Artist with Berkeley Roots Relates Albany Bulb Art Story

The "wild" art on the Albany Bulb – sprouting over the past 20 years free of official oversight – got its start, in a sense, with a "homeless navy," according to one of the chief artists, Osha Neumann.

Many people know about Mad Marc’s Castle and the large wood-and-metal figure on the north shore with outstretched arms that looks like a beseeching woman or perhaps a Biblical prophet.

But few know how it all got started.

The emergence of the Bulb as an uncensored people’s gallery for do-it-yourself art can be traced back to the arrival of homeless people in a variety of boats at the Bulb in the early '90s, Neumann said on a two-hour "Art Tour" of the Bulb Saturday afternoon.

Neumann, a Berkeley-based attorney as well as an artist, created the beseeching woman and nearly all the other large wood-and-metal sculptures with his son-in-law, Jason DeAntonis, a designer, builder and illustrator who lives in Berkeley. 

The "homeless navy" boats broke up, and their planking became the canvases and frames for a group of four artists – collectively known as Sniff – who had gone to the Bulb originally to do sketches, Neumann said. Once there, they put down their sketch pads and abandoned themselves to their imaginations in painting on the large flat pieces of broken boats and the many slabs of concrete that were randomly dumped as part of the construction debris that created the Albany Bulb as a bayfill peninsula in the first place.

The large number of Sniff works – created between 1998-2003 by Scott Hewitt, Scott Meadows, Bruce Rayburn and David Ryan – have largely disappeared, victims of graffiti and the elements, except for four faded paintings on wood that have been preserved and propped up for viewing on a bluff on the Bulb's south side.

But their legacy remained in the inspiration it gave others.

When he first saw what Sniff was doing, Neumann said, the thrill of discovery was similar to the experience of someone who suddenly finds unknown cave art, he said.

"I was completely amazed," he said. The Sniff paintings combined elements of carnival sideshows, burlesque and "crazy Bosch and Bruegel paintings," Neumann said. "They had naked people doing naked people things."

"I just thought this was fantastic stuff," said Neumann, who designed the large, well-known mural painted in 1976 at Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue depicting the political upheavals of Berkeley in the '60s.

And he was equally enthralled with the artistic freedom to be found in an untamed space.

"Anybody could come here and make art, and make art without that dead hand of authority hanging over you," he said.

So in 1999, Neumann began adding to the Bulb artworks by creating his own works made from the large pieces of styrofoam that had formed the dock for the homeless people's boats, he said. 

And although styrofoam as a substance may last for hundreds of years, art made from styrofoam proved far less enduring. So in 2002, he and DeAntonis began working together on the large sculptures on the north shore made largely from wood, metal and other debris that was available at the Bulb. 

Their works include the supplicating figure with outstretched arms, the dragon, the tall thin man, the three seated figures and the seated thin man holding a shovel, who reminds some people of Don Quixote.

"We didn't give them names," Neumann said.

Referring to the seated thin man, he said, "Some think it looks like Don Quixote, but he never had a shovel."

Did he have a gender in mind when the supplicating figure was made? Both Neumann and DeAntonis said they thought of it as a woman. DeAntonis also was on the tour, which drew about 30 people at its peak.

Their statues have not survived unmolested. The beseeching woman blew down in a storm, but before the artists returned to lift her back up, someone else had already put her in place.

"People have definitely been maintaining them," he said. "They've lasted a lot longer than I expected."

Asked by a member of tour how he feels about those who add things to the sculptures or change them, Neumann acknowledged that he has mixed feelings.

The dragon was once deliberately knocked down by a Bible-toting Bulb Christian who had placed a prominent white cross at the end of a jetty that runs from the Bulb into the Bay, Neumann said. 

Neumann and others who didn't like the cross asked him to remove it, but he refused. After the cross was removed by persons unknown, the Bible-carrying man knocked down some of the sculptures, including the dragon and its rider, which he said represented the "Beast of the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon," Neumann said. 

Neumann also described the role of the infamous Laci Peterson murder in bringing a halt to Sniff's work at the Bulb in 2003. Peterson's body was found washed ashore in April that year at Point Isabel in Richmond, near the Bulb. Her husband, Scott Peterson, was later convicted of the crime, but before the trial, Scott Peterson's attorney, Mark Geragos, tried to deflect suspicion to a "Satanic cult on the Albany Bulb" and called a press conference where he cited Sniff paintings with severed heads as evidence, Neumann said. 

The allegation "created a media tsunami," which, combined with other tensions in the Sniiff group, ended the Sniff era at the Bulb, he said.

A number of other people have added their own artworks to the Bulb over the years, including a nearly life-sized metal samurai and a small gargoyle figure made of barbed wire. Many have left small paintings and graffiti art on rocks and concrete slabs.

Among the most famous creations on the Bulb is a concrete building known as "Mad Mark's Castle," which even has its own page on Google Maps. During the Saturday tour, Bulb resident Amber Whitson said it should be spelled, "Mad Marc's Castle," since the person who built it in 1999-2000, Marc Mattonen, spells his first name with a "c." He still lives at the Bulb (not in the castle), and is the only person who managed to avoid the 1999 eviction of the homeless people living on the Bulb at that time, Whitson said.

Whitson and Neumann said the castle – which has partly collapsed – was built with many kinds of symbolism in its design, including of portions shaped like the four suits of cards – heart, club, diamond and spade – as well as allusions to figures from children's culture such as "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and Horton Hears a Who! 

Neumann said it's filled with "endless spiraling messages." An inscribed stone on the ground next to the path to the structure says, "Fairy Castle 2000."

Although the City of Albany has said the artworks are exempt from the Bulb eviction and clean-up of encampments, Neumann said he's not optimistic about their fate when the city realizes its longstanding goal of handing over control of the Bulb to the East Bay Regional Park District to supervise as part of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park.

Tour part of "Resistance Festival"

The art tour had a definite political context. It was one of the scheduled events in a four-day "No Thanks Resistance Festival" held over the Thanksgiving weekend and staged by Share the Bulb members and other opponents of the City of Albany's planned eviction of the illegal encampments on the Bulb.

Neumann, working with the East Bay Community Law Center, is one of 11 attorneys named as representing the plaintiffs in a Nov. 13 federal lawsuit filed against the city seeking to block the eviction.

The art tour ended with a work completed in March, a letter of more than 1,000 words, written in black paint on white background on nine slabs of concrete and titled, "An Open Letter from a Bulb resident to visitors." 

The letter – an appeal for empathy for and understanding of Bulb residents – was a collaborative Bulb effort, written by a Bulb dweller named Kelly who is now in Canada, Whitson said.

Whitson read the entire letter aloud, and her voiced was choked by tears as she neared the end.

Patch dropped by the "No Thanks Resistance Festival" on two afternoons, Friday and Saturday, and both times attendance appeared relatively light. Half a dozen people were hanging out near the entrance to the Bulb during the Friday visit, and the same number were participating in a workshop Saturday led by Elliot Hughes, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, also known as the Wobblies. Hughes said later the workshop title was "Towards an Ecological General Strike: The IWW Environmental Unionist Caucus, Green Bans, and Green Unionism."

Event organizers said a larger gathering was expected late Saturday when several bands were to perform in the amphitheater.

Hughes criticized the temporary homeless shelter set up by the city next to the Bulb, saying its cramped quarters and strict rules made it resemble a prison.

"If you look at pictures of bunks at San Quentin, it looks identical to this homeless shelter," he said. The shelter opened Nov. 22 and had no clients the first four nights, while one person stayed on the fifth night, according to the city.

Hughes also said that if the Bulb residents give up their makeshift shelters and tents on the Bulb and move into the shelter, they'll have nowhere to go when the shelter closes. The city said it will be open six months.

"If people come there and start depending on it, and they buy into it, then they're going to end up with no place to go," he said.

The city's "Transition Plan" for the shelter includes not just the shelter but also work with the Berkeley Food & Housing Project and other agencies to offer help to Bulb dwellers in finding alternative housing. Whether the efforts have been successful and have been given enough time are topics of debate.

Bulb background

For more information on the city's plan for the Albany Bulb and protests by opponents of the eviction, see our list of recent Patch articles and reader posts about the issue:

• News Articles & Community Posts about Albany Bulb

Published Dec. 1, 2013, 10:41 p.m.; updated Dec. 2, 1:43 p.m.

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