Less than an hour after the official passage of Proposition K, a measure to permanently close most of San Francisco’s Great Highway to cars, a celebratory crowd gathered on the car-free section of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park to unveil the latest piece of public art on what has become known as the “Golden Mile.”
“Solar Arch” by the San Francisco street artist fnnch is a 13-foot-tall installation straddling the roadway with four two-minute “shows” comprising different patterns of LED light. Calling his piece “wildly over-engineered,” fnnch told The Standard that solar panels on the outside will generate enough power to keep it radiant through the night and even long periods of fog and rain.
As with so much else, the project began at Burning Man, where fnnch initially erected it. A conversation with Ben Davis of Illuminate — the arts nonprofit responsible for the Golden Mile’s Doggie Diner heads, pianos, and beer garden — spurred him to reconstruct it in the park. Davis handled approvals with the city’s Arts Commission and Department of Recreation and Parks, and the arch was up in a matter of weeks.
“He did that whole process as fast as it’s ever been done,” fnnch said.
To make “Solar Arch” as aesthetically pleasing as possible, fnnch added additional amber-hued lights to the usual red-green-blue arrangement of bulbs, giving it a more flattering cast.
“We were like, ‘Let’s just make a color that LEDs don’t make,” he said, adding that the light is so warm-toned, it almost feels like heat on the skin.
The arch’s location — at the same place where Charles Gadeken’s “Elder Mother” tree was last year — is near where the Bay Ridge Trail winds through Golden Gate Park on its 550-mile path around the entire Bay Area. It’s so close, in fact, that the trail council officially rerouted the path through the arch, further integrating it into the landscape.
To Davis, the placement, along a big “Yellow Dot,” functions as a traffic-calming measure as well, intended to get cyclists to “get off Strava” and slow down on the section of JFK Drive that’s filled with children, pedestrians, and other road users.
Only a day before “Solar Arch” was turned on, another Illuminate project was taken down.
A few hundred yards west on JFK Drive, the giant, red “NO DANCING” sign opposite Skatin’ Place was removed after only 13 months. As volunteers began dismantling the individual letters in Cody Smith’s 115-foot-long work — technically titled “Over Ruled” — it briefly read “DANCING.”
As the sun set Friday evening over a crowd of people sipping red wine around the arch and dancing to disco beats, fnnch, who faced a slew of criticism in 2021 over his ubiquitous honeybear murals, mused about San Francisco’s ever-growing embrace of large-scale artwork.
“The reason there isn’t more public art isn’t because of funding,” he said.“It’s that landlords don’t say yes to having art on their buildings. People are afraid of what could go wrong, and then you do it a couple of times and they love it.”
“Solar Arch” will remain for the next six months, with an option to renew. It will be there when tens of thousands of runners pass through it next May for Bay to Breakers, and Davis is betting that its low profile will make it a visual component of that famous footrace.
“We move at the speed of trust,” he said. “The placement of public art matters.”