Rael San Fratello Mid-Career Retrospective Opens at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco

Key facts

• Rael San Fratello: Prototypes and Provocations is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco from 25 September to 31 January 2027.
• The exhibition is a mid-career retrospective of the Oakland-based studio Rael San Fratello, founded in 2002 by Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael.
• Sanctuary is a cylindrical structure 3D-printed on-site from soil, straw, and water, with walls pierced by glass solar rods salvaged from Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
• The Workshop, commissioned by the arts center, has a roof covered in broom heads sourced from an exhibition in Seoul and facades wrapped in biodegradable thermoplastic PLA filament.
• Display tables feature 3D-printed objects made from coffee grounds, Chardonnay grape skins, and ash collected after California wildfires.
• Teeter-Totter Wall consists of bright-pink seesaws that in 2019 were extended through openings in the US and Mexico border wall.
• REUNITE is an open-source, downloadable poster showing silhouettes of two parents and a child running toward each other, created for protests.
• Curator René Morales said the studio's work attests to the power of radical imagination grounded in humanistic values and an ethos of play and constant experimentation.