San Francisco museum rejects permanent space in favour of site-specific exhibitions – The Art Newspaper

At San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid Middle—a Seventies landmark and the second-tallest constructing within the metropolis—a brand new form of museum is rising. Aligned with broader efforts to place tradition on the coronary heart of town’s revitalisation, two artist installations will unfold in a singular partnership between the skyscraper’s proprietor and the newly nomadic-by-design Institute of Up to date Artwork San Francisco (ICA SF). Launching throughout San Francisco Artwork Week (17-25 January), the bizarre workplace constructing flanked by a mature redwood grove will function the backdrop for works by the artists Lily Kwong and Tara Donovan (each till 31 July).

Kwong’s undertaking, EARTHSEED DOME, is a collaboration with the curatorial platform Artwork At A Time Like This, which is thought for supporting political artwork initiatives. Kwong will start by 3-D printing a sculptural shell, shaped from soil embedded with native seeds, in a storefront dealing with Redwood Park—a half-acre area adjoining to the Transamerica skyscraper internet hosting greater than 50 redwood timber a whole bunch of toes tall. After a number of weeks of fabrication in public view, Kwong’s dome will probably be moved into the grove, the place it’s going to slowly bloom and performance as a seed-dispersal hub. Over the next six months, the construction will shift with the seasons because the seeds germinate.

In the meantime, inside Transamerica’s glass-walled Annex Gallery, Donovan will set up present and newly created columns from her Stratagem collection, constructed from a whole bunch of 1000’s of recycled CDs. The skyscraper’s floor-to-ceiling home windows will flip the sculptures into prisms that catch and scatter daylight, altering subtly with the time of day and the altering seasons.

A nomadic museum

ICA SF was not all the time a roving museum. Actually, when it was based in 2020, it was modelled on the non-collecting European kunsthalle. The museum made its first house in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighbourhood, relocating to a former financial institution constructing downtown in 2024. ICA SF has since advanced its mannequin to concentrate on “bold, site-responsive initiatives” in city settings, based on its new imaginative and prescient assertion.

The museum’s founding director and chief curator, Alison Gass, sees the Transamerica collaboration as an excellent expression of this new strategy. “Generally, we begin with an artist’s dream undertaking after which go discover the area,” she says. “Different occasions, we encounter a web site that’s begging to be activated after which discover the artist. With Transamerica, it was the latter. The redwood grove, the plaza, the glass gallery—they’re an unbelievable set of areas for artists to reply to.”

EARTHSEED DOME is each a homecoming and a fruits for Kwong, a panorama artist and designer who grew up within the neighbouring metropolis of Mill Valley with the world-famous Muir Woods as her de facto yard. She says that this proximity made for an early and nearly devotional relationship to redwoods and the ecosystems they assist.

“I felt like these redwoods have been beings,” Kwong says. “As a child, going into the forest was nearly a non secular expertise. I’ve spent my profession attempting to seize even a drop of the resonance of a redwood in my work.”

Kwong approached ICA SF along with her undertaking after receiving a revitalisation grant from the household basis of Mikkel Svane, the founding father of the software program firm Zendesk. The mix of the redwood grove and Transamerica’s hanging silhouette helped the idea cohere. “The pyramid is that this highly effective, city object reaching for the sky,” Kwong says. “I instantly noticed a grounded earth dome in dialog with it; it created a rigidity between these two kinds and the values they symbolize.”

She designed the dome in order that its inside can maintain seed packets guests will be capable to take with them and plant in their very own neighbourhoods. Now based mostly in Los Angeles, Kwong is collaborating with the Altadena Seed Library, identified for serving to communities regenerate with native crops after wildfires. “Native crops are way more resilient and have coevolved with hearth,” Kwong says. “Lots of our California species really solely germinate with hearth.”

Kwong hopes that commuters, workplace staff and vacationers turn into “human pollinators”, serving to reintroduce native species throughout the San Francisco Bay Space. Accompanying programming will embody talks with horticulturalists, household workshops, seed-saving periods, artist walks and seasonal performances timed to the solstices. Kwong sees the emphasis on care as central to her follow. “I began out eager to reconnect individuals to nature,” she says. “Now I consider it as reconnecting individuals to ecology—to the net of relationships between crops, wildlife, people and cities.”

Burn me a CD

Donovan’s columnar sculptures, particularly becoming for show inside a skyscraper, are made utilizing previous CDs sourced from eBay—every thing from home-burned music mixes to family-photo archives and outdated software program. The primary variations of her Stratagem columns have been exhibited in 2024 at New York’s Tempo Gallery, the place daylight from a wall of home windows brought about them to dissolve and reassemble visually as viewers moved round them.

“I’m all the time on the lookout for traits in a fabric that I can push to a degree of transcendence, the place it now not fairly seems like itself,” Donovan says. “Gentle is a very powerful side of my work, and these items are fully ruled by it.”

The Brooklyn-based Donovan is thought for reworking mass-produced supplies—straws, cups, pencils—into installations that problem notion. CDs, she says, carry a selected poignancy. “In my lifetime, CDs went from being bought to us as the long run to changing into out of date,” she says. “They’re not recyclable. They’re this unusual, enduring artefact of how we used to retailer knowledge.”

Putting in CDs in a metropolis identified for its tech business provides one other layer. They’re “one of many final bodily traces of quantifiable knowledge”, Donovan says. Now displaced by cloud storage and streaming, their presence at Transamerica underscores the pace at which instruments as soon as thought-about everlasting turn into relics. “I’m not primarily interested by making an ethical assertion about recycling,” she says, “however that layer is inconceivable to disregard. All these discs include any person’s data. Now they’re a part of an art work about gentle and time.”

The setting of Kwong’s and Donovan’s installations is each virtually helpful and metaphorically wealthy, reflecting the probabilities of renewal unfolding in San Francisco’s downtown, very similar to the best way nature heals itself over time. In a metropolis the place startups evolve as shortly because the applied sciences they create, Gass says tech-aligned funders appear comfy supporting a mannequin that invests in bold commissions throughout a number of websites. “At this second, San Francisco is a lot about serious about how arts and tradition may be deeply impactful to the revitalisation of town,” she says.

Utilizing a partnership-based strategy, ICA SF will work throughout a number of websites this yr. In Might, the museum will take over the historic Pier 24 constructing with a site-specific joint set up by the artists Dominique Fung and Heidi Lau exploring phases of non secular and materials transformation by time. The museum may even accomplice with the San Francisco Downtown Growth Company on three large-scale public works throughout town.

Again at Transamerica, Kwong says she hopes that her seed-dispersal artwork undertaking “offers individuals a purpose to return out, to be current with nature and lightweight in the course of town. In the event that they depart with a packet of seeds and a barely completely different sense of their relationship to this place, that’s the true work.”