Leah Rosenberg: The Sea Is But Another Sky

LEAH ROSENBERG: THE SEA IS BUT ANOTHER SKY PRESENTED BY FORT MASON ART For The Sea Is But Another Sky, a painting commission for the passageway between Landmark Buildings B and C, Leah Rosenberg highlights the fundamentals of Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture’s site: the setting sun, the rising moon, the Bay Waters, and the wind that dapples across their interaction. View The Sea Is But Another Sky Murals In The Mural Corridor Between Buildings B and C EVENT DETAILS As an artist who studies the color in everyday life, Rosenberg remakes buildings and public spaces with exuberant visions of local conditions. She often draws on the changing palette of a surrounding landscape, from grasses and flowers to sea and skies. SFMOMA, SFO, and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, among others, have invited her to transform their commons via her extraordinary palette. On the cusp of Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture’s 50th anniversary as a nonprofit home for arts and culture, Rosenberg folds the campus’ natural environment onto its former military buildings – buildings designed to send people and material half a world away. In her “mural alley” project, however, Rosenberg stays close: the edge of the San Francisco Bay spills out and onto 18 loading docks, here remade into discrete painting blocks. The waters ripple across continuous walls beneath pedestrian walkways, and the interplay of both pulls you forward into the site itself.  In making The Sea Is But Another Sky, Rosenberg invites viewers to see themselves as agents and actors in this landscape. She imagines each loading dock as “another frame. As you walk, the paintings unfold almost cinematically: sunrise becomes sunset, sun becomes moon, sky becomes sea. The body edits the film simply by moving through it.” In this way, she recalls Fort Mason Center’s call to its first audiences, in 1977: “You are invited to attend, to participate, to propose your own ideas – to become involved in making these solid old army buildings come alive with all the vitality and diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area.” Within The Sea Is But Another Sky, that vitality above, around, and all about Fort Mason Center always includes You.  ABOUT THE ARTIST Leah Rosenberg plumbs color, memory, and place in paintings, sculpture, installation, and performance. Her work has been commissioned by The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; Denver Art Museum; SFO Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she led the pastry program for Blue Bottle Coffee’s Modern Art Desserts. A native of Saskatoon (Canada), she completed her MFA at the California College of Art; her thesis explored the artistic possibilities of cake. ARTIST STATEMENT Sometimes it is worth walking all the way to the edge. Fort Mason has a way of rewarding those who keep going. Past the galleries and cafés, beyond where most visitors turn around, there is a point where the fishermen gather, the seals lift their heads from the water, the wind picks up, and the horizon opens wide. Standing here, I find myself thinking about orientation, time, and the history of this place. One building faces the setting sun; the other the rising moon. Walking between them, you move between day and night, east and west. I kept thinking about how far back the history of this landscape reaches and how the Bay has always been shaped by changing light, tides, weather, animals, ships, people coming, people going. Long before these buildings existed, the sun and moon were already tracing these same paths overhead. Regardless of age, background, or where someone calls home, we have all watched the sun disappear beneath the horizon and the moon emerge from it. We all wake. We all sleep. We are all made of water. I hope these murals might gently coax people toward the Bay – to slow down, look out, and remember where they are. The paintings are built from remarkably little: a horizon line. Water. Sky. Stripes. Circles. Straight lines. Curve…