Fort Mason Center’s New 18-Panel Mural Turns a Loading Dock Corridor Into Sunrise and Moonrise

A new 18-panel mural by San Francisco artist Leah Rosenberg now covers the loading docks in the outdoor corridor between Buildings B and C at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture. Titled The Sea Is But Another Sky, it opened September 17 as part of the center’s Fall Art Walk and stays up through December 31, 2027, according to Fort Mason Center. It is free and can be seen daily from 7am to midnight.

What the mural is

The corridor between the two pier buildings has 18 loading bays, each of which Rosenberg treats as a separate painting, with the walls beneath the walkways painted as a continuous band. Walking from one end to the other, the panels move from sunrise to sunset and from sun to moon: Building B faces the setting sun and Building C the rising moon, a fact the artist says shaped the sequence. In her artist statement she describes the panels as frames, with the viewer’s walk through the corridor doing the editing.

The palette is oranges, corals, reds and yellows against blues and greens. Rosenberg says every color in the work can be found on site, in the plants, the buoys, the cargo ships and sailboats on the bay, and the food and art inside the buildings. Because the corridor is open to the sky, shadows cross the panels through the day and the light changes what you see; the artist’s stated intent is that no two walks through it look the same.

The title comes from The Golden Sunset, an 1860s poem by Samuel Longfellow, as reported by The Voice of San Francisco.

Who Leah Rosenberg is

Rosenberg works in painting, sculpture, installation and performance, with a focus on color drawn from specific places. Her previous public commissions include work for SFO, commissioned through the San Francisco Arts Commission, for The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and for the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. At SFMOMA she ran the pastry program behind Blue Bottle Coffee’s Modern Art Desserts. She is from Saskatoon and completed her MFA at California College of the Arts, where her thesis explored cake as an art material, per Fort Mason Center’s artist biography.

Part of a 50th anniversary year

Fort Mason Center is approaching 50 years as a nonprofit arts campus inside a national park site; the former Army buildings began their conversion in 1977. The mural is the centerpiece of the anniversary programming, and the center has scheduled a series of evening events under the name Points of Departure: a screening of the documentary Tell Them We Were Here with a filmmaker panel on September 24, a Circus by the Bay evening on the Pickle Family Circus era on October 13, and a reunion of the Life on the Water theater company on November 12, according to The Voice of San Francisco.

The same Art Walk opened two other things that are still on view. FOR-SITE’s installation Attentive Earth, by Oakland artists Muzae Sesay and Alexcia Sundra, is inside the Guardhouse at the campus entrance through January 24, 2027. Haines Gallery in Building C is showing 250 Years, Indigenous Futures, a group exhibition of Native American artists including Wendy Red Star and Sky Hopinka. Details for both are on the Art Walk page.

Getting there

Fort Mason Center is at 2 Marina Boulevard, on the waterfront between Aquatic Park and the Marina. The corridor with the mural is between the two long pier buildings, B and C; walk past the galleries toward the water and you’re in it. The 28, 43, 47 and 49 Muni lines end at or near the Van Ness and North Point entrance. Greens Restaurant, Radhaus and The Interval are in Building A if you want to make an evening of it, and SF Camerawork, which reopened this month, is also in Building A.

Sources: Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture (exhibition page, artist statement and biography), Leah Rosenberg, The Voice of San Francisco (September 17).

Photo: Pat Mazzera, courtesy Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture.