Rendering of Andy Goldsworthy: Red Flags in Fort Mason's Gateway Pavilion. Courtesy Haines Gallery.

Andy Goldsworthy, Red Flags, 2020 at Rockefeller Center in 2020 ©Andy Goldsworthy, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo: Jon Cancro

For five decades, Andy Goldsworthy has built one of the most quietly powerful bodies of work in contemporary art — sculptures and installations made from leaves, ice, stone, and earth that dissolve the boundary between human gesture and natural world. This July, FOR-SITE brings his monumental installation Red Flags to the West Coast for the first time, installed at the Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture this July.

Fifty flags, each colored with red earth collected from one of the 50 states, hang together as a single, sweeping presence. The shades range from pale ochre to deep sienna—evidence of a continent’s geological variety—yet what strikes the eye is not difference but continuity. Goldsworthy has long been drawn to this iron-rich soil, which he calls “the earth’s veins,” noting that the same mineral that colors the ground red is the same one that makes human blood red.

In this elemental fact, the work locates its argument: that beneath all lines of demarcation, we share the same material ground.

July 1- 30. Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. More information can be found at Haines Gallery

Andy Goldsworthy, Red Flags, 2020 at Rockefeller Center in 2020 ©Andy Goldsworthy, Courtesy Galerie Lelong., New York. Photo: Jon Cancro