Nayland Blake's hot-colored new installation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Free!Love!Tool!Box!," celebrates sexual and artistic liberation as it played out in San Francisco during two culture-changing periods: the early 1960s, when the artist was a toddler in Manhattan and knew nothing of places like the storied South of Market leather bar called the Tool Box, and the early '90s, when the pioneering queer performance artist, as Chronicle Art Critic Kenneth Baker recently called him, was at the hub of the action.
"It was this moment that was post-ACT UP, post the activism coming out of the AIDS epidemic," said Blake, a warm, gray-bearded bear of a man who was busy mulling what to put where in this improvised project, which he calls a big installation with discrete parts. "There was this kind of flowering of a new sort of drag scene, a new art scene, an explosion of activity among a lot of queer people in San Francisco.
"The show tries to evoke those two moments," adds Blake, who was lit up by the famous 1964 Life magazine photograph of the Tool Box that figured prominently in Life's revealing spread on homosexuality in America. Many of the patrons in the photo, which Blake came across a few years ago, appear in the striking 1962 black and white mural Chuck Arnett painted on the wall behind the bar. Blake, who moved to Brooklyn in '96 but has remained a presence in museums and galleries here, has re-created the mural on a gigantic digital print on silk, which fills an entire wall at Yerba Buena.
The artist is also mixing things from his box of materials - plastic bags, an old wood bench and other discarded objects he found on the street outside his house, clown shoes, tutus, latex face casts and other things he's used in performances and sculptures - with personal objects from people at ancillary events whom the artist asked to bring something expressing freedom.
He's placing them on shelves on a canary-yellow wall (he chose the color because it had a psychedelic feel that suggested the free-loving hedonism of '60s San Francisco). A reading in the gallery last week yielded a self-published chapbook, and a studded dog collar in a red velvet-covered case.
Blake has also built some new things in the galleries. There's a hanging sign glowing with red and yellow bulbs that says "Tool Box" on one side and "Free Love!" on the other.
The actual Tool Box stood at Fourth and Harrison streets, a block from where the long-delayed Yerba Buena project would eventually rise, a connection not lost on Blake. It closed in '71 and the building was torn down. But the mural, which had been painted on a wall adjoining another building, was exposed and visible to drivers coming off Highway 101 until it was demolished a few years later.
"It's a piece of art that allowed guys to identify with something they only thought about in their heads before," Blake said, "and it counteracted the image of these people as freaks and losers. They're not tortured souls." He speaks of the moment in the early '60s when artists and "people in these sexual minorities" embraced the idea that "freeing yourself sexually would lead a kind of transformation of society. This photograph served as a kind of siren call to all these guys who were into leather, around the world, that San Francisco was a place you could go."
Blake, who hopes this show offers a taste of liberation, has also built a tall metal pole with crossbars, draped at the moment with chains made of black construction paper of the kind we all used in grade school.
"I was thinking of maypoles. I wanted to come up with something that would be like scaffolding," the artist said. "I like that it suggests a ship's mast and also a Christmas tree."
More: