Who Has a Say in the Flood of Public Art Coming to San Francisco?

People who make public art are the first to tell you that it is not a speedy process.

It took eight long years for Jesse Schlesinger’s Pacific Transit to come to fruition in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, where the San Francisco Arts Commission installed his 10 bronze, stone and cast-concrete sculptures in February.

“As challenging as those years were — and on occasion they intensely pushed the limits of my patience and were totally exasperating,” he says, “in the end, and what kept me at it, was that I would be afforded the opportunity to make work of this scale.”

With the SFAC commission came requirements for permanence and durability in a coastal environment. Both he and SFAC staff worked hard to reach out to and get buy-in from the neighborhood’s residents and small businesses, who in turn helped keep the project alive during the years of delays.

In stark contrast, the Sijbrandij Foundation has managed to place temporary public art around San Francisco with great speed. Since late 2024, the nonprofit established by billionaire Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder of GitLab, has funded eight pieces of “big art,” and plans to install another dozen along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront by the end of 2025.

Last week, the foundation and Mayor Daniel Lurie announced the launch of a “Big Art Loop” around the city, aiming to install up to 100 pieces of temporary large-scale public art over the next three years. Many of those pieces, inevitably, will be leftovers from Burning Man. “We’re fans of big art in general,” Sijbrandij told KQED, “but of course, yes, in San Francisco, a lot of the big art people make does visit Burning Man.”

With this project, the Sijbrandij Foundation and the art agency Building 180, which oversees curation and operations, will radically alter the aesthetic and physical landscape of San Francisco. And they’ll do it with little to no oversight from the arts commission tasked by our city charter with the approval of all public artworks.

In other words: A billionaire aims to display 100 pieces of large-scale art around the city, which he’s allowed to do simply because he’s paying for it. And the city of San Francisco isn’t saying no to him.

‘Time to consider that public process’

To be clear, the Sijbrandij Foundation and Building 180 have gone about the Big Art Loop project through legal channels, completely by the book. The project’s first temporary art installations at Sunset Dunes, in Golden Gate Park and at Embarcadero Plaza were all accomplished in partnership with the Recreation and Parks department, and passed through the Art Commission for approval.

The newest Sijbrandij-funded installation, Dana Albany’s Coralee, a recycled metal and glass mermaid, is situated at Pier ½, on Port of San Francisco property. It and the 11 pieces to come, stretching from Fisherman’s Wharf to Heron’s Head Park, were approved by the Port’s executive director, per the Port’s Public Art Program.

But just because the Big Art Loop team has found a way to install large-scale sculpture in public spaces by going through city agencies that don’t specialize in art, doesn’t mean it should.

Sijbrandij told KQED that the project was partially inspired by how much big art is not on display. “It gets built, these amazing pieces, and they’re sitting around in storage,” he said. “When I learned that, I was like, ‘Let’s get them out of storage and get them into the city so that they can enrich people’s days.’”

Jill Manton, a public art professional and the former director of the SFAC’s Public Art Trust and Special Initiatives, believes the city could use more temporary public art. “I think there’s great benefits on many levels,” she told KQED, “to introducing art to the public in a way that they don’t feel like, ‘Wow, I don’t really love this. I have to live with it forever.’”

Manton wrote the 2012 legislation that created the city’s Public Art Trust, which allows private developers to put their 1%-for-art requirement into a funding pool in lieu of installing publicly accessible art themselves. The trust can pay for temporary or permanent public art, for the conservation of the Civic Art Collection, or can be made available to eligible cultural nonprofits for public-facing programs or capital improvements.

Most recently, the trust paid for the temporary installation of Thomas J. Price’s As Sounds Turn to Noise, a 9-foot-tall statue of a young Black woman in jogging gear, right where Coralee is now placed. It’s worth noting that Price’s piece, loaned by Hauser & Wirth gallery, wouldn’t meet the size requirements of the Big Art Loop, which wants work over 10 feet in height or width. The Big Art Loop is not going for subtlety; it seeks to interrupt the visual landscape and stop people in their tracks.

Manton says she didn’t get to install nearly as much temporary public artwork as she would have liked during her tenure. Certain established sites in the city — the Civic Center, Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley — have been the most common destinations for temporary sculpture. She also explains that many of the pieces the SFAC installed over the years did not go through a period of public feedback, due to their temporary nature. “For better or worse,” she says, “we didn’t hold open public meetings about the next big project coming to Civic Center.”

“Now when I hear about a program like the Big Art Loop, where they’ve mapped out multiple locations, I think it’s time to consider that public process,” Manton says. “Because it’s not an occasional, every few years, every five years or something like that. It’s occurring with regular frequency now.”

Schlesinger shares that sentiment. “I wish that some of these [Big Art Loop pieces] were going through the vetting process that I went through,” he says, even if these works are only installed for six months to a year. With the massive volume of artwork planned, “It just feels a little bit like a slippery slope.”

We’re already witnessing that slippery slope. Marco Cochrane’s R-Evolution was placed in Embarcadero Plaza in April for a period of six months, with the option to extend its installation up to a year. The piece was quietly extended by Recreation and Parks through March 2026, as first reported by SF Standard. A city spokesperson told KQED it could stay for even longer, pending approval by Recreation and Parks and the SFAC.

Meanwhile, the Building 180 team says securing public buy-in for Big Art Loop installations has been a challenge. “What we would love to learn from you is how do we get more feedback from the community?” the Building 180 account wrote to this reporter over Instagram. “No one shows up to commission meetings or community meetings anymore, we do outreach, flyers, show up to panels and no one responds. Except on social media?”

One agency that does have experience in this regard is — you guessed it — the SFAC.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel

When the SFAC is involved in a piece of public art, a staff of arts professionals — trained curators, many of them — works with community members and neighborhood groups to spread the word about the project. An ad hoc review panel that includes project stakeholders evaluates proposals. The mayoral-appointed Visual Arts Committee and ultimately the full Arts Commission weigh in. And most importantly, an announced period of public feedback allows for in-person and written comment.

In the case of the renovation of the Chinatown Public Health Center, rigorous outreach via community groups was crucial to the decision to remove Patti Bowler’s 1970 Dragon Relief from the building’s Broadway-facing façade — a sculpture that, incidentally, was installed without any say-so from the neighborhood’s residents.

Could the Sijbrandij Foundation direct its Big Art Loop funding to the Public Art Trust, earmark it for large-scale temporary sculpture and let the SFAC do what they do best? Manton says that unfortunately, the Public Art Trust isn’t currently set up to receive private donations — just funds from eligible private developers. But there’s no reason that legislation couldn’t change.

She also points to ArtCare, a nonprofit that can receive donations towards the upkeep of the Civic Art Collection. Such funds helped restore Keith Haring’s Untitled (Three Dancing Figures) in 2012 outside Moscone Center. Perhaps its scope could be expanded to receive funds from the Sijbrandij Foundation for temporary public artworks.

If Mayor Lurie really wants to make the Big Art Loop a successful public-private partnership, why not utilize existing city expertise and remunerate city staffers for their time in the process? The only downsides I can think of are that the project might move slower (not necessarily a bad thing) and Building 180 wouldn’t get to pick all the art.

Instead, we have private money funding large-scale art of its own choosing in some of San Francisco’s most iconic public spaces. The Big Art Loop, unlike the SFAC, is not tasked with the responsibility of displaying artworks that reflect “diversity in style, scale, media, and artistic sources as well as diverse cultural communities and perspectives.” The Big Art Loop looks for existing work only, which artists created with their own funds or fundraised towards — a prohibitive up-front expense for so many.

What happens when the Big Art Loop runs out of Port and Recreation and Parks properties to place its 100 pieces on? For the loop to be truly equitable, it needs to spread its gift of temporary public art beyond established scenic destinations.

As for the public’s role as the recipient of these gifts — let your appreciation or criticisms of this project be known in tangible ways. Email or call Recreation and Parks, the Port of San Francisco, the SFAC, Building 180 and the Sijbrandij Foundation. Tell them what you think of the Big Art Loop, which will be occupying your public space for the next three years.

Oct. 7: A previous version of this story mis-titled Jesse Schlesinger’s public artwork.