As long as I've lived in the Bay Area the stretch of San Francisco's Market Street from the UN Plaza to 6th Street has been a particularly sketchy one, a place where a friend's car once gotten broken into in broad daylight and where I walk very quickly and purposefully if I find myself in the area after dark. But where some people saw only crack dealers the local arts community saw opportunity for uplift, and last Thursday night I joined the SF Arts Commission and an enthusiastic crowd for the unveiling of three new public projects specifically designed to be seen at night. Jim Campbell's Urban Reflections is the bona fide stunner of the trio, a piece that uses thousands of LED lights to create scenes of everyday city life in two empty shop windows. Up close the lights flicker and shift, and as you back away the shapes resolve into images of pedestrians and buses passing by the windows. A longtime fave artist of mine, that man continues to be a mad genius. Directly across the street from Campbell's piece and just to one side of the UN Plaza Paul Notzold has installed Storylines, a huge comic-book-like slideshow that incorporates text by poems about the city from local WritersCorps Apprentices. And then just a little further down Market, near Showdogs, the public is invited to interact with Theodore Watson's Faces (pictured here), a storefront camera that captures your photo and then immediately projects it on a building high across the street. As part of the ARTery Project, the artworks join historic theaters, a cluster of forward-thinking galleries, and local cultural institutions that are slowly but surely making that section of the city a destination rather than a place to avoid. The installations are only up until June of next year, so get on down there.
See also: