Fifty years ago, a band of organizers, artists, and neighbors turned a decommissioned Army port into a home for the arts inside a national park. Join Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in 2027 for a yearlong celebration of that quintessential San Francisco story, beginning with You’re Invited: 50 Years of Bay Area Art, Community, and Reinvention, the anniversary exhibition opening January 9, 2027.
For half a century, Fort Mason Center has turned a military port of embarkation, built for departures, into a place where people come together to exchange ideas, to create, and to connect. This anniversary is at once a homecoming and a commencement. You’re Invited honors the generations of artists, organizers, and neighbors who reimagined these piers, while Fort Mason Station extends that same invitation to the public at our front door. Here, stewardship and reinvention have always been inseparable. As we restore the General’s Residence and break ground on Fort Mason Station, we are not preserving Fort Mason Center in amber; we are ensuring that its next fifty years belong to all who continue to imagine what it can become.
I hope you will join us in celebrating what we’ve created together.
Mike Buhler
President and CEO
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
You’re Invited: 50 Years of Bay Area Art, Community, and Reinvention.
You’re Invited surfaces the human architecture of Fort Mason Center: the organizers, artists, and community who built it and whose stories have never been told at scale. Through their artworks, ephemera, and documentary photographs, visitors time travel across Fort Mason Center’s histories, from Indigenous homeland and military port to a home for experimental art, activism, and community, and arrive at new points of departure for the future.
Fort Mason Art Walk
Join Fort Mason Center, it’s resident organizations and Fog Art + Design for an evening of artist talks and exhibitions accross campus.
Book Launch:You’re Invited: Fifty Years of Bay Area Art, Community, and Reinvention at Fort Mason Center by Alexis Madrigal Book Launch and Exhibition Closing Celebration
KQED Forum’s Alexis Madrigal hosts a conversation about Fort Mason Center’s unique contributions to the Bay Area’s cultural community over the last fifty years. The author talk coincides with the closing celebration of the You’re Invited exhibition.
Opening: Leah Rosenberg: The Sky a Sea as Well
Riffing of an earlier celebration in campus history, where exuberant stars and stripes greeted soldiers returning from War, Rosenberg’s The Sky A Sea As Well, adorns the Bay-facing facades of our piers with images drawn from “day shapes” that convey a ship’s mobility status. Substituting the standard black for vibrant color, Rosenberg crafts a new system of symbols to address the Bay—perhaps to new arrivals, or to those longing to return to it. A Further Trienniel Project.
Re-Opening: The General’s Residence
After a 12-month, $5 million transformational restoration completed in partnership with Architectural Resources Group, The General’s Residence reopens as one of San Francisco’s most iconic event venues with a modern design inspired by the San Francisco Bay and expanded capacity.
50th Birthday Party and Festival
Join Fort Mason Center for a weekend long community celebration. Featuring vendors curated by West Coast Craft, food from Off the Grid, music programmed by Stern Grove Festival and a 50-foot birthday cake prepared by artist/chef Leah Rosenberg.
Fort Mason Station Groundbreaking
Fort Mason Center closes the year of celebration and breaks ground on the transformative Fort Mason Station, a new project that will reimagine an abandoned railbed—closed behind a chain-link fence for half a century—as a space for community, creativity, and celebration.
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