Union Square BART Station
Convergence: Commute Patterns by Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen
The painted glasswork can be seen both inside and outside the station and spans the facade, roof deck, and the ceiling of the entrance on Geary. The base images of “Convergence: Commute Patterns” are a blue topographic map of the city with circles in different colors painted on top of the map showing the commute patterns of the Bay Area.
The circles and lines, while explained in signage is not as intuitive as one would like. Here is a discussion by the artists of the project:
“We were working with multiple maps: One is a very precise topography of San Francisco with this fat blue line that runs through that’s showing the waterways, and then we also have this layer of invented topography which is the fog, with these white lines that are very subtle. We also layered the painted circles, which are based on another map of commute patterns of the nine Bay Area counties. The straight lines that connect the circles are a way to create a structural component, but also reference that 1908 map showing the distribution of earth movement in two major earthquakes in Northern California. We’re really interested in capturing not just human elements of San Francisco but also the more landscape-oriented elements of the Bay Area.”
Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen are based in San Francisco and have worked as a team since 2006.
Starkweather has exhibited widely, including at the Asian Art Museum, Electric Works, the Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco State University, and Dominican University among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Ucross, Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, and Ragdale and has been a recipient of the Pennsylvania Center for the Arts Grant and an Elizabeth Foundation Grant. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Pennsylvania
Hughen holds an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a BFA Candidate at the California College of Arts and Crafts.