There there.

Next week, San Francisco MOMA opens an exhibition of modern art once in the collection of Gertrude Stein and her brothers. 

For those who don’t know about Gertrude Stein’s collecting of modern paintings: Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec ..., and the salon she held at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, befriending and hosting the cultural, literary, and artistic avant-garde, and American expatriates—she is credited for coining the term the “Lost Generation”— Stein is probably most well-remembered by her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, through Toklas’s Cookbook with her famous—or infamous—fudge recipe, and through Stein’s own aphorisms including her best known “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Stein is well known in Oakland for another aphorism, one that has been interpreted as a put-down of her childhood city—and of American cities in general. After years of living in Paris, Stein and her life companion, Toklas, were in the U.S. on a speaking tour. When she visited Oakland, her childhood house was no longer there, her neighborhood was not there, everything had changed. No wonder she wrote—in her own inimitable style— "... there is no there there."

Many of us can relate, as we move around in our lives and find Stein was right. No there there.

For a long time, before we all got smarter, before we could check things on the internet, those not in the know, especially those—and I was once one of them—who live across the Bay to the West, said that it means there’s nothing in Oakland.

The statement used to play havoc with Oakland’s sense of inferiority. But now we just play with Stein’s statement. We like to think we know what she meant.

A handful of years ago, Berkeley, the college town to the north of Oakland, decided to commission some works of public art at various sites where the border of Berkeley meets the borders of the cities surrounding it: El Cerrito, Albany, Emeryville. At the junction of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and Adeline Street, just about one-tenth of a mile from the Oakland border, a sculpture in letters eight feet high spells out two words: HERE and THERE.

The artists, Steve Gillman and Katherine Keefer, meant it playfully. They said it refers to the literary heritage of the area. To the best of my memory, no one in Oakland objected. Yet, just before the sculpture was about to be installed, a controversy arose in Berkeley. Some of the city council members and at least one member of  the arts commission feared the sculpture was meant to signify the superiority of Berkeley over its neighbor. One council person even proposed adding more words and changing the message to: Here, There, and Everywhere. Nice. But not Stein, and without local historic and geographic significance. 

        But that's public art for you, always controversial, even when it isn't.