A Filipino Light Sculpture Switches On at Yerba Buena Gardens on September 4

Yerba Buena Gardens gets its first Filipino cultural marker on Friday, September 4, 2026, when a light sculpture called 13°N, 122°E is unveiled to the public in the eastern plaza across from SFMOMA. The piece is an amber dome set above a fountain, and its light is programmed to brighten and fade in time with sunrise and sunset in the Philippines, which is where the coordinates in its name point: the geographic center of the archipelago.

What Is Being Installed

The work is by mumu, a Filipino artist collective, and is also called the Philippine Sun. SOMA Pilipinas, the city’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District, presents it in collaboration with the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Yerba Buena Partnership. The dome sits in a reworked corner of the gardens that the organizers call the Sun Sala, which also has vinta sails referencing Philippine maritime traditions.

mumu told Mission Local the collective considered a star, another Philippine symbol, before settling on the sun, and deliberately picked coordinates at the center of the archipelago rather than on any one island. The dome was fabricated in Thailand and shipped across the Pacific, and was built to hold up to San Francisco weather and to graffiti. Mission Local reports the project took roughly two years from concept to installation.

Why It Is at Yerba Buena

Redevelopment of the Yerba Buena blocks in the 1960s and 1970s displaced thousands of residents, many of them Filipino, and the area carried no formal marker of that community afterward. SOMA Pilipinas commissioned a study in 2020 on ways to bring Filipino identity into the gardens, presented its findings to the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy and the Yerba Buena Partnership in early 2024, and the project was approved from there.

The installation is officially temporary and is scheduled to come down around 2030. Raquel Redondiez, executive director of SOMA Pilipinas, told Mission Local that the San Francisco Arts Commission has already set aside money for a permanent piece. Funding for 13°N, 122°E came from the California Arts Council, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, the Office of Economic Development, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, and the Yerba Buena Partnership.

The September 4 Unveiling

SOMA Pilipinas is running the unveiling as a Sun Sala Dance Party. The program on the district’s own events page lists a DJ set by DJ Breganza and performances by Galing Bata, Galing Nanays, and Angalo, plus a sampling of Filipino street food offered first come, first served. Attendees are asked to RSVP through the SOMA Pilipinas site. The dome is lit after dark, so the illumination is the late part of the evening rather than the start of it.

A smaller preview happened on August 8 during Pistahan, the Filipino festival held each summer on the Great Lawn, when about a hundred people saw the dome lit for the first time.

Details

When: Friday, September 4, 2026. The sculpture stays in place afterward and is lit nightly.

Where: Eastern plaza, Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission Street between Third and Fourth Streets, SoMa.

Cost: Free.

Getting there: Yerba Buena Gardens is two blocks from the Powell Street and Montgomery Street stations, served by BART and Muni Metro. Market Street bus lines stop within a few blocks.

A second Sunset Sala event, with the Filipino Mental Health Initiative, is on the SOMA Pilipinas calendar for October 2 at the gardens.

For the rest of what is programmed on the lawn this fall, see our guide to free events at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Sources: Mission Local, August 22, 2026, and the SOMA Pilipinas events calendar.

Photo: The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.