This is The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
In a span of less than a month this year, Leah Rosenberg painted a single wall in her Mission apartment more than a dozen times. It was deep indigo, sunny yellow, crisp green, bubble-gum pink. And she didn’t stop at the wall. She coated a bench, chair, and side table. She let paint drip over a mug and a book, then slathered a matching coat over a large, square, hanging canvas.
As each color dried, she’d search her apartment, gathering cards and cups and fruit in that day’s hue, adding them to her monochromatic tableau. The next morning she would wake up, pop open a fresh can of paint in an entirely different color, pull on a pair of painter’s coveralls in a corresponding shade, and begin the process all over again.
Looking at the clean, white wall today, there is no evidence of the multi-colored palimpsest beneath the surface. Much of Rosenberg’s work has this ethereal quality. Like the vibrant sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, Rosenberg’s spaces serve as powerful, fleeting symbols of memories and emotions, before disappearing beneath another veneer of paint.
Rosenberg is a celebrated and prolific artist whose work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA; adorns the offices of Google, Uber, Facebook, and USCF Medical Center; and can be seen in the form of large-scale public installations all over the Bay Area. Even if you don’t immediately know her by name, you have likely alighted on her work at an SFO terminal or in a gritty SoMa alley and experienced the familiar dopamine hit of spotting a Rosenberg in the wild.
The apartment wall-painting project culminated in the film “Color in Twelve Parts,” which debuted in the spring at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Much like the wall itself, Rosenberg’s home/art studio is just the most recent layer on a site with a rich and mostly hidden history.
The one-bedroom loft-style apartment is inside a nondescript, low-slung warehouse wrapped in corrugated metal, where San Bruno Avenue dead-ends into a tangle of freeway overpasses and ramps known as the Hairball. Today, the buildings are home to florists, artists, and a small preschool. Rosenberg moved there in 2021, her first experience living solo after years in a charming Victorian with half a dozen roommates. Her unit is accessed via a winding, tree-lined path.
The front door opens to a petite kitchen efficiently stocked with all the necessities of an industrious cook and baker. An open-tread stair is visible down the hallway; beneath it, Rosenberg has carved out a desk area set with an array of analog tools: washi tape, spiral-bound notebooks, scissors in myriad sizes, a single taper candle, a shiny, red bouncing ball, and a vintage radio. The ball is part of the artwork “Don’t Think Too Much” by Maira Kalman, and the accompanying manifesto, handwritten on a large sheet of crumbled tissue paper, hangs above the desk and sets the mood with precision: “In the strangeness of life, live.”
The hallway leads to the double-height main living space that serves as Rosenberg’s studio. Its primary furnishings are two large tables, where she works daily. One, pushed against a wall, is topped with Rosenberg’s signature precise stripes in a gaggle of colors; underneath is a collection of stools, each striped to correspond to a specific section of the table. The other, a hefty wood dining table, has three long benches sporting rainbow stripes.
A wall of windows looks out to a fecund community garden bursting with flowers, fruits, and veggies — a vestige of its former identity as the Farm, a radical experiment in art and agriculture that once housed circus groups, mime troupes, punk bands, and urban growers. Just beyond it is Potrero del Sol Park, its deep, concrete skateboarding bowl a canvas for an ever-changing show of colorful street art.
A long, low bookshelf fits beneath the windows, and Rosenberg has filled each space as if constructing an altar. There are tiny stones set in perfect rows; handwritten poems, notes, and sketches; art monographs and novels stacked so their spines create towers of colored bars. The opposite wall is fit with another set of windows that are propped open, allowing peeks into Rosenberg’s lofted bedroom, a quiet and contemplative space decorated simply and hung with a few beloved works of art.
The back wall of the main room was the site of “Color in Twelve Parts” but is now a clean and crisp white, as are the bench, chair, and side table. The chair is set with a plump object that looks like an ever-expanding mound of snow-white bread dough left out too long to rise. This is one of Rosenberg’s “Paint Balls.” Once you know what they are, you begin to spot them all over the apartment. Trailing one another up the staircase are glossy pink, blue, and yellow orbs of varying size, imperfect spheres that seem to possess distinct personalities born of their lumps and dents.
Making these paint balls is a meditative practice for Rosenberg. She lets strips of latex paint dry on a surface, then peels them off and wraps them, like a distant, eccentric cousin of the rubber-band ball. Since late October, Rosenberg has been fabricating a single large ball inside a 20,000-square-foot former popcorn factory in Dogpatch, the newest studio in the Minnesota Street Project Foundations’s (MSPF) sprawling art compound.
Her latest (and largest) ball made its spectacular debut at a Dec. 4 fundraiser, cheekily billed as “a ball with Leah Rosenberg.” For the party, Rosenberg and the foundation team convened a crew of artists, chefs, and bakers, many of them veterans of the convivial, art-meets-food events she once helped to throw at SFMOMA. Together, they created an eye-popping buffet of ball-shaped edibles, an over-the-top sensory treat, in true Leah Rosenberg fashion.
The public can see the ball, as well as the accompanying video work about Rosenberg’s process, on Saturday, when it will be part of the Wonderland holiday art market at Minnesota Street Project.
As for Rosenberg, it is time to start dreaming up what she will make next. After nearly two decades of traveling the world for her work, she is excited by the idea of staying home, hunkering down in her studio, and seeing where the rainbow of inspiration leads next.
“I realized the only thing I haven’t tried is staying in one place. So this year, I’m seeing how that goes,” she says. “I believe in San Francisco so much, and the more I devote myself to being here, the more I discover.”
