SF’s most massive crane becomes a light-and-art show this weekend

One of San Francisco’s biggest — yes seldom thought-about — structures will take center stage Saturday, when a pair of light and video artists illuminate the Hunters Point gantry crane. The 450-foot-tall behemoth will be emblazoned with video projections and high-powered searchlights set to music to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Hunters Point Shipyard Artists studios.

Elaine Buckholtz and Ian Winters will lead a team of soundscape artists and a quartet of musicians in fusing light, video, and sound. Expected to be visible from Bernal Heights, parts of downtown, and as far as Alameda, the 30-minute audiovisual ballet will begin at 7 p.m., with subsequent sets at 8:15 and 9. Members of the public are invited to take in the spectacle for free (with reservations) from a designated viewing and listening point in the shipyard.

This site-specific, multimedia installation has something of a “seat-of-our-pants” feel, said Buckholtz, a former San Francisco resident who lives and works in Massachusetts. Saturday’s show is effectively a dry run for a video project the pair hope to debut at the site in 2026. “I would call it a rough draft, but it looks better than we expected already,” she said.

That conceptual quality extends to the music. The quartet — playing cello, saxophone, drums, and electronic instruments — will work from an abstract score with loose thematic points. “What happens in between those points is up for wide interpretation,” Winters said. “And they won’t really know what they will do. But they are all very skilled at improvising.” This is free jazz on a massive scale.

The crane illumination is the latest in a series of large public artworks involving projections and powerful beams of light. As the Shipyard Artists will be hosting open studios all weekend, Buckholtz and Winters’ project is a tribute to the persistence of that affordable, 300-member community. “An incredible amount of the Bay Area’s visual culture comes out of all of those buildings,” said Winters, who has relocated to the East Bay. “There’s nothing else like it.”

All the same, the gantry crane will be the focal point — fog willing. Built in 1947, it was billed as the “mightiest crane in the world,” capable of lifting hundreds of tons. Five decades after it was decommissioned, redevelopment has brought new parks and residents to the city’s southeast, but much of Hunters Point remains contaminated with radiation, a legacy of ships that returned from atomic tests in the Pacific. The crane site is off-limits to the public, and its history is fraught with racism, as the effects of exposure to hazardous material and the loss of shipyard jobs disproportionately hit Black residents. 

To Winters, this is all the more reason to project video art onto a structure many San Franciscans may not even be aware of. “It’s an iconic piece of industrial architecture and, at the same time, almost invisible,” he said. “The same erasure that happened in Bayview as a neighborhood happened to this 45-story structure.”