Catherine Wagner’s “Arc Cycle,” at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Station, draws on her photographs of the Moscone Center, in the 1970s and 1980s while it was constructed, with a large-format camera as she hung from scaffolding.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Jim Campbell and Werner Klotz’s suspended stainless-steel sculpture, “Silent Stream,” evokes a river flowing through the Union Square/Market Street Station.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Erwin Redl’s “Lucy in the Sky” illuminates the Union Square/Market Station with its 500-plus translucent 10-by-10-inch panels, each including a LEDs that are computer-programmed to change colors and patterns.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Mounted to a 40-foot-tall light pole on the platform at 4th and Brannan streets, Moto Ohtake's "Microcosmics" is a stainless-steel kinetic sculpture that responds to the wind conditions.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
At the Yerba Buena/Moscone Station, Leslie Shows' "Face C/Z," composed of glass and steel, is 35 feet wide and 14 feet high.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Catherine Wagner’s “Arc Cycle,” at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Station, draws on her photographs of the Moscone Center, in the 1970s and 1980s while it was constructed, with a large-format camera as she hung from scaffolding.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Jim Campbell and Werner Klotz’s suspended stainless-steel sculpture, “Silent Stream,” evokes a river flowing through the Union Square/Market Street Station.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Erwin Redl’s “Lucy in the Sky” illuminates the Union Square/Market Station with its 500-plus translucent 10-by-10-inch panels, each including a LEDs that are computer-programmed to change colors and patterns.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
Mounted to a 40-foot-tall light pole on the platform at 4th and Brannan streets, Moto Ohtake's "Microcosmics" is a stainless-steel kinetic sculpture that responds to the wind conditions.
Ethan Kaplan Photography; Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission
The world over, train stations are the site of many ambitious works of public art. There’s Narcissus Quagliata’s 4,500-glass-panel “Dome of Light” at Formosa Boulevard station in Taiwan, Tracey Emin’s massive neon text piece “I Want My Time with You” at London’s St Pancras International and New York City’s sprawling subway art program, which includes works by Chuck Close and Faith Ringgold, among many others. Now, this global phenomenon has pulled into the station in San Francisco — or, more specifically, four stations. The new Central Subway extension, which launched weekend service last November and is expected to increase to full service on January 7, features 10 museum-quality art installations along the line, offering riders connection with more than just their destinations.
“Points of arrival and departure have always played a special role in our memories and in our sense of belonging,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. “Having art in these particular locations is important, and it helps to frame riders’ overall experience.”
The importance of public art is a sentiment the City has long stood by. For over 50 years, San Franciscans have benefited from its Art Enrichment Ordinance (aka, the 2-percent-for-art program), which allocates 2 percent of construction costs of capital improvement projects for artwork, administered and overseen by the San Francisco Arts Commission. Fifteen years and roughly $40,000,000 in the making, the central subway is one of the commission’s longest and highest-budget projects to date. The artists featured are a mix of local, national and international names, while the artworks themselves are monumental in scale, evoking ideas of transit and change befitting their context.
Bay Area–based artist Moto Ohtake’s “Microcosmic,” at the 4th and Brannan streets platform station, is a kinetic, futuristic sculpture mounted at the top of a light pole. Measuring 15 by 15 feet at its fullest extension, the piece moves in response to weather conditions, offering a different, unique experience during every visit.
Riders at Yerba Buena/Moscone Station are met on the street level by the first half of local photographer Catherine Wagner’s “Arc Cycle”: photographs of the Moscone Center’s construction that Wagner shot between the late 1970s and early ’80s, etched lightly onto the station’s glass walls. Looking at the etchings, it’s impossible to not simultaneously see the reflection of the completed structure across the street, like a mirror revealing the past.
Down the escalator, San Francisco mixed-media artist Leslie Shows’ “Face C/Z” shines above the station’s turnstiles. The intricately fabricated sculpture, based on a scan of iron pyrite, or “fool’s gold,” resembles a vein of subterranean minerals. The work touches on the Bay Area’s gold rush history and evokes a sense of excavation in the underground environment, connecting to the second half of “Arc Cycle.”
Wagner’s photographs continue past the turnstiles, here etched in granite slabs along the walls, furthering the archaeological theme. The pictures, existing only as prints until now, weren’t made with this presentation in mind, but rather as a conceptual project that Wagner wanted to elicit meditations on change. “Change is the common denominator in all our lives,” she says, citing the construction site as a visual metaphor for this phenomenon. It’s something the subway system itself calls to mind, on the cusp of drastically changing how the broader community connects.
“Convergence: Commute Patterns,” a piece by Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather of local artist team Hughen/Starkweather, spans the facade of the Union Square/Market Street Station’s entrance and addresses this current shift directly. The composition of watercolor circles and graphic lines is an abstracted representation of the Bay Area’s commute patterns and commuter density, with a topographical map of the City overlaid on top. From outside, the graphic emulates a solar system, while seen from within it evokes stained glass, transitioning seamlessly into the art on the station’s second level.
Erwin Redl’s stunning “Lucy in the Sky” fills the entire concourse connecting the station to the east/west Muni line and BART, the ceiling covered in a field of 10-inch square LED light panels, flooding the space with constantly changing colors. It’s immersive in a totally inoffensive way: fun and glamour in pure form. Above the station’s platforms, Jim Campbell and Werner Klotz’s collaboration, “Silent Stream,” comes to life more subtly. A winding serpent of stainless-steel discs, the pixelated mirror reflects the crowd below. Looking up to view the piece offers a different perspective on the station itself, and one that changes with what’s on the ground. “Public art needs to be integrated as much as possible and as engaging as possible without being startling,” says Campbell. “It needs to work in that ambient way, but also if you pay closer attention to it.”
Some riders I spoke with were pleasantly surprised by the art, while others rode the subway specifically to see it and get a photo op. “I found out about the art here from posts on TikTok,” says one young woman, traveling between Chinatown and San Francisco State University. “It makes me feel like I live in a bigger, modern city.”
And, according to the SFMTA’s Tumlin, that sense of pride is part of the project’s aim. “My hope is that the art helps to uplift a sense of homecoming for locals,” he says. “It’s also for tourists. For many, it will be their first glimpse of San Francisco.”
The upper and lower levels of the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station feature two works by Yumei Hou, a master of the traditional Chinese folk art of papercutting, who was selected to represent the neighborhood through an outreach process between the SFAC, Chinese Culture Center and Chinatown Community Development Corporation. Here, her cutouts have been translated into red steel, both occupying full walls in the station. “Yangge: Dance of the Bride” and “Yangge: Dance of the New Year” depict scenes of celebratory dances and characters from the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, signifying safe travels. For Hou, the pieces are a testament to the fact “that art has no boundaries” and can connect people throughout the broader community as well as visitors from all over the world.
San Francisco–based artist Clare Rojas’ mosaic, “A Sense of Community,” just past the station’s turnstiles, echoes Hou’s sentiment. Each tile in the mural features a swatch of fabric sourced from various art institutions and textile merchants. The connection of community that the piece represents is a common theme throughout all the artworks in the subway and their shared vision for the fabric of the City’s community.
Two more artworks are slated to be installed in the Chinatown and Yerba Buena/Moscone stations in the first quarter of this year. Tomie Arai’s 100-foot mural, “Arrival,” unfurling across the facade of the former like a scroll, will speak to the history and legacy of Chinatown. Although based in New York, Arai has ties to the Bay Area: Her grandparents immigrated through Angel Island and were married in San Francisco in 1906, resulting in “a huge burden to tell this story accurately,” she says. Arai decided what to include in “Arrival” through a process of community outreach, where she learned that residents wanted to see an emphasis placed on Chinatown’s future. The piece will include photographs of students from nearby Gordon Lau Elementary; representations of nonnative tree species, symbolizing immigration and growth; and an early map of the neighborhood.
“Node,” by New York artist Roxy Paine, will soon be a commanding presence in the courtyard at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Station. At over 100 feet tall, the steel sculpture, reminiscent of a jagged lightning bolt, will act as a way finder of sorts, visible from several vantages throughout San Francisco. Paine’s is a concentrated example of the way in which all of these artworks activate the spaces they exist within.
“Art has a huge impact on the way that people navigate spaces within the City,” says Mary Chou, the SFAC’s director of the civic art collection and public art program. “The presentation of a work of art can impact your sense of history and of place.”
