The Marina officially has a new piece of public art. On Saturday, Oct. 23, the community gathered for the dedication ceremony of a new sculpture gracing the Moscone Recreation Center, at the corner of Laguna and Bay Streets. Passage, by Bay Area artist Kent Roberts, is a 25-foot-long, stainless steel mock frame of a ship’s hull replete with an undulating concrete wake. Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, San Francisco Arts Commission director of cultural affairs Luis R. Cancel, S.F. Recreation and Park Department general manager Phil Ginsburg, and the artist himself all turned out to give remarks.
The San Francisco Arts Commission, the agency charged with keeping San Francisco artistically enriched, joined with the Recreation and Park Department to have the piece installed. “I commend the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Public Art Program on another fantastic addition to the civic art collection,” Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier said in her statement. “The sculpture is a beautiful, contemporary symbol of San Francisco’s maritime history and honors those who arrived here by ship and who helped make this the great cultural city that it is today. I am also thrilled that District 2 can now boast a sculpture by such a prominent local artist.”

San Francisco Art Institute alumnus Kent Roberts is a longtime member of the Bay Area art scene. He has worked for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since 1979 and currently holds the position of exhibition design manager and chief preparator there. Roberts has a studio at his Moss Beach residence as well as at Pier 70 in the City. It was in his studio at Pier 70 that Passage was created.

The entire fabrication process – including making the paver forms for the wake – took approximately a year. Actually assembling the sculpture required 10 days of welding over a month. The welder, Rico Pinto says, “This is the second project I have done with Kent. The first was a giant wing in San Jose.” The wing sculpture is called Soaring Flight and it is a strikingly slender sky reflecting tribute to aviation pioneer John Montgomery.

“Kent is very challenging,” Pinto says smiling, “and I enjoy the challenge. He comes up with these odd shapes. These patterns, as you see, are hard to rig. There is no point of gravity so they have to have a lot of reinforcement.”

“This part,” Pinto adds, knocking on the tip of the bow “is a time capsule. We stuck about two dollars in quarters in there before we welded it up.”

After they finished they had to get the sculpture to the park. Roberts said, “Extracting it from the studio was kind of like getting a ship out of a bottle.” Roberts went on to say, “Once we got it to the park we kind of tore things up. Now it looks like the ship magically appeared here, so I want to thank the gardeners for making the canvas around it look so beautiful.”

Roberts thanked others for their involvement, as well as the commission and the community as a whole. “I was very fortunate to have been chosen by the San Francisco Arts Commission to make my sculpture for this site, and they have been a great partner in the long process,” said Roberts. “Being at the site the last few weeks, working on the sculpture, I have met many of the local residents and their enthusiasm about bringing sculpture to the site has been very rewarding for me.”

His work, it seems, will be very rewarding to the community as well. Starting at the end of the wake, concrete emerges from the earth in black and white ribbons braiding up a path around the powerful, stark ribcage of the ship’s hull, meeting at the bow in white concrete crescendos. Roberts feels Passage celebrates the diversity of the area, paying homage to the vessel that brought all types of people here from the Native Americans who traveled up and down the coast in boats, to the explorers, to the immigrants. Roberts said, “The ship refers to all the diversity in the City, to the ship that got us all here.”