There’s plenty of beauty to enjoy this weekend in Balboa Park, at the San Diego Cactus and Succulent Society’s Winter Show and Sale!
The public is invited to check out tables full of amazing displays inside Room 101 of the Casa del Prado. There are jewel-like flowers, exotic species, and bizarre plant forms will make you look twice!
If you’d like to take a potted cactus or succulent home, there’s also a big sale in the Casa del Prado’s outdoor courtyard.
This evening, shoppers at the Fashion Valley mall enjoyed dragon and lion dances! It’s another fun celebration of the Lunar New Year in San Diego!
I swung by after work to experience the festive scene.
Members of the Southern Sea Dragon and Lion Dance Association performed near the center of the mall, then marched up and down past shops on the ground level, attracting a crowd of onlookers.
Drums and cymbals followed the energetic procession. Kids were delighted. Dollar bills were being placed into lion mouths to bring good luck in the new year. One small lion was aglow with colored lights!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
There’s a fascinating exhibition now showing at the La Jolla Historical Society’s Wisteria Cottage Gallery. San Diego artists, after viewing artifacts in the La Jolla Historical Society’s archives, have created pieces that are inspired and informed by the past. The exhibition is titled Memory Traces: Artists Transform the Archive.
I visited the gallery inside the historic Wisteria Cottage yesterday. It’s free to the public and worth the time if you’re curious about local history or the creative process–or philosophy.
According to the La Jolla Historical Society’s description here: The exhibition draws its title from a 1925 essay by Sigmund Freud, in which he explored the way remembrance functions . . . The exhibition proposes that the archives’ contemporary value may, in fact, lie in its malleability . . . for critique, for expanding understandings of experience and of history, for transformation, and the creation of new narratives…
As I walked about looking at the pieces, I could see how this world we live in is a continuum, where past, present and future are entangled and inseparable, not unlike all the moments in our own lives.
I took photos of two examples of the artwork…
Historical photo of Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida’s sculpture Our Father’s House, installed in La Jolla Village in 1989 as part of an outdoor art exhibition. A study for a larger work later installed in Guernica, Spain, honoring lives lost during the Spanish Civil War.their father’s house, by artist Joe Yorty, 2022. A wood replica with photos and newspaper clippings concerning the building, movement and destruction of local buildings. An homage to past lives, including the artist’s own father.Cloth banner with words Matinee Today that was once used at La Jolla’s historic Granada Theatre.Matinee Today, by artist Allison Wiese, 2021. Photos of material from the past being used in present life in many different ways. The past persists. Nothing ever truly goes away.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
It’s a brand new month! Time to look back five years!
In February 2017, Cool San Diego Sights featured a variety of interesting photographs. Looking back, I see that my first old (now retired) PowerShot camera was particularly busy at several sports related events.
There was the 2nd Annual Ocean Beach Pier Surf Classic, the big Celebrate San Diego event at Petco Park that promoted many of our city’s sports teams, and the Celebration of Champions at the Elite Athlete Training Center in Chula Vista.
I’ve assembled the following blog posts from February 2017. Some of my photography wasn’t the greatest years ago, but you still might enjoy traveling back in time!
To enjoy photographs from five years ago, click the following links…
This blog now features thousands of photos around San Diego! Are you curious? There’s lots of cool stuff to check out!
Here’s the Cool San Diego Sights main page, where you can read the most current blog posts. If you’re using a phone or small mobile device, click those three parallel lines up at the top–that opens up my website’s sidebar, where you’ll see the most popular posts, a search box, and more!
To enjoy future posts, you can also “like” Cool San Diego Sights on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.
A very popular, family friendly Lunar New Year Festival is being held this weekend in City Heights!
I walked down to Officer Jeremy Henwood Memorial Park today where the annual event, hosted by the Little Saigon Foundation of San Diego, is being held.
It’s 2022 . . . the Year of the Tiger. Look what I saw!
If you’re in San Diego and want to enjoy a free Tet festival that celebrates Vietnamese culture and features lots of yummy food, beautiful Lunar New Year displays, lion and dragon dances, games, folk dance, and much more, head over to City Heights on Sunday! See details here.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
During the ups and downs of this long COVID-19 pandemic, Old Town San Diego State Historic Park’s indoor museums have been mostly closed. But I learned today that outdoor “Hidden History Talks” are now being held free to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 2 pm.
There are several interesting locations in the State Park where the talks might be held, including the courtyard of the Casa de Estudillo and the donkey pen behind Seeley Stable. Visitors to the park should watch for signs indicating where that day’s free history talk will be.
Today I sat on a bench in the beautiful Casa de Estudillo garden and listened to a California State Parks employee talk about the remarkable biodiversity in San Diego, which is partly attributed to the importation of plants and trees by Spanish missionaries, settlers, traders, and early civic visionaries like Kate Sessions.
The garden at the Casa de Estudillo is a sort of microcosm of this biodiversity.
Trees and shrubs were pointed out on all sides, and explanations were made of why they had been planted here–many a century and a half ago. Curious eyes turned this way and that at the mention of pepper and olive trees, pomegranates, and loquat, mulberry, pecan and walnut trees. And many others!
Among the things we learned was that small pepper trees from Spain, newly planted around Old Town’s plaza, had to be protected from roaming cattle. A century and a half later those pepper trees are huge and beautiful!
Everything we learned was fascinating.
I was told that eventually the normal walking tours should return to Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, but it all depends on the COVID-19 pandemic’s trajectory and public health orders.
If you’d like an idea of what the regular one hour walking tours are like, click here!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Events that I recorded five years ago seem to have happened yesterday. It’s time to review some of the more interesting things I photographed back in January 2017!
I documented a visit to the Well Fargo History Museum in Old Town. Unfortunately, this museum was closed down by Wells Fargo. I’m told the Colorado House building which the museum occupied will be repurposed–possibly to showcase clothing worn during the early days of San Diego. I’m looking forward to that!
I also took photos of several festive events, including that year’s MLK Day Parade, Mormon Battalion Commemoration Day, and San Diego Tet Festival in Mira Mesa.
If you’d like to revisit fascinating old posts on Cool San Diego Sights, click the upcoming links!
This blog now features thousands of photos around San Diego! Are you curious? There’s lots of cool stuff to check out!
Here’s the Cool San Diego Sights main page, where you can read the most current blog posts. If you’re using a phone or small mobile device, click those three parallel lines up at the top–that opens up my website’s sidebar, where you’ll see the most popular posts, a search box, and more!
To enjoy future posts, you can also “like” Cool San Diego Sights on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.
Two galleries at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park feature slashed, defaced and vandalized landscape photographs. The title of the exhibition is Disestablishment.
Galleries 14 and 15, freely accessible to the public from the May S. Marcy Sculpture Court (home of Panama 66), are filled with this disquieting artwork.
San Diego artist John Raymond Mireles took photographs of natural beauty at areas once part of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments in Southern Utah, then invited people to hammer upon, cut, scratch and pen graffiti on each piece. This intentional damage is said to represent how the land can now be exploited for oil drilling and coal mining.
Like much contemporary art with a political message, these not-so-subtle pieces aim to shock the viewer. Learn more about Disestablishment, on view until January 30, 2022, at the SDMA website here.
Here are a couple more examples…
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Today I stepped through a door and found myself somewhere between Heaven and Earth.
The fine art exhibition, titled Between Heaven and Earth, filled Gallery 21 in Balboa Park’s Spanish Village Art Center. Canvases on the gallery walls flowed with shadows, mists and dimly seen forms. The San Diego artist who ushered these visions into existence is Catherine Carlton.
Her more mysterious pieces seem to blend earthly scenes with a sense of their spiritual essence. Her creations evoke a subtle emotional response–a feeling that there is more to this world than what meets the eye. Some of her pieces include sacred symbols or bits of verse.
I particularly loved her art made with layered wax containing pigment. Images of rain, lightning, and natural landscapes are ethereal, fluid, and alive. You can see an example in my next photograph.
Catherine Carlton creates this sublime beauty in her art studio at Liberty Station. She particularly loves to produce commercial art, and has painted murals for various local restaurants..
If you’d like to see more of her work, visit her website here!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Do you live in San Diego? Do you love adventure, the outdoors, and exciting new challenges? If so, then listen up!
You now have the rare opportunity to learn to sail one of the world’s most famous tall ships, the Star of India! Not to mention other amazing sailing ships belonging to the Maritime Museum of San Diego, such as the replica Spanish galleon San Salvador, and the official tall ship of the State of California: Californian!
The classes are free but require an annual museum membership, which for most individuals is a mere fifty dollars. If I didn’t work full time, I’d seriously consider signing up!
I saw the following sign on the Embarcadero today. As it says, many people dream of this opportunity. The orientation is coming up this Wednesday, January 5, so quickly inform anyone you know who might be interested!
You can also learn more by visiting this page on the Maritime Museum of San Diego’s website!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Cool San Diego Sights! 