Visions of Frisco: An Imaginative Depiction of San Francisco during the Gold Rush & The Barbary Coast Era
Visions of Frisco is a rollicking romp through the Gold Rush; a wild and wondrous ride along the Barbary Coast, with glimpses into raucous brothels, smoke-filled opium dens, and chaotic, carnivalesque streets. All of this is brought to life by Wilfried Satty's hallucinatory collages paired with eyewitness accounts. Fact and fantasy fuse to produce something closer to the true living legacy of this fabled era history as it exists in the imagination. --Susan Landauer, Author and curatorIn their collages the Dada and Surrealist artists used chance congeries to arrive at a paradoxical and, at times disturbing view of reality. Coming to San Francisco in 1961 as a young man Satty was amazed with life there during the Hippie counterculture. In time he turned to the picturesque history of the Barbary Coast in his wondrous collages. He found old books, photos, various historical illustrations and re-constituted them with great artistry into rich, inventive and often poignant images of this multi-layered city of a time long gone. Walter Medeiros, a close friend of the artist, has made his own collage of Satty's collages. He found texts, annals, eyewitness accounts and writings by many authors which can be related by the reader to the spellbinding pictures. The result is a visionary re-creation of a place that was called Frisco. --Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus, History of Art, University of California, BerkeleyFrancisco so vivid, so hauntingly real and compelling that they may transform forever our understanding of the city. San Francisco s history turbulent, raucous and always dramatic has swept up artists and writers since its earliest days, but surely no one has evoked the exuberance, squalor and bewildering diversity of 19th-century San Francisco life more richly than Satty in these collages. --Kate Regan, San Francisco Chronicle