Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:00:47] I’m Ericka Cruz-Gavara and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. So there’s this very large public art installation that’s become a staple of my commute to and from work. It’s this 45 foot tall metal statue of a woman, a very fit and naked woman called R-Evolution, which was installed in front of the Ferry Building in San Francisco in April. Turns out, it’s part of a billionaire-backed effort to install 100 temporary large-scale art pieces like this around the city in the next three years.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:01:36] I cannot overstate how much more public art that would be than we would normally see. Essentially what we’re seeing is our public space being leased out to someone who can afford to fill that space and choose the art that goes into it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:01:58] Today, the flood of public art that’s coming to San Francisco, whether you like it or not.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:02:14] Sarah, I feel like people may have noticed a lot of new public art popping up around San Francisco. Can you walk me through some of the examples of that that you’ve been seeing in the past year?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:02:26] We can start at the southern end of the Great Highway, where there are now two tall metal giraffes. That’s a new piece of temporary public art.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:02:38] Sarah Hotchkiss is senior editor of Arts and Culture for KQED.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:02:44] If you move up the Great Highway, there is a 10-ton spinning rock in the center of what used to be the highway. Then if you went through Golden Gate Park, there’s a ton of new stuff. The latest and the biggest is Naga, which is this sea serpent that’s installed in Rainbow Falls Pond along JFK Drive. And then if you went to the ferry building you would see this 45 foot tall mesh statue of a nude woman called Revolution that stands there in Embarcadero Plaza. And the latest is a 18-foot-long mermaid statue that is installed just next to the Ferry Building at Pier One Half that was made by Dana Albany. It’s made out of recycled metal and glass.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:03:36] What do these pieces of artwork have in common, would you say?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:03:39] They are all enormous. Some are bigger than others, obviously 45 feet. Tall is quite large. Naga, I believe, is 100 feet long. So that’s quite large, but yeah, they’re all at least over 10 feet in one direction.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:03:56] And I guess what has the reaction to these artworks been?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:04:03] The reaction has been very mixed. Some people are very excited, especially people who may have seen this work before. Some of it has been at Burning Man. They’ve seen it on the Playa. They’re very excited to see it again. I’ve heard that Naga in Golden Gate Park is a real hit with the kids. But then there are people who are like, hey, why, how did this end up in my public space? This is not my idea of site-specific artwork. It has no relationship to the setting that it is now in. And I also heard nothing about this happening before it arrived here.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:04:44] Yeah, let’s get into that a little bit more, Sarah, because that really has been the, it seems like the driving questions of your reporting. What exactly is driving all these new installations that we’re seeing around the city?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:04:57] Yeah, so everything I mentioned was funded either totally or in part by the Sijbrandij Foundation, which is a private philanthropic organization founded by Sid Sebrandy and his wife. Sid was the former CEO of GitLab, and I believe he is a billionaire. The Sijbrandij Foundation has spent $2 million so far to place eight pieces of public art, large-scale temporary art, in spots around San Francisco. The city is not paying for this. The Sijbrandij foundation leases the art and pays to install and eventually, I assume, de-install it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:05:42] And this is all part of a project that they’re calling the Big Art Loop. How do they talk about the rationale behind this project?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:05:51] The Big Art Loop is a name that came out with the installation of The Mermaid, the Dana Albany piece, and the idea is to place up to a hundred pieces of big art, that’s what they call it, so over ten feet in one direction, around the city of San Francisco over the next three years. It’s an enormous project. Literally. In all directions. They’ve done eight so far. There’s another 12 planned to be installed along the city’s waterfront before the end of 2025. So that’ll bring us to 20. And then they’re going to continue working their way around the city.
Daniel Lurie: [00:06:31] All right, we’re here at the big art loop. We have eight pieces up. There’s going to be 100 around the city in the coming.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:06:38] Mayor Daniel Lurie is very excited about this. He joined on with the announcement of the mermaid on the waterfront and he thinks that arts and culture is gonna bring San Francisco back.
Daniel Lurie: [00:06:51] We’re going to continue to lean into our arts and culture, because that is driving our comeback here in San Francisco. Let’s go, San Francisco!
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:07:00] Why do this, Sarah, and why do these art pieces have to be so big?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:07:07] So Sid Sijbrandij has spoken about why big art and he really wants to interrupt the urban landscape and create something that is going to draw people in specifically for selfie opportunities.
Sid Sijbrandij: [00:07:22] Social media has become the new passport stamp. You used to show people where you went with your passport, maybe your luggage tags. Today, you post on Instagram.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:07:32] He talks about the being in Chicago that is such a great representation of what you can achieve with large scale art. And he’s really looking at scale as a way to monopolize space.
Sid Sijbrandij: [00:07:52] We think that big art can help people to know about a place and want to visit it, making a place more visually desirable and exciting.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:08:07] We’ll have more with KQED’s Sarah Hotchkiss right after this. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:08:50] Sarah, how different is what the Sijbrandij Foundation is doing? How different is this process from how public art usually gets installed in San Francisco?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:09:02] So the main difference between what the Big Art Loop is and what the city usually does is that these are temporary installations. They are not short-term though, so they’re looking to install these pieces for a year, usually at minimum. Our evolution or revolution at the Ferry Building has just been extended until March, 2026 and could be extended for longer. Sijbrandij Foundation and the Bigart Loop, they’re are looking for pre-existing works. So someone had the ability to make a 45 foot tall sculpture, whether from their own funds or from fundraising, but they had access to those resources. So that is a major difference. You’re drawing from a finite pool of people who make big art. And often in the Bay Area, the people making big art are making it for Burning Man. That is not exclusively where this art is coming from, but it is a measure factor in what’s showing up in our spaces. And the way that they are able to place these in public space is that because they’re paying for it, because it’s temporary, they go through agencies like the Port of San Francisco, which has control over the waterfront, or Recreation and Parks, which governs our parks. And they offer those agencies these pieces of art, and those agencies say, sounds great, we don’t have to pay for it. Beautiful things that will draw people, great. Which is. Very different from how we would usually see public art appear. It would go through an open call process. There would be an ad hoc review committee that was made up of various stakeholders, maybe neighborhood residents, someone from the Public Utilities Commission, arts professionals. And then there would be a period of public feedback.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:10:57] It sounds like that’s a huge part of what makes what the Sobrandi Foundation is doing so different is that that lack of public input. And I know you talked with an artist who went the traditional way and it took him a long time to put his art in public. Can you tell me a little bit more about Jesse?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:11:18] I talked to an artist named Jesse Schlesinger about his experience of installing permanent public artwork in the outer sunset.
Jesse Schlesinger: [00:11:25] To start with the positive, the benefits are really that there was ample opportunity for input from the public.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:11:34] He had a piece that was finally installed this year, but it was an eight year long project.
Jesse Schlesinger: [00:11:41] As challenging as those eight years were and they were on occasion like sort of pushed the limits of my patience in the end and what kept me at it was the possibility that I would be able to make a work of this scale.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:11:56] He was originally commissioned to make a piece of public art that could serve as seating at the end due to turnaround in the outer sunset. But over the years, street planning didn’t happen the way it was supposed to. Different schedules conflicted, and so it really took him and the Arts Commission and then everyone who had gotten really invested in this project, like the local businesses and the neighbors, to push it through.
Jesse Schlesinger: [00:12:22] Walking the neighborhood where my work would be installed and introducing it to all of the businesses and telling them about the project. And partially as a consequence of that process, it felt like there was real buy-in from the neighborhood.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:12:38] It ultimately became slightly different from his original plan, but we now have this piece of beautiful permanent public art in the outer sunset.
Jesse Schlesinger: [00:12:49] It really does feel immensely rewarding to see children interacting with the work out there and people walk by it. After all of those efforts, having it realized in that way is really a gift.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:13:07] That makes me really curious then about what Jesse thinks, about what the Sibrandi Foundation is doing and what they’re able to do.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:13:16] Yeah, Jesse, even though he went through this eight-year-long process to achieve his public art, thinks that some of the same rigor and vetting should be applied to the artwork that we’re starting to see with the big art loop. And I think it’s a matter of the time frame, like this is all happening so quickly, and the scale. A hundred pieces.
Jesse Schlesinger: [00:13:40] I think that if like real care and consideration is applied to the process that it can really benefit the city and I think stop-gap solutions like this maybe are not the optimal approach to that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:13:57] I guess, do you think then that this should just all be done differently?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:14:02] Personally, yes, from my very opinionated point of view, I believe there needs to be public oversight for a project of this scale. Essentially what we’re seeing is public space being leased out to someone who can afford to fill that space. With the Big Art Loop, we’re not really getting any information about how they’re choosing these pieces, how they are addressing issues of diversity, either in the mediums that are being shown, the content, the esthetics, the diversity of the artists being represented. They do have some stats about, you know, local versus international, men and women. But when you’re talking about a hundred pieces, it’d be nice to know what is your rationale for choosing these pieces. Can we see that up front? I do recognize that this is a gift. It’s meant very generously. But I think that there’s a little bit of what we’ve seen in other parts of San Francisco where someone comes in to supposedly fix a problem, hurries something through, we become the beta testing ground of that product, whether it’s a piece of technology or something that’s gonna shake up our infrastructure.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:15:29] A driverless car.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:15:30] Perhaps, and then it doesn’t work, and they’re kind of problem solving on the ground, and we are experiencing the herky-jerky-ness of them figuring that out in real time. And I just think the stated goal of 100 pieces, I cannot overstate how much more public art that would be than we would normally see.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:15:54] Which, I guess to play devil’s advocate Sarah, is that such a bad thing that there is more public art around the city?
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:16:05] Yes and no, I mean, it could be amazing. I think my personal esthetic tastes are not necessarily aligned with what I’ve seen so far from this project, but that is just me. I think what I’m really worried about and I want us to pay attention to is that what appears in our public space in the form of statues, monuments, memorials, has a real effect on how we see ourselves as a people, as a city, how we represent our history. And so many of the truly problematic ones, those were mostly donated by outside groups. Hmm. They were not necessarily commissioned by the city. And I just think we’ve learned that, and we should be careful about what we allow to occupy our public space because it affects who we are as a city. Well, Sarah, thank you so much.
Sarah Hotchkiss: [00:17:04] Thank you for having me.
