696 Amador Street
off 3rd Street / Pier 90/92
Bayview/Hunters Point
A while back I wrote about these grain silos, I also mentioned at the time they eventually would become an art project. You can read all about the silos here.
This project is part of the Blue Greenway Project, a $2.2 million project funded through the Port of San Francisco.
The Project was awarded to the Seattle based firm of Haddad/Drugan. It is titled “Bayview Rise” and is expected to be in place for a minimum of 5 years.
According to their website:
Bayview Rise works 2-dimensionally as a graphic image, 3-dimensionally as it articulates the folded, rolling, and textured surfaces of the historic architecture with color and pattern, and 4-dimensionally at night as colored lights cycle through the colors red, green, and blue causing the mural imagery to change its appearance. Diffenrent light colors will cause parts of the mural of that same color to be highlighted while other colors recede into the dark background. As the light colors shift, images will appear to float in and out of the scene. This striking effect will result in the appearance of an animated graphic abstractly representing a neighborhood in transformation, Bayview Rising.
In early 2013 Haddad|Drugan researched the history, culture, and future plans for Bayview Hunters Point. They identified stories that could be included in the artwork, ranging from industry to infrastructure to community to ecology, and compiled them in a layered map. The artists met with community representatives and shared their research and a group of words inspired by the research. From this process they developed the artwork to emphasize the concept of “rise,” a word they had shared with the community and which tied together some of its most inspiring stories. The graphic imagery of the mural is rooted in the Bayview’s historic and future conditions, but with an emphasis on elements that float, fly, and rise.
The composition creates a spatial illusion in which elements appear to rise up and out from a horizon where water meets land and sky. Grounding the image is a bottom layer of water, representing both San Francisco Bay and the past marshlands of Islais Creek. Submerged in the water as a symbol of the neighborhood’s past is the head of a steer in homage to historic Butchertown and the cattle that once marched down Third Street. The primary icon rising from the horizon line is a soaring heron, which ties to nearby Heron’s Head Park, a successful environmental restoration by the Port. Other imagery represented in the artwork includes native cherry plants, shorebirds, and a reference to a quote by community activist Essie Webb who likened Hunters Point to a balloon waiting to be re-inflated. The images within the mural have been combined, overlapped, and juxtaposed in a triangular matrix so there appear to be metamorphoses between cherries and balloons, water and birds, land and leaves. This shift is emphasized with the changing colors of lights.
Bayview Rise was funded and commissioned by the Port of San Francisco with coordination from the SFAC. The painting was by R.B. Morris III and the lighting by Legend Theatrical.
The proposal by the Port of San Francisco can be read here.
