Of Course There is a Gift Shoppe

It's nice to have friends in town, so you can take them around to the tourist spots you would not normally bother with. The DeYoung Museum has been re-open for more than a year and The Great Plotniks hadn't been inside yet. What a mistake that was.
Luckily, they and their friend Finch caught the tail end of the wonderful Ruth Ozawa exhibit downstairs. The way Ruth Ozawa uses hanging wire shapes along with their shadows as part of the whole presentation really opens your eyes to what is possible in sculpture. Ruth Ozawa is still alive too -- she lived up on Noe St. for many, many years.



Walk upstairs and you move from celebrating the peace of nature to chronicling how primitive people dress for war. The collection of New Guinea art is the largest Plotnik has ever seen, and by far the most interesting. This stuff usually bores him -- a mask here, a canoe there, a spear over there -- but the DeYoung's is no normal collection. Even Ducknik, who studied New Guinea Art at Ohio Waterfowl University, was bowled over.



Don't forget to walk upstairs to the Ninth Floor Observation Deck to look around. Of course there is a Gift Shoppe there. But the view is a different one than anywhere else in the city, and you don't have to buy the calendar or the coffee mug if you don't want to.