When you install a gargantuan, naked, womanoid statue in front of one of a city’s most iconic sites, you should expect some strong reactions. When you propose adding 100 more pieces of large-scale art to the cityscape selected by an exclusive group and installed at breakneck speed, a more philosophical discussion arises.
On Tuesday, arts writer Sarah Hotchkiss published an article for KQED headlined Who Has a Say in the Flood of Public Art Coming to San Francisco? In it, Hotchkiss investigated the sources of private money behind massive public art installations like Marco Cochrane’s mesh giant known as R-Evolution at Embarcadero Plaza and Naga, the bubble-blowing dragon created by Cjay Roughgarden, Jacquelyn Scott, and Stephanie Shipman, installed in Golden Gate Park. It’s the same private-public partnership that’s behind the incoming citywide project called Big Art Loop, which Mayor Daniel Lurie announced last week is set to install more than 100 temporary large-scale sculptures along the city’s waterfront and through Golden Gate Park over the next three years.
As Hotchkiss explains, public art works are usually subject to a lengthy approval process by the San Francisco Art Commission, whose board members generally have professional art, art history, and curatory backgrounds. It often takes a long, long time: Lava Thomas’s sculpture of Maya Angelou was installed near the SFPL’s main branch in 2024 after years of delays and debates following a call for submissions in 2018.
But Big Art Loop does not go through that same process. The project is funded and operated through a private initiative called Big Art SF, a partnership between a for-profit organization called Building 180 and the Sijbrandij Foundation, a nonprofit backed by billionaire Sid Sijbrandij, the co-founder of GitLab. Hotchkiss’s article makes the case that while private capital can cut through the bureaucracy of installing large-scale public art, it can also sidestep public oversight and community input.
The curatorial process behind the Big Art installations begins with artist submissions, which are then filtered through Building 180 and its “partners,” a group that Riley said can change based on where the artwork will be placed. She said the residents of India Basin, for example, have been particularly engaged during the selection process for the piece that will soon be erected in their neighborhood as part of the Big Art Loop. In other areas like near the Port of San Francisco, Riley said she and her team “ended up creating a panel of folks” to get feedback, including Ferry Building officials and local business owners. Finally, city engineers weigh in on the technical details to help make the final selection.
As these pieces spring up, heated conversations are stirring in the local art world.
“I think what a lot of people, myself included, are frustrated by is the fact that these private entities are able to remake the public landscape in their own image,” said Max Blue, an art critic and columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. “A lot of the public doesn’t like these sculptures. I don’t like these sculptures. I think a lot of them are just left over from Burning Man.”
Both R-Evolution and Naga did, indeed, debut on The Playa, in 2015 and 2024 respectively. Shannon Riley, the CEO and founder of Building 180, told Gazetteer SF that five out of the eight new Big Art pieces that will be installed on the Loop within the next month have also appeared at the desert festival. Riley, who confirmed she has been to Burning Man, maintained that there is no uniting visual identity among the project’s growing collection.
“I don't think there's an aesthetic because [Big Art Loop] is not under one curatorial purview," Riley said. “I guess the only thing is that they’re big. They all have to be over ten feet tall. But other than that, it ranges tremendously.”
Many other Big Art pieces are industrial, flashy, and modular, made to be constructed and deconstructed easily. Haters and admirers both called this look “Burning Man art.”
“I grew up in San Francisco so I know about the Burning Man side of the art world here,” said visual artist DJ Meisner. “It’s just so clear when you see the art that it’s like, Oh, I’m supposed to be unbelievably wealthy and high looking at this. I’m neither of those things, so I’m just annoyed to be looking at it.”
While Meisner said a lot of the art he’s seen come out of the Big Art SF project is “bad” and “disgusting to look at,” he enjoys Zachary Coffin’s Rockspinner sculpture in Sunset Dunes, because it’s simple and organic. It’s a big rock that spins.
“Burning Man has been a part of the culture here for a long time, but in the past it’s been kind of invisible,” said Chris Brown, the creative director for Mill, a consumer composting company. Brown, who has helped define the visual identities for brands like Google, MasterClass, and Uber Eats, thinks placing that art in public spaces is “refreshing.”
Burning Man art, per Brown who has attended the festival “at least” 10 times, is an “invasion of something into a space that it’s not naturally built for.” That’s why he thinks Naga, for example, translates so well; it looks cool snaking through the Playa and emerging from the water in Rainbow Falls on JFK Drive.
The best public art, according to art historian and curator Josefin Lundahl, shouldn’t be an invasion, but rather a blending with its environment. “I can’t help but think about Ruth Asawa’s fountains in Japantown. It melts in beautifully with the landscape. It’s built specifically for the community that lives there. It ties back to her own ancestry, and it’s gorgeous,” Lundahl said.
Another piece Lundahl favorably cited is the brutalist Vaillancourt Fountain, a 54-year-old and now-nonfunctional structure in Embarcadero Plaza that has sparked heated debates over public art and beauty as the Recreation and Parks department has called for its removal. The Art Commission will formally discuss the request next Monday. (Meisner is also a fan, especially compared to the fountain’s current neighbor, R-Evolution: “One of them looks like an AI-generated woman. One of them takes more than four words to describe.”)
Lundahl said her circle has been discussing their worries about Big Art SF’s impact on the city since the 100-piece plan was announced.
“My main concern is that the public art is going to look the same if it's coming from a certain group of people with a lot of money and tech backgrounds,” she said. “We’re undermining the arts’ ability to foster diversity and individual identity, which is the whole point of public art, to create and foster meaningful community dialogues.”
