Anthony McCall’s ‘First Light’ at SF’s Fort Mason (Thru March 8)

Jennifer Sonderby

Before teamLab. Before Meow Wolf. Before immersive Van Gogh. There was Anthony McCall. In 1973, he created the first ‘solid light’ installation, projecting light through haze to form 3D sculptures you can walk through, touch, and become part of. 50+ years later, it’s still revolutionary.

Fort Mason Center for Art & Culture and the Kramlich Art Foundation present the San Francisco Bay Area premiere of the pioneering British artist, Anthony McCall’s revolutionary “solid light” works from the early 1970s. The exhibition features three seminal pieces that transformed the possibilities of cinema and challenged the boundaries between film, sculpture, drawing, and performance.

Anthony McCall’s ‘First Light’
January 10 – March 8, 2026
Wednesday – Sunday | 11a – 6p
Gallery 308, Building A, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, 2 Marina Boulevard, SF
FREE – RSVP Required (limited spots)

Special Musical Performance on Saturday, March 7, 2026 | Opens 11a – 1p
Re-Opens: 3p – 7p with curator talk at 6p

About the Exhibition

The exhibition presents Line Describing a Cone (1973), Conical Solid (1974), and Cone of Variable Volume (1974), works that invite viewers to step away from the screen and into the sculptural beams of projected light themselves. As theatrical haze catches the projector’s light, evolving geometric forms materialize in three-dimensional space, creating elegant structures that viewers can walk through, touch, and interact with. Over the course of their durations, these works transform spectators into participants and galleries into playing fields, making space for both contemplation and action.

The works begin as film animations. In Line Describing a Cone, a single white point extends into a slowly curving line, building to a full circle across its running time. The 10-minute Conical Solid (1974) projects a flat blade of light that rotates from a fixed central axis at varying speeds. Cone of Variable Volume shifts the size of a complete circle across four movements, one of which, McCall notes, builds “so that it resembles a very slow breathing.”

McCall developed these works after relocating from London to New York City in 1973, seeking to create what he described as a “film that could exist only in the moment of projection with an audience, without reference to an ‘elsewhere.’”

The solid light works emerged at the intersection of avant-garde cinema, Minimalism, and Structural Film, while also anticipating parallel movements in expanded cinema, participatory performance, and today’s immersive video installations.

Anthony McCall: First Light continues a partnership initiated in 2015-16 with Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet, through an ongoing collaboration among the Kramlich Art Foundation and Fort Mason Art.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:
“Do You See What I See” film series.

About the Artist

Anthony McCall (b. St Paul’s Cray, UK, 1946) lives and works in Manhattan. His work’s historical importance has been recognized in major exhibitions including Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77, Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-02); The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-04); Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-07); The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Projected Image, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008); and On Line, Museum of Modern Art (2010-11).

Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Tate Modern, UK (traveling to Oklahoma Contemporary, U.S., in March 2026); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Fubon Art Museum, Taiwan; Futura Seoul Museum, South Korea; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; plus Pioneer Works, Sean Kelly Gallery, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Albright Knox Art Gallery), U.S.

Anthony McCall: First Light, Presented by Fort Mason Art and the Kramlich Art Foundation.

 

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