11 Installations To See On the Illuminate SF™ Light Art Trail

The Wind Baffles

Mary Street, between Minna and Natoma streets

The iconic wind baffle structures anchor The Parks at 5M, a vibrant community connected to the surrounding fabric of San Francisco’s SoMa District by a cohesive network of public spaces. They are the brainchild of !melk, an award-winning urban design and landscape architecture firm. Built to mitigate wind, the baffles or “wind breakers” are artfully illuminated from the outside and complemented with a soft glow that radiates through the perforations in the upper zones. Though made from steel, a material associated with heaviness and industry, the baffles are often referred to as “flowers” for their stem and leaf-like design elements. Come nightfall, they transform into breathtaking sculptures and suddenly seem to float.

Point Cloud

747 Howard Street

Point Cloud is housed on the pedestrian bridge connecting the north and south buildings of The Moscone Center. This installation was created by Leo Villareal, the same artist created The Bay Lights. Point Cloud spans 100 feet and is constructed of 858 steel rods and 28,288 LED bulbs that are individually programmed to change colors every 30 seconds. 

Peace in the Middle East

701 Mission Street

Taravat Talepasand's Peace in the Middle East has returned as a permanent installation in YBCA's Grand Lobby. Hung from the ceiling, this intricate neon artwork, featuring the word "peace" in Farsi, explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority through Talepasand's lens as an Iranian-American woman.

Love Over Rules

Mission and Annie streets

Glowing 6-foot-6-inch letters spell out LOVE OVER RULES on the exterior wall of the Salma Family Building in the heart of SoMa. This light sculpture is the first permanent public artwork in the United States by New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas. A tribute to the artist’s cousin, murdered in 2000, the blinking white neon installation shares his cousin’s last recorded message to Thomas. Each word gets a line, encouraging different reads: is it “LOVE OVER RULES” or “LOVE OVERRULES"? 

Day for Night

415 Mission Street

At the top of the Salesforce Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi, you'll find Day for Night, a massive and incredibly versatile light art installation by Jim Campbell. The top of the tower has been sheathed in 11,000 lights and video screens that allow daily scenes of city life to be displayed all night long.

White Light

Fremont Street between Howard and Mission streets

In the gleaming, sunlit rotunda of the Salesforce Transit Center, Jenny Holzer's White Light inspires commuters and visitors with its words of wisdom. The 182-foot-long LED screen displays the words of more than 40 writers for varying amounts of time. Some are fleeting, 45 second appearances. Others linger for up to two hours.

Let's Glow

Various Locations

Let's Glow SF is a holiday projection event that will run December 4-13, 2026. The nightly journey of light and color will feature the works of local and international artists. Stunning whimsical, abstract, and naturalistic winter-themed images will be projected onto iconic buildings in San Francisco’s Financial District.
 

Language of the Birds

Intersection of Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and Grant Avenue

Language of the Birds is a permanent site-specific sculpture installed at a pedestrian plaza linking Chinatown and North Beach. Each of the artwork’s suspended “books” mimic a bird in motion, with various wing positions created by the forms of the pages and bindings. At night, LED lights embedded within the books create visual patterns.

Passing under the flock, pedestrians will notice words and phrases embedded in the plaza floor, which appear to have fallen from the pages above. On closer inspection, the fallen words are in English, Italian and Chinese, and were selected from the neighborhood’s rich literary history.

This is the first solar power-offset public artwork in California. The artists teamed with scientist David Shearer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore to provide solar power to the city’s grid, offsetting the energy used by the artwork.

Buckyball

Pier 15

Experience Buckyball by Leo Villareal, a towering 25-foot illuminated sculpture that enlivens the Exploratorium's public space in both daylight and moonlight. 

Inspired by futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, the spherical soccer ball-like form features two nested geodesic spheres comprised of 4,500 LED nodes arranged in a series of pentagons and hexagons.

Buckyball's light sequences are driven by chance, and can glow with more than 16 million distinct colors to create exuberant, random compositions of varied speed, color, opacity, and scale. 

Helical Trace

100 Channel Street

LUMA Hotel has given the gift of light art to passersby on the corner of Third and Channel streets. Local art hero Jim Campbell has created another beautiful, site-specific, dynamic light installation in the hotel's lobby. The prolific artist who installed Day For Night atop the Salesforce Tower created this striking installation that looks different from every angle and uses the reflection of windows to amplify its movement.

Seeing Spheres

16th Street and Terry A. Francois Boulevard

Olafur Eliasson's largest public artworks in the U.S., Seeing Spheres, consists of five fifteen-and-a-half-foot-tall, polished hydroformed steel spheres that stand in a circle. Each sphere supports a flat, circular mirrored face, framed by a ring of LED lights, which is oriented inward to reflect the mirrored faces of the surrounding spheres. Together, they produce a surprising environment of multilayered, reflected spaces.

Situated in front of the East Entrance to Chase Center, this striking new artwork establishes a prominent public setting in Thrive City for visitors to meet and interact.