Ray Bandar | Beth Cataldo • Art Projects

Save the Date: Free Screening of “Ray Bandar: A Life with Skulls” on January 31 Featured

When: Wednesday, 1/31/2018, 6:00 – 7:00pm
Where: Koret Auditorium
Main Library
100 Larkin St.

Doors open at 5:30pm.

He’s been called Dr. Bones and Reptile Ray. Usually dressed in tattered “field-trip” clothes, Ray Bandar was a fixture at the California Academy of Sciences and the beaches around the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 60 years.

Ray passed away peacefully in his home on December 23 of congestive heart failure. This showing is now a tribute to his life’s work.

“A Life with Skulls” captures Ray’s obsession for collecting skulls from local beaches, road kill, zoo animals and on field trips to Mexico, Australia and in the United States. This humorous movie investigates Bandar’s history as a skull collector, showing many of the thousands of skulls he has accumulated over the years, talking to Alkmene, his resilient wife, and touring the awe-inspiring Bone Palace.

“A Life with Skulls” is an inspiring look at a man who had a special tie to the natural world. You will be motivated to go out and explore it for yourself.

Screening followed by a Q&A with:

Beth Cataldo, Film director
Moe Flannery, Collections Manager of Birds and Mammals at the California Academy of Sciences

This is a Green Stacks event.

This is a Films & Videos program from SFPL. From feature films to youth-made videos, we’ve got something great to watch.

Bandar’s Bones Return Featured

On Thursday, May 16, the Skulls exhibit will open at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The exhibit features a collection of skulls that will provide a fascinating look into nature’s engineering while telling us all about the lifestyle of many animals.

Ray’s early apartment

Sea lion teeth

Ray with Pelvic Mask

Ray in Skull Palace

Perhaps as fascinating (if not more) is the story of the man who collected the majority of the skulls in this exhibit. At 86 years old, Ray Bandar has been collecting skulls for Cal Academy for more than 60 years. Many of the skulls he collected (approximately 7,000) are in his house in what he calls his Skull Palace, a basement room stacked high with bones and skulls. The exhibit will have a selection of those skulls along with hands-on activities for all ages.

My favorite part of the exhibit features a wall of sea lion skulls. The diversity of those skulls is remarkable as it tells the story of individual variation in one species. In front of that wall of sea lions is a video featuring Ray Bandar, much of it from my movie, Ray Bandar: A Life with Skulls, which I began back in 2003 when I first met Ray.

The inspiration for the movie occurred when I was on a backstage tour of the last Skulls exhibit at Cal Academy. During my tour, Ray told his bounty of tales with a boyish exuberance that I felt I needed to capture on video. He brought every skull to life with a tale: mammals dying because their horns locked when they were fighting, marine mammals with shotguns shells in their heads, how dogs represented man-made evolution and bears that had become obese on human food.

In search for a complete story about Ray’s passion, I interviewed his friends, colleagues and wife and followed him out on an excursion to collect the skull of a harbor porpoise. My own three-year journey with Ray would eventually turn into a 30-minute movie called Ray Bandar: A Life with Skulls, which was shown on PBS. You can buy the movie (with an hour of extras), from Amazon.com.

For more information see:
The California Academy of Sciences web site
KQED’s story on Ray Bandar