A public art installation will showcase Hunters Point Shipyard’s historic crane in a 40-minute multimedia light show starting next weekend, as part of the SF Arts Commission’s series celebrating monuments that honor under-recognized communities.
The show, called Crane, combines projected video, lighting, music, and live vocals, with imagery and stories drawn from Bayview-Hunters Point. The project is a collaboration between video artist Ian Winters, lighting artist Elaine Buckholtz, composer Evelyn Ficarra, historian Stacey Carter, and community engagement artist William Rhodes, as the Chronicle reports.
Crane is the final installment of the SF Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy series, which uses public art to highlight monuments and histories connected to communities that have been under-recognized.
According to Mission Local, the artists are using the crane itself as part of the work, rather than simply projecting the imagery on it. Ficarra reportedly recorded its metal structure with contact microphones, capturing the machinery’s vibrations and hums for the score. Members of the Dr. George W. Davis Senior Center choir then recreated those sounds, while the soundtrack also incorporates their memories of the neighborhood and historic recordings.
Projected imagery will trace the shipyard’s military and industrial past, including its role in World War II and later nuclear research. The combination of light, video, sound, and the crane’s massive structure is meant to bring some of the site’s lesser-known history into view.
The nearly 500-foot crane was built for Navy operations and could lift 630 tons, while the shipyard employed roughly 18,000 people at its peak during World War II, as Mission Local reports. The site later became a center for nuclear research and was declared a Superfund site in 1989 because of radioactive contamination.
The show has reportedly been in development for several years and is supported by the Rainin Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the SF Arts Commission. It also follows a 2024 illumination of the crane.
This year’s production will not have a public audience at the base of the crane. Per Mission Local, the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, which has jurisdiction over the site, rejected plans to bring spectators, and later rejected a proposal to have only the performers at the crane because of safety concerns.
Carter hopes the renewed attention will eventually help protect the structure. She has advocated for historic landmark status, although the crane is currently on federal property owned by the U.S. Navy, meaning it cannot receive a city landmark designation.
All four shows will be livestreamed for free from 5:30-10 pm October 9-10 and 16-17 at crane.video. Watch parties are planned at Zaccho Dance Theatre on the first weekend and Building 101 during the second weekend, when the Hunters Point Shipyard Artists will also hold their open studios.
Related: Hunters Point Shipyard to Get 26 Acres of New Parks, to Be Run By Arts Commission, Rec and Park
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