By James Salazar
Syd Mead’s 1977 gouache painting “Party 2000” will be one of the works highlighted in “Future Pastime” at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery.. Vidoun
A new downtown art exhibition will be a famed visual artist’s first major show in the region in 30 years.
“Syd Mead: Future Pastime” will this Thursday make its West Coast debut at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery. Curators Elon Solo and William Corman first unveiled the exhibition at a New York City art building in 2025.
Gallery visitors will be able to view 16 gouache paintings made by Mead — who died in 2019 — over the course of his 60-year career.
Before “Future Pastime” opens to the public Friday, its organizers will host an opening reception Thursday inside the Transamerica Pyramid from 6 to 8 p.m.
Exhibition organizers said bringing Mead’s work to downtown San Francisco is allowing them to create an arts destination that can draw visitors to the neighborhood outside of their traditional work days while also inviting guests to imagine what The City’s future will look like in their own minds.
“Bringing Syd Mead’s work back to San Francisco after 30 years feels especially meaningful at the Transamerica Pyramid,” said John Gullixson, the founder and CEO of Estate Real.
Gullixson’s real-estate development and operating company creates cultural projects and programs that combine hospitality, the public realm, culture and real estate.
Mad Architecture firm employees, who helped design the recently opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts in Los Angeles, helped design the San Francisco exhibition, which is being presented by Yoda PLC, an investment firm bases in Cyprus.
Gullixson said that there is “a natural dialogue” between Mead’s art and the Transamerica Pyramid.
“Both invite us to imagine a future that looks different from the present,” he said.
“Future Pastime” will be the third exhibition shown in the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery. In 2025, the building hosted “Past as Prologue: The Last Decade of Furniture Design by Ray and Charles Eames.”
From January to July of this year, the Transamerica Pyramid presented “Stratagems” by Tara Donovan. The exhibition, which was presented with the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, featured large-scale sculptures made from epicycles CD-ROMs.
Downtown SF Partnership President and CEO Robbie Silver said art exhibitions have helped the Transamerica Pyramid “become a catalyst for downtown, driving economic growth and bringing people together through world-class art and public experiences.”
“Future Pastime,” Silver said, would give Bay Area residents and other visitors from around the world “new reasons to experience this iconic landmark beyond traditional office hours, contributing to a more vibrant downtown.”
Mead last appeared in the Bay Area for a fall 1996 solo exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, helping art center employees design and install the layout.
 |
| Illustrator, industrial designer and neo-futurist concept artist Syd Mead created the gouache painting “RAYS Wheels” in 1985. Vidoun |
The exhibition, “Bright Red Mysteries,” featured 134 of Mead’s illustrations, which were mounted on 13 triangular 12-foot-high kiosks designed to resemble trees in a forest.
According to YBCA, the works were divided into two themes. One side of the forest-like layout focused on industrial designs, while the other side revolved around films and television shows that featured Mead’s designs, as well as fantasy and cartoon drawings.
Paintings highlighted in “Future Pastime” include one of a dinner party at which guests are wearing garments made from steel, a racing event in which dogs soar above skyscrapers, and a drive through intergalactic space.
“Where San Francisco’s present-day conversation about technology so often circles between anxiety and detachment, Mead’s future is neither dystopian nor abstract,” Solo and Corman said in a statement. “It is lived-in, teeming with humanity.”
Solo and Corman said they hope visitors will come away from the exhibit realizing that the figures Mead painted in his artwork were not “conquerors of the future but its regular inhabitants, spending their days in each other’s company.”
Gullixson said that as a cultural symbol of The City, the Transamerica Pyramid will be “a fitting place to bring people together to consider what the future might be and what we want it to become.”
“It’s an honor to help bring this exhibition to life,” he said.
First published at the San Fransisco Examiner, October 4, 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment