SF’s annual display of giant Valentine’s hearts beats on for its 20th year, and here’s your Hearts of SF class of 2023, which will remain at the Ferry Building through February 28.
It’s Valentine’s Day in San Francisco, and you know what that means — 400-pound, six-foot-wide hearts have been put up about the city. These Hearts in San Francisco are now enjoying their 20th annual tour of duty in SF (they started in 2004, and did not even skip a year during the pandemic), and this year’s batch remains on display until February 28.
Just as they were in 2022, this year’s giant hearts are all clustered at the Ferry Building. They’re up for the remainder of February, but we’ll give you a Valentine’s Day rundown of this year’s Hearts in SF.
And here’s a first… this Painted Lady heart lights up! And the windows actually turn different colors. It was not illuminated when SFist visited, but you can see Josh Zubkoff’s heart Windows Into the Art in its full lit-up glory on the artist’s web page.
Another heart features iconic San Francisco sights, in Dyna Beach’s My City. It has so many san Francisco landmarks that we have to include an extra picture of its other side below.
If you’re interested in how these things are made, Beach has a very fun time-lapse Instagram video on the creation of this heart, complete with dog and toddler cameos.
Skye Becker-Yamakawa’s butterfly heart is technically entitled The Bees and The Butterflies, and does have a kick-ass bumblebee depicted on the other side.
There’s a real Keith Haring-esque feel to Wendy Ackrell’s Labyrinthine Heart shining with the mixed-media effect of a reflective gold paint.
The very front entrance to the Ferry Building is home to floraandsteel’s Dancing In Love. Like all of these hearts, it’s up for auction until midnight tonight. But the current bid on this one is $20,000, so… (shrug emoji).
Rounding out the six giant hearts is Ari Takata-Vasquez’s Emerge. This one’s already sold, folks.
There are other sizes of hearts also on display at the Ferry Building, like Low Poly Love in a Meta World (left) by Charles Gadeken of Entwined in Golden Gate Park fame, and Open Heart (right) by Nora King. These too are up for auction, though again, the bidding ends at 11:59 p.m. PT on February 14.
And the auction is to benefit the SF General Hospital Foundation, which is not the same thing as Zuckerberg SF General Hospital. “The hospital is an entity of the City and County of San Francisco,“ foundation board member Schuyler Hudak explained to us in 2020. “Because it’s a city-run institution, you can’t make a donation. The foundation was born to accept contributions and then figure out how they could be distributed to inspire better patient care, more innovative programming, and to support the doctors and nurses with the resources they need to be a world-class institution.”
Heck, there’s even a little Dolores Park heart by Jirsa. It’s still available for with a current highest bid of $2,500, if you want to spend the rest of your Valentine’s Day scaring up a few thousand to beat that bid.
Related: Photos: Giant Rabbit Statues Ring In the Lunar New Year ‘Year of the Rabbit’ In SF [SFist]
Images: Joe Kukura, SFist
