Cheryl Haines
Founding Executive Director, FOR-SITE Foundation
Celebrating its ten-year anniversary in 2014, the FOR-SITE Foundation is dedicated to the creation, presentation, and understanding of art about place. Our exhibitions and commissions, artist residencies, and education programs are based on the belief that art can inspire fresh thinking and important dialogues about our natural and cultural environments. Through our collaborative partnerships, FOR-SITE has broken new ground and forged a model for engaging audiences by inviting artists to make site-specific works on national park land throughout San Francisco.
Ai Weiwei, Blossom, 2014 (detail); installation: porcelain, hospital fixtures (sinks, toilets, bathtubs); part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
FOR-SITE began working with Ai Weiwei in 2009, first in the context of an exhibition titled Presidio Habitats, which took place in San Francisco’s Presidio, a 1,491-acre national park site and former army post with sweeping coastal vistas and a rich history spanning more than two hundred years. For this exhibition, we invited an international cast of architects, artists, and designers to create site-specific works that addressed the animal life in the park. Ai Weiwei chose to design a home for the Western screech owl. Through the addition of a strategically placed aperture, the artist encouraged this small owl to inhabit what appeared to be a hybrid of a traditional Chinese garden stool and a blue-and-white porcelain vessel from the Ming Dynasty. These elegant and purposefully ornamental habitats hung together in a community of forms high up in the branches of a Monterey cypress tree, evoking a range of associations, including the Presidio’s Pacific Rim orientation, San Francisco’s Chinese heritage, and the transmission and transformation of culture through trade.
Next, FOR-SITE organized International Orange (2012), a large exhibition of site-sensitive commissions occasioned by the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. This exhibition, named for the unique paint color of the span, took place inside Fort Point, one of the few Third System forts on the West Coast, located at the south anchorage of the bridge. While the exhibition was being installed, I would often take a moment and go to the roof of the fort and consider the environment further, and my eyes would rest on the island of Alcatraz. I couldn’t help but think how remarkable it would be to enliven this island site with a new conversation, one not only about detainment but also addressing the layered and complex historical legacy of the island.
Alcatraz, one of the most visited sites in America’s national park system, hosts 1.4 million visitors a year. While its notoriety is associated primarily with its years as a federal penitentiary, as I studied the site more deeply, I realized that the island’s story was much richer than I imagined, including not only the Native American occupation (1969–1971) but also the Civil War–era political prisoners and conscientious objectors to World War I who were once incarcerated there. As my research developed, I was captivated by the richness of the island’s history and the possibility of making it visible to audiences through a curatorial intervention.
In 2011, artist and activist Ai Weiwei was detained (and feared “disappeared”) by the Chinese government for eighty-one days due to his outspoken stance regarding the human rights abuses that have occurred there. Not long after his release, I went to visit him in Beijing. I asked the artist what small thing could I do to assist him after this experience. He said that he hoped that I could bring his ideas and art to a broader audience. I had been asking myself what kind of artist would be well suited to create work on Alcatraz. At that moment, I suddenly realized that this artist was the answer. Here was a remarkable opportunity to engage someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution—a time when his father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, suffered terribly for his artistic stance; an artist who is not only an outspoken human rights activist but someone who has personally experienced being detained for his beliefs. I asked, “What if I brought you a prison?” His immediate response was, “I would like that.” Thus began our discussions about this exhibition.
Convinced by the artist’s initial response that there was tremendous potential in this conversation, I immediately approached the National Park Service (NPS) and its local partner here, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, with the idea that this project could be an opportunity both to tell the Alcatraz story in a different light, appealing to many international visitors with greater themes, and to attract local visitorship, which is much less than one might imagine. Our partners at the Conservancy and the NPS were at once struck by the opportunities this project presented and were very creative and positive in their responses.
Working on this exhibition has been a great gift, enabling me to connect more deeply with the history of Alcatraz with the help of research assistants and historians who have added to my understanding of a site I’ve long found fascinating. But more important, I have learned a great deal about the current state of affairs regarding international human rights and freedom of expression and have become more aware of the many places where basic civil liberties are compromised.
Sadly, the freedom to express one’s beliefs without fear of recrimination is far from universal. The exhibition draws parallels between prisoners and “free” citizens living under the authority of a repressive government. In both cases, communication is often restrained in order to control the populace. The works in @Large address these concerns eloquently with materials and methods that Ai Weiwei has not used in the past. In fact, the artist seized this chance to address new subjects, to broaden his field of vision beyond China, and to consider other countries with disturbing human rights records. The result is seven new installations commissioned specifically for this exhibition.
Of course, such broad ideas about human rights and freedom of expression are most effectively animated when considered with respect to individual lives. One of the most moving artworks in @Large is Trace, an installation comprising nearly 180 portraits of prisoners of conscience from around the world, all made from LEGO building blocks. The faces and names that appear in these portraits were selected with great care and with the inspired guidance of Amnesty International. The individuals identified here are from thirty-one countries around the globe. Many of them are serving lengthy prison sentences for merely voicing beliefs that are in conflict with their government’s positions. They present a human face through which the basic tenets of this exhibition are presented, calling our attention to pressing societal and political issues. The portraits are laid out on the floor of the New Industries Building, a location where prisoners once worked at tasks such as washing the clothing from military bases throughout the Bay Area. While they worked, the prisoners were carefully observed by guards standing above on a highly protected walkway. These portraits are meant to be seen individually by viewers as they walk among them, as well as from the elevated position of the “gun gallery,” where they become a sea of lost faces, overwhelming in their expanse.
One of the things that made it possible for me to organize @Large with an artist who cannot travel abroad—collaborating through countless online exchanges—has been the fact that the artist has an innate understanding of architectural space. Ai Weiwei has become all too experienced at working remotely over the past three years, and during this time he has realized several substantial exhibitions abroad while remaining unable to travel outside China. Whether despite of or because of these limitations, Ai Weiwei is extremely skilled at understanding space and locating opportunities for activation.
Stay Tuned is another artwork I hope will evoke a visceral, empathic response from the viewer. Located in A Block, which is in the main cellhouse and dates from when Alcatraz was a military prison, this audio installation activates twelve cells with inspiring oration and music made by people who have been detained for the creative expression of their beliefs. The voices speak from a variety of cultural vantages and native languages, including Czech, Farsi, Russian, and Spanish, creating in each cell a different immersive sound environment. Upon entering a cell and sitting before a mirror, the visitor is invited to spend some time listening and reflecting on the responsibility we all bear to demand fundamental human rights for those who have been silenced.
Communication is a key theme in the exhibition—both interpersonal communication as a basic human necessity and the role of communication in organizing social change. The choice of A Block for Stay Tuned came from considering how prisoners in Alcatraz were prevented from communicating with one another. In fact, from 1934 to 1937, Alcatraz was a “silent” prison, a particularly cruel penal experiment that forbade all speech and reportedly drove some prisoners insane. Documented are instances in which prisoners tried desperately to communicate through the pipes or by leaving notes inside library books. These stories, and Ai Weiwei’s own experience during incarceration, inspired both Stay Tuned and one of the most interactive pieces in the exhibition, Yours Truly. As the artist told me in one of our numerous conversations, “The most terrible thing about jail is not the treatment you receive but the isolation.” Located in the Dining Hall—one of the few places where the prisoners could actually interact and communicate with one another—Yours Truly invites visitors to take repose at tables and benches, where they have the opportunity to send postcards to prisoners of conscience who are currently incarcerated throughout the world. The postcards depict the national (or widely recognized) birds and flowers from nations with poor human rights records. Visitors are encouraged to offer these prisoners words of hope, to share their thoughts about their experiences of the exhibition and the island, and to let them know that they and their struggles are not forgotten.
Ai Weiwei with FOR-SITE Executive Director Cheryl Haines outside the artist’s Beijing studio, spring 2014
On many levels, this is an unprecedented project, with challenges that have ranged from an artist who is creating the work from afar to a highly complex visitor environment. None of it could have been possible without a truly inspirational and visionary artist and the remarkable team assembled by the FOR-SITE Foundation—incredibly skilled people working at the top of their various fields: Marnie Burke de Guzman, special projects director; Jackie von Treskow, program director; Alison Konecki, development and outreach associate; Jennifer Burke, visual design; Juliet Clark, writer and editor; Jan Stürmann, video production; Ari Salomon, web developer; and publications editor David Spalding. I’m also deeply grateful for the visionary leadership of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area/National Park Service—particularly Frank Dean, general superintendent, and Alcatraz site supervisor Marcus Koenen—as well as our partners at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy: Greg Moore, president and CEO; Kate Bickert, director of park initiatives and stewardship; Nicholette Phelps, vice-president, visitor programs and services; and Robert Lieber, vice-president, interpretive sales. I would also like to express my gratitude to our patrons, whose incredible generosity has enabled FOR-SITE to realize this exhibition: lead donors Roger Evans and Aey Phanachet and the Fisher Family, with significant support from Drusie and Jim Davis, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Mimi Haas, Outset USA, and Wendy and Eric Schmidt. Finally, it has been a great privilege and honor to be able to address these concerns with such caring and creative partners: we salute the work of Human Rights Watch and extend our thanks to Amnesty International for vetting our prisoners of conscience research with great care and exactitude.
I can only hope that visitors viewing this exhibition will be brought to consider the following questions: What are basic human rights? What constitutes freedom? What role does communication play in the creation of a just society? What can we do to ensure that we will be heard? And what is our individual responsibility to ensure freedom for one another around the globe? If just a handful of visitors begin to think differently about the concept of freedom or feel newly compelled to engage in or support social activism, @Large will have been a great success.
