A hulking relic of San Francisco's shipbuilding past is about to become the city's most unlikely stage. The gantry crane towering over Hunters Point Naval Shipyard will be wrapped in projected video, original music and community voices this October as part of a new public art piece called CRANE, turning decades of industrial silence into a 40-minute multisensory show.
The project will become the centerpiece of that 40-minute, multi-sensory light show, according to Mission Local, which describes the piece as a temporary monument in five movements built around crane, voice, light, sound and projection. The crew behind it includes visual artist Ian Winters, lighting designer Elaine Buckholtz, composer Evelyn Ficarra, historian Stacey Carter and community organizer William Rhodes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which reports that Winters contributes video, Buckholtz handles lighting, Ficarra designs sound, Carter brings historian research, and Rhodes leads community engagement work.
CRANE is produced by the Shipyard Trust for the Arts and is billed as a public art collaboration with that organization and the full creative team, per Ian Winters’s own project page, which notes the piece is premiering in fall 2026 at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and is funded by the Rainin Foundation’s Open Spaces program. The Chronicle describes CRANE as the last event in the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy series, a program that, according to the San Francisco Examiner, builds temporary public artworks with neighborhood communities to spotlight under-recognized histories and rethink what a monument can be.
A Sound Built From the Crane Itself
Composer Evelyn Ficarra did not just write music for the crane — she recorded it. Mission Local reports that Ficarra attached contact microphones to the structure to capture its own sounds and wove them into the performance alongside historic recordings and oral histories from Bayview-Hunters Point residents, a blend that Stacey Carter’s own event listing describes as the first phase of immersive soundscapes.
Carter, who contributes historian research to the project, has also fed the team discoveries about Paul Draper’s all-Black painting crew, which she has shared with the collaborators, per the same Mission Local account. The crane the team is working with is enormous by any measure: Mission Local describes it as visible from five counties and standing nearly 500 feet tall, while the Chronicle’s 2024 coverage put it at 450 feet high and nearly three football fields wide, and KQED has described it as 450 feet tall and 730 feet long — accounts that don’t agree on the exact numbers. What isn’t in dispute is its age: the Chronicle reports the crane was built in 1947 and was the largest of its kind in the world when it was installed at the site, during an era when the Hunters Point shipyard employed 18,000 people at the peak of its operation in 1941, according to Mission Local.
Shows, Watch Parties and a Free Livestream
According to the Chronicle, CRANE is scheduled for October 9 through 10 and October 16 through 17, 2026, running from 5:30 to 10 p.m. at Building 101, 451 Galvez Ave, with four shows total and tickets ranging from free to $75. The Chronicle adds that in-person watch parties will be held at Zaccho Dance Theatre during the first weekend and at Building 101 during the second and final weekend, with the whole thing streamed live for free at crane.video. Other accounts complicate that picture: Stacey Carter’s event page lists six live performances on October 9, 10, 11 and October 16, 17, 18, while Mission Local describes opening night on October 9 featuring a live choral performance and watch party at Zaccho Dance Theater, with a livestream planned at Building 101 on October 16 and 17 — details that don’t fully line up with the Chronicle’s four-show schedule.
The run coincides with Hunters Point Shipyard Artists Open Studios, scheduled for October 17 through 18 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at studios in Buildings 101 and 116, according to the Chronicle, with art on view, food trucks and live music rounding out the weekend.
A Follow-Up to 2024’s Crane Lighting
This isn’t the first time the Hunters Point crane has glowed for an audience. Back in October 2024, the Chronicle reported that the structure was lit up with searchlights, arena-scale video projection and a live musical quartet, helmed by Ian Winters and Elaine Buckholtz, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Shipyard Artists, a studio community the paper describes as more than 300 creatives strong. That earlier show took place Saturday, October 19, 2024, from 6 to 10 p.m., was livestreamed online and paired with Shipyard Open Studios, where visitors could meet and shop from more than 130 artists, per the Chronicle’s reporting at the time.
CRANE arrives as part of a broader city effort to rethink how San Francisco memorializes its past. The Shaping Legacy project began in 2020 with the convening of the Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, according to the Examiner, and gained momentum in 2023 when the city received a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund artist-built temporary monuments and memorials. The latest phase of the project, the Examiner reports, selected five participating artists from a pool of 75 applicants: Adrian Arias, Afatasi the Artist, Stacy Carter, Ariana Martinez-Cruz and Kaleb Duarte. Carter’s commission is CRANE, which turns the shipyard’s gantry crane into one of the city’s more unusual stages for public memory.
