John Ong of Sacramento was awaiting a friend’s arrival at San Francisco International Airport when he leaned over a railing and was confronted by a sculpture garden.
“I’m not really much into art and all that. I love the colors, though,” he said, when asked to describe what he saw. “They could look good at my house for sure.”
Ong’s difficulty in summarizing what he was looking at is the point of this new permanent public art installation by Gay Outlaw, a San Francisco artist known for her dry Southern humor.
Three monumental sculptures of steel, concrete, terrazzo and aluminum are arranged in a paved triangular patio on ground level at the western end of the new Harvey Milk Terminal 1, where it connects to the International Terminal.
The art commands its own courtyard, and a wall plaque gives the three pieces’ individual titles — “Bird Plane House,” “Shell” and “Intersection” — but there is no overall title for the installation. It is up to the viewer to either figure out a connection or just stare at them while killing time waiting for a flight. Either way is fine with Outlaw.
“I think of these three pieces as having a conversation together,” said Outlaw, who declined to specify what this conversation might be about.
“It’s obviously not a verbal conversation. It’s tactile, spatial and visual.”
In a competition hosted by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Outlaw’s design was selected from a pool of 516 artists, and 12 semifinalists. With a $530,000 budget, the project was completed in early November after a long delay when two of her fabricating plants were closed by the coronavirus pandemic. During that delay, the airport — normally noisy and frantic — has become a quieter place, closer to a museum than a bustling hub for international departures.
“You don’t think of an airport as a destination for contemplative viewing of anything. You are always in a rush and there is anxiety around that,” Outlaw said, “but now it is kind of surreal out there.”
Originally from Mobile, Ala., Outlaw, 61, has been in San Francisco for half her life and operates out of a converted auto garage near Ocean Beach. Her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Legion of Honor, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. This installation at SFO represents her first permanent public commission anywhere.
But there has been no public dedication event due to stay-at-home rules. This adds to the intrigue, which Outlaw employed at her only other public art installation — a serpentine wall made of fruitcakes encased in an aluminum container at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. That installation turned out to be temporary, from 1995 to 1997, through no fault of the 750 fruitcakes. “They got better with age,” she said.
Her airport installation can be approached by foot, by car, by AirTrain, through a two-story picture window at Terminal 1 or from the food trucks one level above. From any vantage the sculptures inspire an element of surprise because they are hidden away and few people know to come looking for them.
“I’ve only seen them through the window, but I think somebody put a lot of work into it,” said Leonard Sacket, who had just arrived from Tulsa and was collecting his luggage at the nearby baggage claim. “They need an ashtray out there if they ain’t got one.”
They ain’t. But they do have two long, wooden benches to sit on. These were part of the architectural design of the terminal, which Outlaw had to work around.
Each of the three geometric shapes appears to sit on its own concrete plinth, and they are different enough to be mistaken for the work of three artists. In the daytime they are bathed in indirect winter light, and at night they are illuminated by embedded lamps that accentuate the palette of orange, teal, bright yellow.
Day or night, “The main people who see it are the people who work there,” Outlaw said. “I see pilots and flight attendants walking past with their luggage.”
Chris Cruz, who runs a desk assisting travelers with wheelchair needs at the Terminal 1 baggage claim, has plenty of downtime to study the three geometric figures outside the window.
“One looks like the tail of a plane, one looks like a chair,” he said. “The other one I’m still trying to figure out what it is.”
“They’re so beautiful,” said Carmina Lorenzano of East Palo Alto, who was admiring them from above, on her break from the Cielito Lindo taco truck. “One looks like cardboard and one looks like … I don’t know.”
The cardboard description is spot-on, said Outlaw. That one, “Bird Plane House,” is made of aluminum plates with edges that resemble a cardboard box that has been deconstructed to show a cross section of its corrugation.
“Intersection” is 12,000 pounds of cast concrete, detailed with terrazzo biscuits that change shape depending upon the vantage.
“Shell” is covered in special-effects auto paint that reflects light, like a peacock feather.
“I wanted this piece to have a mysterious and beautiful sense of light and space, in contrast to ‘Intersection’ and ‘Bird Plane House,’ ” Outlaw said.
Mystery should not be a problem so long as this unnamed patio covered in an unnamed body of work remains unannounced. But that won’t last. It is part of an overhaul of the airport in outdoor art. It will all be introduced and dedicated with civic fanfare. Until then, and probably until a vaccine, there is Outlaw’s sculpture garden.
“It’s there,” said Jennifer, a ticket agent for American Airlines who declined to give her last name while taking her break and staring at the art through the picture window. “But there’s hardly anybody at the airport to see it.”
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