Love the Bulb: Albany Bulb Art Park
The Albany Bulb is a former construction debris landfill adjacent to the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. For decades, this peninsula that sticks out a mile into San Francisco Bay flourished as a user-designed park. With a wealth of discarded rebar, rubble, and driftwood, the Bulb attracted sculptors, graffiti artists, muralists and others who created a remarkable body of uncurated art scattered across the 31 hilly acres of the site. Without rules and restrictions, the Bulb became an adventure playground for artists, a place where great outsider art flourished and the human imagination soared. Currently owned by the City of Albany, the Bulb is slated to eventually be transferred to the East Bay Regional Park District.
Susan Moffat, Director of UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative, created an organization called Love the Bulb to protect the artistic traditions of this special place, inviting us to enjoy a rare intersection of wild ecosystems and community-based arts and to enable its creative spirit to thrive. Love the Bulb also has worked with the community of homeless people who used to live at the Bulb to document and share their knowledge of the place and to facilitate dialogue about issues of social justice in public space. The goal of Love the Bulb is to create a platform for using art and conversation to explore global questions of climate change, urban nature, landscape and urban design, and human ecology that go far beyond the borders of this old landfill.
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