Created in the passageway between Landmark Buildings B and C at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture is a new 18-panel public mural by artist Leah Rosenberg. The Sea Is But Another Sky transforms the historic loading dock corridor into a reminder of the natural phases of daily life. The 18 panels show the gradual setting of the sun and rising of the moon, turning the walkway into an encounter with color, weather, and time. The mural’s opening is a part of Fort Mason Center’s Fall Art Walk on Thursday, Sept. 17. In an ongoing commitment to public art at the waterfront campus, the evening will include a free campus-wide evening of exhibitions, installations, artist/curator programs and performances across the campus. The programs continue through fall with the Points of Departure event series leading up to FMCAC’s 50th anniversary.
The boundary between heaven and earth
The sea and sky merge and dissolve in a series of colorful orbs in oranges, corals, reds, and yellows floating in front of bright blues and greens in a celebration of place and light. As the sun sets on the bay, the sun and moon imagery on the loading docks react in the changing glow. The greens and blues darken, the oranges become more subdued as nature follows its way to night. Each dock is another frame of rising and setting, and the movement of the individuals walking past the loading docks activates the scene like a film. As the artist says, “The body edits the film by simply moving through it.”
“Sometimes it is worth walking all the way to the edge.”
— Leah Rosenberg
Rosenberg’s art explores where color, memory, and place intersect through site-responsive painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. In her artist statement, Rosenberg traces the mural to the far end of the waterfront, “past the galleries and cafes, beyond where most visitors turn around,” where fishers gather and seals surface in the bay. As she worked between the two buildings, one facing the setting sun and the other the rising moon, she began thinking about orientation, time, and shared bodies of water: “We all wake. We all sleep. We are all made of water.” The wind played its role, too, lifting paint from buckets and drop cloths until, she writes, “it felt as though everything here had become a character.”
The mural title was inspired by a poem by Samuel Longfellow, The Golden Sunset (c. 1869):
The sea is but another sky,
The sky a sea as well,
And which is earth and which the heavens
The eye can scarcely tell.
The cloud-like cliffs, the cliff-like clouds,
Dissolved in glory, float,
And midway of the radiant floods
Hangs silently the boat.
The sea is but another sky,
The sky a sea as well,
And which is earth and which the heavens
The eye can scarcely tell.
So when for me life’s latest hour
Soft passes to its end,
May glory, born of earth and heaven,
The earth and heaven blend.
Flooded with light the spirits float,
With silent rapture glow,
Till where earth ends and heaven begins
The soul shall scarcely know.
‘Points of Departure’
The new immersive event series, Points of Departure, returns this fall with three programs celebrating the people, stories, and innovations that have shaped Fort Mason Center’s past and present.
Sept. 24: Tell Them We Were Here (2021), by Griff and Keelan Williams profiles eight Bay Area artists who extend the region’s legacy of creativity, activism and community. A panel discussion with the filmmakers explores how the local art ecosystem has evolved sin the five years since the film’s premiere.
Oct. 13: Circus by the Bay celebrates the counterculture vaudevillian sensibility of the animal-free, one-ring circus style popularized in San Francisco during the 1970s. The style was built on juggling, clowning, acrobatics and aerial work pioneered by local companies such as the Pickle Family Circus. The movement sent a stream of Bay Area talent on to Cirque du Soleil and Broadway. The evening brings together some of the movement’s leading voices in conversation including rare archival photos, video, and live performances.
Nov. 12: Life on the Water: A Reunion reunites members of the theater company, Life on the Water, based at Fort Mason Center from 1986 to 1993 when they performed in their own custom-designed space, now the Bayfront Theater. The artists originated their own work in a blend of experimental and traditional forms, political statement, and cultural diversity. Life on the Water became internationally known for pioneering solo theater showcases by such luminaries as Spalding Gray and Karen Finley. The program will include never-before-seen archival footage of some of the company’s most celebrated productions.
“Each of these programs is a point of departure into a different chapter of this campus’s past and present, each revealing new facets of a place uniquely devoted to embarkation and discovery,” said Brad Rosenstein, FMCAC’s Associate Curator of Public Programs. “Taken together with Leah’s mural and the Art Walk, they are an invitation to see Fort Mason Center, and the Bay beyond it, with fresh eyes.”
The Sea Is But Another Sky will open at Fort Mason Center’s Fall Art Walk, which will also include exhibitions, installations, artist/curator programs, performances, and more.
