Art at BART: Art installation at Warm Springs/South Fremont Station captures beauty of station’s surroundings

To enter Warm Springs/South Fremont Station from the eastern side, you must first find yourself under a rotunda, which covers the escalators that will ferry you to the platform. But if you stop for a few moments and look up – or even down at the refracted light on the ground – you may have an undeniably transformative experience.

Encrusted into the rotunda are so many “jewels” of pure color depicting a blue sky with sumptuous white clouds. The experience is almost religious on a sunny day when the sunlight peeks through the glass and reflects onto the concrete below. And as riders pass by, birds flit through the rotunda, singing and twirling.

Up on the platform, the experience is just as moving. Glass panels set into the windows poke out above the mountains, bathing the platform in color. It’s almost like standing in a cathedral.

You might be surprised to have such an affecting experience in a BART station. But the location, according to artist Catherine Widgery, who created the station art, is key to the effect.

“I have come to feel more and more that in this world where we’re just rushing, and it’s all about getting from point a to point b, where everything is a commodity in a transactional way, that we need art more than ever to slow down and come alive again to our surroundings,” she said, speaking from her home on a recent weekday morning. 

To Widgery, “The art is pure experience,” providing a “moment for the soul, as opposed to everything else we do that has some transactional quality.”

The art, she said, is made to “speak to something higher, deeper, more profound.”

“If we could have in all our environments this moment of more profound experience, that’s not transactional, that’s not about material things, our lives would be richer,” she continued.

The artwork also changes depending on the current weather and the time of day, meaning the work is never static, but agile and variable. It asks of the viewer her most valuable commodity – time to view the piece in its entirety – interrupting the inevitable “heads down” approach to commuting.

The Warm Springs/South Fremont Station – one of BART’s newest stations, having opened in 2017 – is the centerpiece of the Warm Springs Community Plan, which seeks to further develop the 880-acre area. The station – a feat of architecture and engineering – is also environmentally sustainable. Incorporated into its design are solar panels over the parking lot, as well as EV charging stations, and bioswales for draining stormwater and runoff, among other features. The station is also the neighbor of multiple Transit-Oriented Development projects, meaning housing built near the station enables BART riders to walk, bike, or bus to the station rather than drive. (Read more about the station and its green amenities here).

The BART Art Program integrates artists to publicly-accessible construction projects to enhance customer and community experiences of transit spaces.

The BART Art Program integrates artists to publicly accessible construction projects to enhance customer and community experiences of transit spaces. Widgery joined the team in the station’s early planning stages after responding to a request for qualifications put out by BART. She thinks she was picked after building a giant model of the rotunda that you could literally walk through, which she shipped to the West Coast.

“I think it was the experience of it that led to my being selected for the project,” she said. “It actually showed the effects of the piece.”

To design the installation, Widgery said she had to “imagine the space before it existed,” from drawings and plans. After presenting her concept, Widgery said the architects changed the plans for the rotunda, which originally had an opaque roof. The project expanded from there.

Initially, the colored glass panels were intended solely for the east wall of the station. After Widgery’s recommendation, the designers changed the plans and added the panels to the west wall as well, so that the sun could reflect through the glass as it set.

Widgery said that on opening day of the station, the architect told her, “Thank you for saving my building.” She remembers “flying high on that day,” as attendees congratulated her and even asked for her autograph.

The concept for the work harkens to community-based art projects. Widgery “crowdsourced” the imagery for her installation by incorporating images that people had posted online in the public domain of the natural areas surrounding the station. She then “wove” them together after breaking the images into “crystals” of color. The mind fills in the missing pieces, weaving the “crystals” into a seamless landscape.

“Our mind is actually more activated when we’re not given all the information,” Widgery explained. “I notice myself much more engaged when something has this broken-up quality.”

After Widgery created the design, her images were translated into colors fired into glass – a “very labor-intensive, time-consuming process.” The colors were airbrushed and fired in Germany at Peters Studio, a family-owned glass studio that has been operating for a century. Next, the numbered and coded glass pieces were – very carefully – shipped to the U.S. and painstakingly installed at the station.

The final piece changes depending on the time of day, the position of the viewer, and the movement of the sun. Though made to last a long time, the artwork’s philosophy, in a sense, is ephemerality.

“It represents a moment in time,” Widgery said. “How to find a way to have that manifested in my work is an interesting challenge. I think it comes from the idea that nothing is fixed. It’s really a Buddhist idea – that it’s all just a transient, ephemeral moment in time.”

“The world outside will last,” she continued. “It’s our perception that’s fleeting.”

Artists interested in learning of upcoming opportunities with the BART Art Program should sign-up to the program mailing list: https://cloud.info.bart.gov/signup. Search under “Other - BART Art Program” when you are asked for the information you’d like to receive.