San Francisco selects five artists for new public art installations

San Francisco has moved its public-memory fight into a new phase, choosing five artists for temporary installations that are meant to sit alongside, and challenge, the city’s older statues, monuments and memorials. The Shaping Legacy project is not just adding art to the civic landscape; it is asking which histories deserve more room in San Francisco’s public realm, and which existing symbols should stay, be reinterpreted or eventually come down.

The San Francisco Arts Commission said the project comes out of a three-year, Mellon Foundation-funded review of the city’s commemorative landscape. Its audit examined 105 monuments and memorials in the Civic Art Collection, compiling and verifying information about each work and assessing its history, public response and cultural context. That review became the basis for the city’s next round of public art, with temporary projects limited to up to five installations.

The commission announced the selected artists on April 7, 2026, after issuing the call for artists on May 19, 2025. Applications closed June 30, 2025, at 4:59 p.m. PDT. The commission said the temporary works are expected to move beyond bronze-and-stone monument design and into forms such as light, textiles, performance, augmented reality and community ritual, a sign that the city is testing more flexible ways to mark public space.

That matters in a city where monument debates have often become proxy fights over power, belonging and whose version of history gets permanence. The Arts Commission has framed Shaping Legacy as a way to expand inclusion, belonging and recognition of shared humanity in monuments and memorials, with special attention to stories tied to labor, migration and displacement, the kinds of histories that have often sat outside San Francisco’s traditional commemorative canon.

The project’s broader significance may outlast any single installation. By treating monuments as something the city can review, reinterpret and, when necessary, remove, San Francisco is signaling that public art is now part of a larger argument over civic identity. The five selected artists will help determine whether that argument produces new gathering places, fresh points of contention, or both, across the city’s public spaces.