centennial year. From the front lawn to the recently reinstalled galleries of Baroque art, the museum will be open and offer community programs throughout the day.

This includes the launch of many collection-based initiatives aimed to widen audience access to the museum’s spectacular art collection, supported by celebration partner Bank of America, who is sponsoring free admission to Mary Cassatt at Work on Saturday, November 9, and Sunday, November 10. Exhibition tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis on-site at the museum.

When the Legion of Honor opens at 9:30 am, Alexa Treviño, a Mexican American portrait photographer and The de Young Open 2023 artist, will offer visitors a portrait pop-up: 100 years, 100 Portraits with The Thinker, Auguste Rodin’s famous bronze sculpture. At 10:50 am, the local George Washington High School Marching Band will draw a crowd to the Court of Honor for an 11 am Centennial Program, which will include an Ohlone Welcome from Gregg Castro of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone and remarks from Thomas P. Campbell (Director and CEO), Diane B. Wilsey (Board Chair Emerita), representatives from Bank of America, French dignitaries, and local and state government officials.

Further activations include electronic musical performances and vinyl DJ sets in the galleries and Court of Honor programmed by SMARTBOMB; Sketching in the Galleries led by teaching artists; limited-edition Legion of Honor 100 silk-screen prints from Artivate’s mobile art bike; and a fresh spin on organ concerts with a newly choreographed dance performed by members of the San Francisco Ballet Trainee Program. For this special weekend, the exterior frieze, above the museum’s front entrance doors, will be cranked open, enabling organ music to spill out into the Court of Honor, Lincoln Park, and beyond.

Food will also be a focus, with a Cake Picnic collaboration on the front lawn showcasing 250 cakes that will be art pieces in their own right, plus complimentary croquembouche by husband-and-wife duo Monique Lopez Feybesse and Paul Feybesse of Tarts de Feybasse. French techniques and cultural heritage will be part of a running theme throughout the weekend in homage to the Legion of Honor’s Francophile roots.

Art history aficionados and all visitors can enjoy a double-feature lecture series in the museum’s Gunn Theater. At 1:30 pm, Emily A. Beeny (Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor and Barbara A. Wolfe Curator in Charge of European Paintings) will inaugurate the “A Closer Look” curatorial lecture series with Collecting European Paintings for San Francisco. At 2:30 pm, Fine Arts Museums director Thomas P. Campbell will be in conversation with Musée Rodin director Amélie Simier about Auguste Rodin and San Francisco.

Saturday’s celebration launches exciting programs centering the rich art collections housed at the museum, including the “A Closer Look” series. Every second Saturday of the month throughout the centennial year, a curator will delve into the Legion of Honor’s history and its distinctive collections of European and ancient art, all while demystifying curatorial practices. In addition, visitors will see new trilingual gallery introductory panels, which feature texts that explain the art historical theme of various galleries, available in English, Spanish, and Chinese. New Family Guides will also be available for free in those same languages. The weekend will also be the first time visitors can enjoy the all-new Legion of Honor 100 Highlights Audio Tour that animates collection artworks through the voices of art experts and art makers. An audio tour hub will be available on famsf.org, which will enable visitors far and wide to access this highlights tour in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese for free on their devices.

Exhibitions on view all weekend long include the Mary Cassatt at Work, as well as Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor, which will present a combination of captivating works of art, archival materials, and an expansive timeline to offer the public a deeper understanding of the museum’s history and a vision for its future. Also opening that weekend will be Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design, which intertwines the history of theater and dance with the founding of the museum.

SUNDAY, November 10: The weekend celebration will continue with complimentary admission to Mary Cassatt at Work, courtesy of Bank of America.

MONDAY, November 11 (Veterans Day): The museum will be specially opened for the public to commemorate its official founding. The Legion of Honor serves not only as an art museum, but also as a memorial to the 3,600 Californians who sacrificed their lives in World War I. As such, complimentary admission to the museum’s collection galleries and Mary Cassatt at Work will be offered to veterans on this day. Information for the public is here.

The commemoration begins with an 11:11 am Veterans Day Ceremony with a color guard performance in the Court of Honor, followed by an organ concert of patriotic music. Isabella Lores-Chavez (Associate Curator of European Paintings), who organized Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor, will offer a lecture on the history of the museum, with opening remarks from community partners Jonathan Cordero and Gregg Castro of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone. Veterans Day will conclude with a second, open-frieze organ concert of patriotic music at 4 pm.

YEARLONG COLLABORATIONS

Oakland-based creative community and live events/multimedia platform SMARTBOMB has organized the music for three indoor and outdoor spaces of live ambient and electronic musical performances and DJ sets for Saturday of the Centennial Weekend Celebration. All details about this program, called Echoes of the Past / Resonance of the Future, can be found here. SMARTBOMB will return throughout the Legion of Honor 100 year.

Artivate, along with their youth mentee cohort, will bring their mobile art bikes and kitchen for live screen printing with Fine Arts Museums teaching artists inspired by the museum’s collection. This will launch a yearlong collaboration series of pop-ups featuring limited-edition prints and youth-led programs using “Recipes of Resilience,” a mobile food-and-stories archive, bringing to light new perspectives into the museum’s collection.

Cake Picnic was born out of a simple desire to eat a lot of cake and be surrounded by friends. Founded by Elisa Sunga, Cake Picnic brings communities and friends together. For the Centennial Weekend Celebration, more than 250 cakes will be brought to the Legion of Honor for visitors of all ages to enjoy. Cake Picnic will return in spring 2025 for Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, one of the exciting exhibitions that will go on view during the Legion of Honor 100. 

San Francisco Ballet has long been recognized for pushing boundaries in dance, and like the Legion of Honor, it has a storied and local history. SF Ballet School Trainees will perform new choreography accompanied by live music from the Legion of Honor’s Spreckels Organ in the Rodin galleries and the Court of Honor on Saturday, November 9. This begins a yearlong collaborative programmatic season, which will start in spring 2025 with performances by the SF Ballet Orchestra, community pop-up dance classes in the summer at the Legion of Honor, and further crossover reciprocal programs coinciding with the museum’s “A Closer Look” lecture series.

Megan Lowe Dances aims to create stimulating perspective-shifting performances in spaces outside of the traditional stage theater. Known as a fiercely female choreographer of Chinese and Irish descent, Megan Lowe will begin a two-season residency at the Legion of Honor. In late summer 2025, open practices and rehearsals will offer an inside look at the process of choreographing, which will be followed with fall performances of the newly created works.

About the Legion of Honor 100

A century after the Legion of Honor’s founding by the tour de force Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, Adolph B. Spreckels, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco celebrate the Legion of Honor 100, a once-in-a-generation series of festivities commemorating the 1924 founding of the beloved San Francisco institution.

Yearlong centennial celebrations will highlight the distinctive histories, rich collections, and future aspirations of the Legion of Honor. Dedicated museum supporters and new audiences alike are invited to imagine the institution’s future, and how they might take part in it, through a series of exhibitions and public programs, as well as contribute to ambitious gifts-of-art and multiple endowment fundraising campaigns. Learn more at famsf.org/events/legion-honor-100.

About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, comprising the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, are the largest public arts institutions in San Francisco.

The Legion of Honor was modeled after the neoclassical Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. The museum, designed by George Applegarth, opened in 1924 on a bluff in Lincoln Park overlooking the Golden Gate. It offers unique insight into the art historical, political, and social movements of the previous 6,000 years of human history, with holdings including ancient art from the Mediterranean basin; European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts; and the largest collection of works on paper in the American West.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco occupy unceded land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, who are the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula. The greater Bay Area is also the ancestral territory of other Ohlone peoples, as well as the Miwok, Yokuts, and Patwin.

We acknowledge, recognize, and honor the Indigenous ancestors, elders, and descendants whose nations and communities have lived in the Bay Area over many generations and continue to do so today. We respect the enduring relationships that exist between Indigenous peoples and their homelands. We are committed to partnering with Indigenous communities to raise awareness of their legacy and engage with the history of the region, the impacts of genocide, and the dynamics of settler colonialism that persist.

Lincoln Park, where the Legion of Honor was founded in 1924, operated as City Cemetery from 1868 until 1898. When the park was created, many of the burials were relocated but the majority were not. Please join the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in honoring the memory of the thousands of individuals still buried on this land.

Media Contact

Press Office / press@famsf.org