Annual light show brings radiant new artwork and returning favorites to Pier 15
All the Flowers are For Me. Photo by Drew Baron. Courtesy of The Columbia Museum of Art.
SAN FRANCISCO (October 11, 2022) – GLOW: Discover the Art of Light returns to the Exploratorium this holiday season with six artists illuminating Pier 15 with light sculptures big and small. Visitors are invited to connect and get inspired in their luminescence. GLOW opens November 17, 2022 and runs through January 29, 2023.
“We are excited to continue our holiday tradition of showcasing brilliant light installations throughout the museum,” said Kirstin Bach, interim director of arts at the Exploratorium. “This year’s GLOW exhibition brings pieces that spark curiosity, heighten our perception, and stimulate conversation.”
The Last Ocean by artist Jen Lewin. Photos by Charles Aydlett (left) and Nadir Ali (right), Images Courtesy of Jen Lewin Studio.
In Gallery 3, Jen Lewin’s The Last Ocean is an expansive landscape of interactive platforms that illuminate to resemble a glowing ice field. Created from reclaimed ocean plastic, the platform’s five-sided pieces form a beautiful geometric tessellation — a repeating pattern of flat shapes with no gaps. Through the use of recycled ocean plastic, Lewin explores the crisis of plastic pollution in our oceans, a warming planet, dwindling natural resources, and the need for aggressive systemic change.
In the Black Box, Anila Quayyam Agha’s All the Flowers are for Me is inspired by Islamic textiles, architecture, and floral motifs. A single beacon of light glows from within a suspended steel cube, producing immersive patterns that ripple and change as visitors move through the space.
Similarly, Agha’s Teardrop (after Robert Irwin) interweaves delicate, traditional Islamic decorative geometric patterns and architecture with modern materials. The work is inspired by jaalis, intricate carved screens, which cast moving shadows as the sun rises and falls.
Left to right: Entangled Attraction, Photo courtesy of Sally Weber and Craig Newswanger; Raylights, Photo courtesy of Craig Newswanger.
Entangled Attraction and Raylights, a pair of installations by Resonance Studio artists Sally Weber and Craig Newswanger, immerse visitors in trails of light in motion. Entangled Attraction features 100 pinpoints of light that appear to orbit around each other when viewed from afar, while Raylights produces ever-changing, mandala-like light patterns synchronized to ambient sounds.
GLOW will also feature the return of visitor favorites Museum of the Moon by Luke Jerram, and Enchanted Tree by Burt Libe.
