In a Visual Arts Committee meeting on Nov. 15, members of the San Francisco Arts Commission voted unanimously to remove the bronze and brass dragon sculpture over the Broadway Tunnel and place the public artwork in storage.
The decision was prompted by planned upgrades to the 1968 Chinatown Public Health Center, which include enlarging the windows over the tunnel and eliminating the wall on which the sculpture is currently mounted.
Also on the table was the option of relocating Patti Bowler’s Dragon Relief to the building’s roof or in a vertical rearrangement to its Broadway-facing side. But letters, petitions and public comment directly from Chinatown community members and neighborhood organizations made it clear this was a unique opportunity to reassess the sculpture’s suitability.
“It’s a big moment for the community,” said Jenny Leung, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center, of the committee’s decision. “There’s so much structural exclusion of people of color from making these big decisions about public spaces and public art.”
The CCC was one of seven Chinatown organizations that wrote a letter arguing for the sculpture’s removal, stating that Dragon Relief “does not inspire community pride, does not have a foundation in community process, and holds little value toward community health and wellness.”
Patti Bowler, who died in 1992, designed Dragon Relief as one of the first commissions under the city’s Art Enrichment Ordinance, which sets aside a percentage of a building’s budget for public art. The 56-foot-long ribbon of metal was fabricated in Santa Rosa by Wade Lux and installed in 1970 on the Clarence Mayhew-designed health center. (KQED previously reported that Bowler’s husband, architect J. Carson Bowler, was once employed by Mayhew, who selected Bowler for the $27,500 project.)
As Visual Arts Committee member JD Beltran noted in the Nov. 15 meeting, the selection of Bowler, in consultation with seemingly no other stakeholders than the architect, is no longer the norm.
“In the six decades since this was created, our process as a commission has completely changed — for the better,” said Beltran. “We don’t even take a step forward until we actually consult with the community. And I think now that we do have those processes in place … since this is public art and it is community art, I think we should honor that process.”
In addition to questioning the relationship between Bowler’s artwork and the neighborhood served by the health center, letters and public comment touched on concerns for the safety and privacy of patients; a desire to honor Bowler’s original design; and potential distractions to drivers and pedestrians. Ultimately, no comments emerged as strongly in favor of relocating the sculpture to another part of the building.
While the city may make an attempt to keep Dragon Relief in public view, large pieces of public artwork do not often reemerge from storage. According to their presentation at the meeting, the SFAC has removed 12 large-scale public artworks over the past 20 years — only one has been successfully relocated to another city property.
Placing an an artwork like Dragon Relief in storage, then, is not a decision to be taken lightly. In recent years, the SFAC has worked to build back public trust after the high-profile debacle of Lava Thomas’ rejected, then re-awarded Maya Angelou monument, when top-down decision making seemed to fly in the face of both public desires and the SFAC’s own commissioning processes.
SFAC staff members noted that the amount of community outreach done around Dragon Relief went beyond their usual approach, and was informed by their work with the Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, established in 2020 to reevaluate the city’s historical markers.
Seismic upgrades and a modernization of the health center are planned to begin in spring 2025 and last two years, pending voter approval of a bond measure on the November 2024 ballot. The SFAC will have a budget of $691,461 for new art enrichment in the building, which could include an exterior mosaic, interior murals and the purchase of two-dimensional work. The CCC will work with the SFAC to facilitate applications by monolingual artists like Yumei Hou, whose artwork in the Central Subway’s Chinatown station is based on her traditional cut paper pieces.
“Today, we can speak more holistically about what it means to have an artwork that is representative of the community, having something that represents their story, having something that actually excites and galvanizes the community to be a part of,” said CCC Deputy Director Hoi Leung at the Nov. 15 meeting. “The community really cares about art if they’re educated and empowered to think about art.”
