Pews yield the floor to rugs
For-Site weaves 36 artists’ designs into ‘Sanctuary’
Ala Ebtekar’s rug was a month late for the art opening, but exhibition organizers saved a place for it in the middle of the 36 individual works that form “Sanctuary,” an art installation inside the Fort Mason Chapel.
When the final piece was placed, in early November, the exhibition was complete and the polished wooden floor of the church got covered with intricately woven rugs as if they are yoga mats.
“You have no idea how the whole thing comes together until you walk in,” says Ebtekar, after visiting the chapel for the first time. “I think the exhibition is best experienced as a collective of voices. It demands that kind of engagement.”
Because the show is called “Sanctuary” and it is in a sanctuary, it is art you can sit on and art you can lie down on and art you can spend all afternoon with once you remove your shoes at the door. Clean socks are advised. If you don’t have a pair, you can borrow a pair of slip-ons. Bare feet are not an option.
The art and the footwear were put there by For-Site, the ambitious San Francisco public art organization that is headquartered at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. It makes use of historic locations in the Presidio national park, and this is the first time it has employed the chapel, which sits off by itself on the upper campus, a white Mission-style building with a bell tower.
For-Site is increasingly an activist foundation, and “Sanctuary” was a response to Executive Order 13769, commonly known as “the travel ban” or “the Muslim ban.”
Thirty-six artists from 21 countries were invited to submit one design each. Those were sent to Pakistan to be converted by master rug makers into 4-by-6-foot rugs of wool yarn, each 3 inches thick.
A team worked full time on the rugs, and they were shipped in groups when completed. The most intricate of the rugs took the longest, and that was the design by Ebtekar, a lecturer in art at Stanford University.
“Persian carpets are sacred where I come from,” says the 39-year-old artist, who grew up in Berkeley but spent years studying in Iran. As such, he knows that “the rug is the first thing that is laid down to make a home.”
His rug, titled “Makan: A Sense of Place,” is deep with Islamic mysticism. If you stare down at it, you will see four angelic figures embedded in multiple shades of purple, blue and indigo. “It’s this continuous inward outward movement that I am trying to point at,’’ he explains. “A doorway to another place.”
It takes some quiet concentration to understand it, and the chapel provides it. The chapel was built in 1942 when Fort Mason served as the Port of Embarkation for the war in the Pacific. You can imagine the troops who took their last moments of solitude here before going down the steps to the dock and shipping off to war.
The pews have been removed for “Sanctuary.” You can lie on your back on the rugs and look up at a wooden ceiling designed to evoke the ribs of a boat’s hull. In the afternoon, the western sun filters through stained glass like a spotlight, shifting from rug to rug.