Five years ago, on Sept. 9, 2020, Bay Area residents woke up to a blanket of wildfire smoke over the region, which blotted out the sun’s light. It lasted the entire day — ask any local and they can easily recall their own experience from it.
It’s now known as “the Orange Sky Day” and has become a symbol of climate change.
How do you make sense of a day so unsettling and otherworldly?
“I had no words at that time other than the ones of making,” artist Alisa Golden told KQED. “I always feel a kind of catharsis, both within the process and after I am finished with the project.”
Golden and many other artists have used visual mediums to convey the eerie, dangerous beauty of that day. KQED compiled images of their work and thoughts below.
Lorraine Woodruff-Long began quilting as a hobby, but turned to it full-time after getting laid off from her job in the nonprofit sector in 2020. The de Young Museum in San Francisco has displayed her work, and she teaches quilting at City Extension through City College of San Francisco.
When lightning sparked a fire siege in August of 2020, smoke blanketed the Bay Area for weeks.
“We’d started having really bad air quality days,” Woodruff-Long said. “I was taking screenshots of San Francisco from the Purple Air app, just over and over. After I’d been doing this for almost two months, everything started looking like a quilt to me.”
“I think art communicating a lot of these things is really impactful, because sometimes you’re just not expecting to see this information in the places that you’re seeing it. Like, people aren’t expecting to see [climate change] in a quilt show.”
Woodruff-Long said historically, the fiber-art world was about women being “nice and making pretty things.”
But she wanted to give people more permission to speak. “Quilts make great protest signs,” Woodruff-Long said.
Painter Kim Cogan drove around San Francisco on the Orange Sky Day with his wife and young daughter, taking in the scene, documenting it with a point-and-shoot camera.
“My daughter was born the month before, and so waking up to the skies, I was just thinking to myself, ‘my god, what did I bring her into this for?’”
To him, it felt like the end of the world. “How scary it is to think that this seemed to be the new normal, or what could be expected annually.”
Much later, he thought it would be an interesting topic to explore in his paintings. He wanted people to have a bigger conversation about it and to share their experiences.
“This was just a really interesting sort of image, capturing the atmosphere and the sky color and then the car was illuminated by the headlights,” Cogan said. “The picture seemed to sort of pop out from a science fiction movie. I always try to take this angle of something that’s a little more dramatic and moody and has an unsettling quality to it.”
Cogan was intrigued by the juxtaposition of a bank and the orange sky, the idea that a bank “keeps you safe, your money safe, and then at the same time you’re confronted with the orange sky and this sort of eerie feeling, but yet the ATM is illuminated for you to withdraw.”
Alisa Golden is a writer and artist who works in various mediums.
During the fall of 2020, she created a series of seven quilts in response to the record wildfires and smoke. “I felt emotionally exhausted. We were already living with pandemic restrictions, anxiety was in the air,” Golden reflected.
“It was the strange light on Sept. 9 that sparked this particular quilt; the sky was so vividly visual I felt compelled to mark its moment. Both beautiful and terrifying. Daybreak felt like a broken day. The orange sky alone didn’t tell the whole story, though; it needed something to push against,” Golden wrote.
“I had taken photos in the early morning, as many people did, and found myself drawn to the one with houses, the rooflines against the sky, the white lights shining from inside, indicating life continuing on even though the world felt so dark. The child in me imagined this to be the Dark Ages,” Golden wrote.
For Golden, creating quilts like these helps her work through challenging subjects and let them go. “It is a way to express feelings when I don’t want anxious thoughts chasing themselves in circles,” she said.
“Making art and writing have always functioned this way for me. A release, so I can be free for the next experience. And comforted that I have a document. Perhaps a way to also hold onto time. We forget so much,” Golden wrote.
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