In April of 2025, Marco Cochrane’s “R-Evolution,” a 45-foot tall sculpture of a nude woman in a yoga pose, was installed on public land at Embarcadero Plaza for a planned six months. The project, originally intended as an economic booster for Union Square, was deployed with the logistical support of the arts agency Building 180. Sid Sijbrandij, a founder of the software maker GitLab, supplied funding through his eponymous foundation.
Reaction from local art critics was swift and negative. At KQED, Sarah Hotchkiss wrote that she felt embarrassed for the city. Hotchkiss thought that the work, originally created for Burning Man, had “no relationship to its new urban surroundings and everyday city life.” Worse, because the city did not require pre-installation public comment due to the project’s temporary nature, “the public — as in, the people — had nothing to do with it,” despite its placement on public land with the ostensible purpose of enhancing public life.
Once the first response of the city’s largest newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, would have been written by an art critic. But the paper no longer employs a staff art critic or even publishes freelance art critics, although it continues to cover the field in other ways. Penning the initial piece about “R-Evolution” fell to Emily Hoeven, an opinion columnist and editorial board member whose usual beat is politics.
Hoeven found “R-Evolution” appealing. More surprisingly, she opined that public art exists in a space beyond criticism. “Part of the value of public artwork is that it exists at all,” she wrote. In her view, supporting “R-Evolution” was a “civic duty,” and anyone who criticized the work was “petulant.”
In the months following the installation of “R-Evolution,” Building 180 and the Sijbrandij Foundation installed several additional works on public land. At the end of September, it was announced that these pieces were the first phase of the Big Art Loop, 100 large (at least 10 feet tall) works to be brought out of storage and placed on temporary exhibit around the city, all curated by Building 180 and funded by the Sijbrandij Foundation.
All works proposed for the Big Art Loop have undergone the public comment process recommended for temporary installations. But Building 180, an art production and curatorial business, has few ties to the city’s art ecosystem. The project’s requirement that pieces be large and pre-made means that a significant fraction of the works have been created for Burning Man, the annual festival held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Beyond Hoeven, art critics have been clear: the Big Art Loop is a “hostile takeover of public space,” as Max Blue wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. San Francisco had sold out, Blue further wrote, to “a select few whose cash has bought them the position of public curator.” In Frieze, Moses Hubbard described the project as nothing more than “a clearing house for the Silicon Valley elites to launder their tastes to the city.”
Why has San Francisco allowed this takeover? No doubt, a major reason is the general trend towards the privatization of public functions, public art included. The design firm planning the new Embarcadero park was chosen solely by BMX, owner of the neighboring Embarcadero Center. About 50% of the funding to construct the park will come from private sources. Similarly, the designers of the Powell Street revitalization project were chosen by the Union Square Alliance, and funding will include a large chunk of private money.
Changes in how public art is perceived have also made it vulnerable to privatization. The mission statement of the San Francisco Art Commission (SFAC) states that art is “essential to daily life.” But out in the world, public art tends to be viewed as a frill, something that, as Hoeven argued, we should be grateful to have at all. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s budget, cutting SFAC staffing while expanding funding for police salaries, is in line with this view.
Public art is also increasingly seen through an economic lens. But the notion that public art, no matter how bland, is an economic booster is unfounded. Plus, the idea that public art exists to confer economic benefits leads directly to Hoeven’s notion that it is one’s “civic duty” to support all public art, just as one must support the construction of any housing.
Matthew Goudeau, appointed in April by Mayor Daniel Lurie as the city’s first Executive Director of Arts and Culture, has said that, in addition to art being good for the economy, “[a]rt as beauty is important.” But this sentiment leaves a lot out — for instance that art might involve personal expression, or ideas about the world, or a conversation with history or the community — and risks reducing public art to decoration.
Resisting simplistic views of art is crucial, because if public art is viewed as a nonessential filigree that is valued simply as a catalyst for economic revitalization and inoffensive decoration, then outsourcing its curation follows.
Can this takeover be stopped? KQED’s Hotchkiss has proposed a straightforward solution: that the Sijbrandij Foundation fund public art through SFAC, not Building 180. Unfortunately, this idea is out of step with current trends towards privatization and is probably not politically feasible. In recent interviews, Goudeau does not appear to find private curation problematic.
Gallerist Jessica Silverman has suggested that San Francisco look to private-public partnerships such the Public Art Fund and the Madison Square Park Conservatory as models. These New York City-based groups have strong ties to the art world, aiding them in identifying exciting, varied artist partners. These private-public partnerships also commission new work for specific spaces, allowing for what Silverman calls a “true dialogue between the artwork, the community, and the location” as opposed to “corporate, plug-and-play placements.”
Another approach might be to attempt to mitigate piecemeal the effects of the curatorial takeover piece-by-piece. One troublesome aspect of the Big Art Loop is the large number of works it is expected to include. Perhaps SFAC could limit the number of temporary pieces a single sponsoring entity may place.
A second problematic Big Art Loop policy requiring completed work, which is helpful only to artists who are able to supply their own funding. Perhaps SFAC, in its agency role as a supporter of artists, might compel groups placing a large number of works to include a certain number of original commissioned works. Or a new entity, public or private, could be created to commission works, perhaps for specific locations, that could be submitted to the Building 180 for installation.
But something must be done. As it stands, the Big Art Loop is a child’s idea of public art that, if it cannot be abolished, must be modified. Interventions such as removing Building 180 from curation, founding new public-private partnerships, or changing the rules under which Building 180 operates could partially reverse the takeover.
Permanently curtailing the potential for a well-funded private group to take over public art curation requires changing perceptions. Public art should be viewed as a fundamental part of the city’s infrastructure, not as an obligatory frill. Economic effects of public art should be seen as secondary. General knowledge about art must be increased so that the general public becomes less prone to acceptance of less than top quality art in public places. Until this is addressed seriously San Francisco will continue to present public art that falls below even local standards let alone an achievement worthy of national and international recognition.
