Between the Cracks: Finding Grace

Catherine Wagner, Grace Cathedral’s 2027 Artist in Residence, creates a series of site-specific interventions in the cathedral, a neo-Gothic icon that was built in stages as San Francisco recovered from the 1906 earthquake and the impacts of the Depression.

Following Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours, described as love letters to God, Wagner invites viewers to explore the limits of our longing, our aspirations and frailties, our desire to both receive and extend grace. Her material and metaphoric interventions highlight gestural moments in the murals that line the nave walls and the morning light that dances across both nave and sanctuary. Referencing the Japanese art of kintsugi—a repair that highlights rather than hides fractures—she creates abstract maps of the cracks in surrounding sidewalks that appeared as the ground swelled and contracted in a place riddled with fault lines, geologic and cultural.

In one spectacular series, Wagner works with immaculate reproductions of the cathedral’s original architectural drawings. Onto these technical drawings, she introduces a seductively luminous abstraction rendered in rich gold tones. The resulting works are as radiant as medieval illuminated manuscripts, inviting contemporary audiences to (re)consider the site—from its original vision through its construction to the present day—using the artist’s lexicon of symbols referencing health, hope, and humanity.