“I always knew I was destined for something … I was so capable of the most immense fantasies.”
Fanny Renoir is a woman of mystery. She is one of North Beach’s local celebrities, one of the artists distinctly tied to her neighborhood and skeptical of the digital age. She cannot be emailed, she cannot be Facebooked, she can barely be found along Columbus Avenue. Her mystique did not come easy.
She was born in Fortuna in Humboldt county, California, to an Irish father and a Swiss-Italian mother, growing up among the trees. She is private about her early life, claiming it was marred by alcoholism in her dad and his side of the family, Catholicism and Fortuna’s smalltown “repression.”
In an interview with Keith Breitbach for his series Passport Podcast, Fanny is more candid about her father, telling Breitbach he built the house she grew up in and the men in her family worked in a mill; Breitbach calls her a “country bumpkin who fell off the turnip truck.” Her poems are conversational, and at times invoke her childhood. On a reading from April 16 at Bird & Beckett Books, she spoke of smoking in Arcata, and shed a tear during a poem about her mother’s gardening and beauty.
Of her early life she mentions a brother, a cathartic play written in the seventh grade and an intense yearning for something bigger and more bohemian than Fortuna had to offer. In high school she directed pep rally skits and was a contestant in the 1959 Miss Eureka pageant. Though she didn’t win, it was “one of the finest nights of all.”
She moved down to attend San Francisco State University at 18 later that year to pursue a degree in writing, which she completed in 10 years between state schools in San Francisco, San Diego and Humboldt. This first stint in the city was just shy of the Beatniks infiltration, whom she claims she didn’t even notice the first time around.
Upon returning north, Fanny married and had children, but this is also a period she is not interested in disclosing.
“I had a lot of negative experiences with males … I felt that a lot in life, being in a room with a male that you didn’t know what they were going to do next.”
Clarity seems to come with her move to North Beach, which she claims became her permanent home in February of 1984, after years of hitchhiking “back and forth three times across the country” to Tennessee, Arizona, New Orleans, and even Ken Kesey’s (of LSD fame) estate in Oregon.
She is a small woman, maybe 5 foot 1, and carries around a large tote bag full of papers, pieces of artwork, contact information, and in some cases, a ventriloquist doll missing its pants. Poetry is her first love, but she dabbles in painting, collage and most recently, songwriting and instrumental music.
Despite her insistence that she “doesn’t use the internet,” Fanny had a website once upon a time. The site is charming but outdated: Fanny lists “upcoming” poetry shows from 2011, her manuscript, music acts she recommends, and an entire page dedicated to “Friends of Fanny.” Her bio reads: Fanny Renoir: artist, writer, poet, director, producer, curator, entrepreneur.
Marsha Bellavance met Fanny in 2000, drawn to the anti-consumerist energy of North Beach which she believes is waning. In her eyes, Fanny has upheld many “Beat” traditions that are not being passed down to the next generation.
“In these whole 18 years, she has persevered in her art and her vision … anything that’s left of the scene should be celebrated,” she said.
Fanny lives in on the top floor of the Columbus Hotel, a single room occupancy hotel just around the corner from her watering hole, Caffe Trieste, where she gets the “Fanny special.” On a good day, it’s free.
Fanny’s room is a sunny, zealously-curated gallery of paintings, prints, collage, fabrics, posters, prose: point to anywhere on the wall and she knows whose work it is. Beneath the art, her room holds a sink, a piano, a chair, a small television, and a bed.
When she arrives at Caffe Trieste, there is always someone, scribbling on a notebook or tapping a tablet, who knows her and breaks their concentration. From the scarce footage that can be found of her online, she is almost never alone.
“I am these people. That’s the bottom line. I am my friends,” she said.
Jeff Giordano is a part-time filmmaker who met Fanny two years ago during the production of his documentary “Passion is the Money,” about the remaining North Beach artistic scene; the title is a line from one of Fanny’s poems. To him, Fanny is not just an artistic leader, but a visible inspiration.
“Over the course of the day, she can talk to 30 different people … she enjoys being visible everyday, making her rounds,” Giordano said, “she really is an artistic member of the community.”
One of these friends, Nancy Calef, helped her design the website. Like Fanny, Calef also came to North Beach for reinvention, leaving a toxic stage mother and child modeling career in the Bronx, New York, and then an artless ashram community to begin her artistic self-expression, which includes painting, sculpture, singing, songwriting and animation. Calef’s husband, Jody Weiner, left a criminal law career in Chicago to be a novelist.
“Fanny is a catalyst. She’s so stubborn about her independence and her ability to express herself,” Calef said.
“She’s prepared to die, for her goal, for her art,” Weiner added.
Fanny is busy right now. Next week will commemorate her 41st variety show curation at Live Worms gallery on Grant Avenue. Her last show was four 12-hour days with paintings, collage, needlework, jewelry, installations, musical performances and an Elvis impersonator, featuring works and performances by Calef and many others mentioned on her “Friends of Fanny” page. This one is expected to be even bigger.
North Beach Bugle 