On a green strip beneath a canopy of eucalyptus trees where San Francisco’s Panhandle meets Ashbury, a flatbed truck delivered a pair of giant crows their regular-sized counterparts might feel a bit intimidated by. The massive crows, cast in bronze, were the works of artist Jack Champion. Their pedigree includes a yearlong stay in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. “This piece is called an ‘Attempted Murder,'” explained Champion as the second crow was lowered onto the grass. “In the classification of animals and everything, it’s considered a murder of crows if there are three or more. And because there’s only two, it’s ‘Attempted Murder.'” Champion constructed a past version of five crows from fiberglass and hauled them out to the Black Rock Desert for the annual Burning Man arts festival. Champion refashioned them in bronze at Berkeley’s Artworks Foundry. “I hope people don’t think they’re scary,” Champion said, admiring the pair of ominously jet black creatures. The crows are the latest installment of the Big Art Loop, an ambitious project to place public artworks all around San Francisco. The project, which began in 2024, is creating a 34-mile loop around the city with the goal of eventually installing up to 100 temporary art pieces. “We believe that art can activate public spaces and can help people see themselves and each other in a new light,” Big Art Loop Executive Director Aliza Marks said. A pair of black bronze crows by artist Jack Champion are installed in San Francisco’s Panhandle near Ashbury as part of the Big Art Loop. At the same time as Champion’s crows were touching down on the Panhandle grass, nearby at the eastern tip of the Panhandle near the entrance to Golden Gate Park, artist Kate Raudenbush was also busy putting the finishing touches on a newly placed art piece she calls “Seed of Self.” The New York-based artist crafted the structure from steel and other metals, with a small vestibule facing an orb-shaped mirror where visitors could sit. At night, the internal structure lights up. “Symbolically, I wanted ‘Seed of Self’ to feel like a cosmic seed fell down and broke open in the middle,” said Raudenbush, who is known for her intricate metal sculptures, often featured at Burning Man. The addition of Champion and Raudenbush’s art pieces brought the total number of Big Art Loop installations to 20. Marks said the project hopes to have 50 installations by the end of the year. “Big Art Loop brings the unexpected into our daily lived experiences,” said Marks. “You turn the corner and you see something you didn’t expect to see there.” The project has already placed pieces like Marco Cochrane’s “R-Evolution,” a 45-foot tall woman installed in Embarcadero Plaza; Zulu Heru’s “Whispers of Waste” in India Basin Park in the Bayview; CJ Roughgarden’s “Naga,” a massive sea serpent in Golden Gate Park’s Rainbow Falls; and Michael Christian’s twisted metal sculpture titled “Corpus” near Pier 14. The pieces are connecting Bayview-Hunters Point to the Embarcadero to Golden Gate Park and out to Sunset Dunes. The Big Art Loop began when Sid and Karen Sijbrandij and their foundation pledged the seed money to begin renting art projects to place around San Francisco. The couple learned that many large scale artworks, including those made for Burning Man, were stashed away in storage. The project began paying artists to temporarily place their works out in the urban landscape. The idea was to use art as an anecdote to the doom loop reputation that San Francisco was stuck with following the pandemic. Artist Kate Raudenbush sits inside her metal sculpture titled “Seed of Self” on San Francisco’s Panhandle near Stanyan. “This is to me like a revival of San Francisco,” said Champion. “I think this art loop is probably the greatest thing to help this bring San Francisco, this historical city, back into the loop.” It was also a reminder that the tech-laden city, bursting with AI billboards and companies, still had a foot in the tangible world of art. “I think that we have to remember that creativity is actually one of our most cherished and valuable qualities as human beings,” Raudenbush said. The iron crows and the metal seed from space will remain in the Panhandle for at least a year. The Big Art Loop typically installs pieces for a year, with the possibility of extending their stay. Along the way, likely generating reactions of love and hate and everything in between. “It’s something that’s now the fabric of their daily lives,” said Marks. “And that’s what we hope for is to enrich these communities and to bring great art to neighborhoods around San Francisco.” ...read more read less