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. Curved lines. Sometimes simplicity takes the longest to arrive at. Not much is needed to accumulate meaning.

The circle has become a recurring companion in my work because it refuses to settle into a single identity. It can be the self, a whole, a target, a  ball, a piece of fruit, a moon, a sun, a face, a planet. Here it becomes all of these things and none of them, shifting with the light and with the viewer.

I have always been curious about what color can do in public space. Not simply how it can brighten a place, but how it can brighten a day. How it can surprise someone in passing. How it might persuade you to change your route just to experience it again. Like a flower in bloom, color asks us to notice because no two moments are ever exactly the same. It’s a cycle.

I have always been drawn to sequences; to repetition, seriality, and the possibility of making paintings move. The 18 loading bays offered an architecture that already contained rhythm. Each opening became 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.

But the murals are only half the picture. The other half is made by the site itself. Throughout the day the sun casts moving shadows across the walls, redrawing the compositions hour by hour like a giant sundial. The buildings are in conversation with the sky. The sun is making paintings too … painting on top of these paintings.

Then there is the wind. If you have stood in this corridor, you know it rarely sits still. During installation, gusts lifted paint from our buckets, carried color across the drop cloths, and splattered our coveralls, as if laughing at our attempts to paint perfectly straight edges or at the thought we could contain the paint to the drop cloth at all. The wind insisted on joining the cast. Over time, it felt as though everything here had become a character: the seagulls, the fog horns, the fishermen, the seals, the conversations drifting between the buildings, a paper bag tumbling down the corridor, the changing tide, the afternoon light. Fort Mason has always been a place where stories unfold, and while painting I often felt less like I was installing an artwork than joining an ongoing performance already in progress.

Every passage through the corridor is different. The painted colors remain the same, but the shadows never do. Morning and evening, fog and clear skies, each produces another version of the work.

Some of the colors may seem a little fantastical for sky and sea, sun and moon. Yet every one can be found somewhere nearby: in the flora, the art in galleries, the food, the buoys, the cargo ships, the sailboats, and the atmosphere itself. The landscape is already painting these colors. The mural simply gathers them together.

The murals are not meant to compete with the Bay but to frame it. They encourage us to look toward the horizon, to notice the changing light, to become aware of time passing. A reminder that the world beyond the wall is changing as constantly as the painting itself.

As Fort Mason celebrates 50 years as a non-profit partner of the National Park Service, I hope these murals celebrate not only the site but its continual becoming … its bright moments and dark ones, its calm mornings and windy afternoons, its long history and the countless people who continue to shape it.

Color, for me, has always been a way of making visible what is already there. Sometimes all it takes is a few painted lines (and 36 gallons of paint) to help us see the sea as another sky.