How many museums in San Francisco can you get into for the price of a Muni ticket? The new Central Subway, which launches weekend service on Saturday, ahead of full service in January, will connect more than Chinatown and Sunnydale: It also will connect riders to eight site-specific, museum-quality artworks across the four newly opened stations, courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission, with two more coming in 2023.
Bay Area artist Moto Ohtake’s “Microcosmic,” at the Fourth and Brannan streets platform station, is a kinetic, futuristic sculpture mounted at the top of a light pole. At 15 by 15 feet at its fullest extension, the piece moves in response to weather conditions, offering a different, unique experience during every visit. Transit and change are common themes in all the pieces on view.
Wagner’s photographs continue past the turnstiles, here etched in granite slabs along the walls, furthering the archeological theme. The pictures, existing only as prints until now, weren’t made with this presentation in mind, but rather as a conceptual project Wagner wanted to elicit meditations on change.
Erwin Redl’s “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 glamor in pure form.
Rose Pak Station, at Stockton and Washington streets in Chinatown, features 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 Arts Commission, the Chinese Culture Center and the Chinatown Community Development Corporation. Here, two of her cutouts have been translated into a red steel, both of which occupy full walls in the station.
“Art has a huge impact on the way that people navigate spaces within the city,” said Mary Chou, director of the Civic Art Collection and Public Art Program at the Arts Commission. “The presentation of a work of art can impact your sense of history and of place.”
Beautiful what 1,950,000,000 or $1,100,000,000 per mile can build. SanFrancisco BayArea