Art among the wreckage: An artist brings new life to a long-abandoned pier

Artist George McCalman is preparing to launch his interactive exhibition “A March Through Time” on November 22 at Pier 29 in San Francisco. The exhibition is housed within a curtained-off section of the 122,000-square-foot pier, which McCalman describes as a timeworn space that reflects his belief that the past and present are intertwined. He has worked for nine years from a studio in an Outer Sunset home, a stripped-down, weathered building owned by architect Douglas Jacuzzi and ceramicist Georgia Hodges, which embodies a philosophy of material purity and reverence for process. The studio itself is filled with projects in various stages, including the 155 portraits of Black pioneers that make up his book “Illustrated Black History.”