Free “Syd Mead” Exhibition Opening: Sci-Fi Blade Runner Futurist (Transamerica Bldg.)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Following its critically acclaimed 2025 debut in New York, Syd Mead: Future Pastime comes to the West Coast at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery, opening Thursday, October 8th, from 6pm to 8pm.

Few artists have shaped how the world pictures tomorrow as thoroughly as Syd Mead. For more than half a century, the self-described “visual futurist” set the vocabulary that designers, engineers, architects and filmmakers still draw on. He showed that the future could be drafted with precision rather than guessed at. That work began in industry, where Ford and U.S. Steel hired him to imagine what came next, and it reached millions through the films he helped design, among them Blade Runner, TRON and Aliens. 

His gouache paintings show tomorrow with enough engineering logic to work as blueprints. But his real subject was never the machines. It was the people living with them: a casual drive through cerulean space, mechanical hounds racing above the skyscrapers, a dinner party in steel couture. Mead’s future is neither dystopian nor abstract. It is lived-in, leisurely and deeply human.

Thirty years after his last major Bay Area exhibition –  just as the tools he forecast are finally arriving – Future Pastime asks San Francisco to reconsider the future it is building, and who it is for.

Syd Mead: Future Pastime runs 10/9 – 12/17, Weds-Sun, 11am-6pm.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.