The power of gold to show inequality
Artist’s leaf gilds common fixtures in area cities
Lodged between a dive bar and a thrift store lined with murals on the bustling Mission District’s Sycamore Street stands a 4-foot-tall post covered in 23-karat-gold leaf. The shimmering bollard stands out in the line of other steel boundaries just barely in the shadow of an overhanging fire escape, next to streams of urine and cigarette butts peppering the sidewalk of one of the most expensive places to live in the United States.
The gold-covered bollard is one of nine utilitarian objects — manholes, pipes and sewer cleanout covers — gilded in gold leaf throughout San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito and San Rafael as part of “Gilded Cities,” an unsanctioned public art project condemning income inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area.
Berkeley-based designer Erik Schmitt, 58, spent four days traversing the Bay Area and crouching over utility objects, priming steel pipes and plates with a wire brush, then cleaning them with a soft brush before pressing
“And when you’re looking at gold sewer plate, it’s exquisite.”
Erik Schmitt
gold leaf onto the grooves of the surfaces. When it was all done, he snapped a photo and walked away.
“The Bay Area is experiencing a tech renaissance. There is a such a concentration of brilliant people working in tech, and that’s what makes this so ironic,” Schmitt said. “People are coming here, inadvertently driving up the cost of living, and making the traditional creative community, including cops and nurses, to be forced to leave the city.”
Schmitt calls San Francisco and its neighboring cities “gilded” communities because they boast about ethnic diversity and inclusiveness while pushing out individuals and families who can’t afford the region’s rising rent, leaving mostly wealthy workers.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual report on income limits, which found a family of four earning less than $117,400 a year living in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties should be classified as “low income.” Anything below $73,300 was considered “very low income.”
Schmitt’s art project, he said, serves as commentary on how the region has become an enclave for the rich, where only the most economically privileged can survive.
The inspiration to cover everyday utility objects throughout the Bay Area with gold leaf was born from Schmitt’s fellowship earlier this year at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
The fellowship program asked him to explore “notions of truth,” so Schmitt decided to focus on economic displacement and housing affordability in San Francisco. “Gilded Cities” was done independently of the program, Schmitt said, but the program helped him hone the project’s execution.
In late May, Schmitt purchased $500 worth of gold leaf from an online Bay Area distributor that also taught him how to apply the thin, 80by-80 millimeter leaves of gold onto surfaces.
“I actually ordered artificial gold, but the more I thought about it, any sort of artificiality would conceptually kill the idea,” he said. “The way real gold catches the light is amazing. And when you’re looking at gold sewer plate, it’s exquisite.”
Schmitt scouted locations for the public art pieces by using Google Maps, an irony he acknowledges and embraces, as it reinforces the Bay Area’s relationship with the booming tech industry.
He tasked his developer colleague, Nick Bushman, to build the Gilded Cities website so users can hover over a map of the Bay Area and click on each piece, navigating the user to a Google Map with the exact location.
“I used sophisticated tech that is made by people who moved here to work, and in so doing are driving up the cost of living,” Schmitt said. “It illustrates the complexity of the issue.”
Schmitt owns a 1,000square foot home in Berkeley, but he suggested he would have been one of the people getting priced out of the Bay Area had his landlord not sold him the home considerably under market value 17 years ago.
“If I was one of these people in the Mission getting forced out, that’s a different situation. That is life or death,” Schmitt said. “Now, my fear is that the city will be locked in amber, a little jewel filled with rich people.”
William Rhodes, 51, the co-founder of 3.9 Art Collective, has championed similar initiatives with fellow African American artists, curators and writers. Named after a 2010 prediction that the black population in San Francisco will be 3.9 percent in the near future, Rhodes and the collective create art that teaches communities how gentrification creates a void in art and culture.
“Public art is important, because when you’re in a situation with the economic disparity you can easily become numb to it all. Public art forces you to look at the issues and to become uncomfortable,” Rhodes said. “The creatives that are part of these innovative ideas like (Schmitt’s), that’s what sells the city, the definition of the city.”
Schmitt spent between five and six hours each day in late May prepping and covering the different surfaces. He tried to be discreet, ducking into gritty alleyways and quiet roads in Berkeley. In San Francisco, gusts of wind swept through Sycamore Street as he worked on the 4-foot-tall steel boundary, blowing off pieces of gold. He watched it disintegrate and drift down the concrete, each fleck a small fraction of the roughly $80 of gold he used on the bollard alone.
All nine of the gilded surfaces are still gold, though some are scratched with keys and scraped off in patches.
“I didn’t want to do a project dealing with these issues inside a gallery space. I wanted it to be in the public landscape where we’re calling attention to it,” Schmitt said. “You’re subverting the whole art infrastructure, bypassing it and going directly to the people.”