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Have you ever seen art suffused so vividly with heightened sensory memory that you lose your breath a little?
I did four months ago, and it still sits with me today.
Kota Ezawa’s 2024 mesmerizing animation “Grand Princess,” which the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired in October, served as the main event in the artist’s “Here and There — Now and Then” exhibition at Fort Mason’s Gallery 308 earlier this year.
Ezawa’s piece depicts a tugboat ushering the cruise ship under the Golden Gate Bridge on March 9, 2020 as it carried more than 120 people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic. In a still shot, Ezawa shows passengers standing on private decks separated by partitions — a prelude of how we would live for the next few years.
Accompanied by a haunting rendition of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Ezawa’s layered, hand-painted digital enhancements of existing images made memories of that time wash over me.
As I first watched grainy video of the Grand Princess on the San Francisco Bay that day in 2020, I had been a physician for 27 years and in San Francisco for 19. The words of my medical-school microbiology professor, Dr. Elmer Pfefferkorn, echoed in my ears.
In this March 9, 2020, file photo, the Grand Princess cruise ship passes beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in this view from Sausalito.
“When a virus jumps from animals to humans, we are defenseless,” he would say.
So, when the ship was given permission to dock in Oakland, I imagined its slipstream like the train on the gown of Death itself, gliding in through the deep channel in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.
A week after the Grand Princess docked, I started as the San Francisco Fire Department’s physician. No sooner had I put my bag on the desk did I hear former Mayor London Breed issue a shelter-in-place order.
Just a few days in, paramedic Beth Goudreaux called my office to report she had transported a very sick patient to the hospital who’d died shortly after arrival.
“I’m sure it was COVID, he just came back from visiting relatives overseas,” she said, telling me there was no autopsy planned. I called the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to relay Goudreaux’s suspicions.
On March 24, exactly one week after the shelter-in-place took effect, city officials confirmed the case was The City’s first confirmed COVID-19 death.
The following year was a sprint to stay on top of the virus — and we did, until we didn’t. Two paramedics and a firefighter were hospitalized with COVID-19 and, thankfully, nobody died.
Yet I had a hard time enforcing mask rules at the stations, the vaccines’ speedy rollout a few months later quickly gave way to a tug-of-war between The City and first responders who weren’t keen on having the government make them do anything to their bodies. I was caught in the middle.
Ezawa’s art also reminded me of what was missing — and what was gained — during the pandemic.
Cruise ships such as the Grand Princess were regular fixtures of the open-water swims I’ve participated in since 2005, my one sure way to cope during stressful times.
Bay cruise tour boats sit tied up to a pier at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on April 24, 2020.
Between March 2020 and October 2021, the cruise ship dock was empty. The blunted human activity opened our ears to the sounds of all the birds and the waters’ seasonal visitors. I’m not surprised that the humans who found their way into the Bay during shelter-in-place have stayed with it — some local swim clubs now have three-year waitlists.
Now, the cruise ships are back, but you’re more likely to see oil tankers coming through the Golden Gate. I think about what it must be like to come into port as a cruise passenger now, as the legacy tourist businesses of Fisherman’s Wharf are in a period of transition. To be honest, it’s tough for me to conjure the joys of cruising after the watching the plight of the Grand Princess and all it portended.
Familiar feelings from the Grand Princess’ arrival have returned — namely, dread. Our political and cultural upheaval occupy most of my thoughts, especially the worry about our warming planet. Reading about salmon season cancellations, or the heightened pandemic risks makes me feel like Paramedic Goudreaux must have when she transported the patient to the hospital.
But as I walked through Ezawa’s full installation, another piece focused on the San Francisco Bay caught my eye. “Alcatraz is an Idea” depicts the 2019 Alcatraz Canoe Journey, which on Indigenous Peoples Day that year commemorated the 50th anniversary Native Americans’ occupation of Alcatrz Island.
Ezawa’s careful rendering of the water and the details of a canoe made of reeds accentuates the relationship between humans and nature. As the painter Marc Chagall once said, “Great art picks up where nature ends.”
I’m guessing he didn’t mean the actual end of nature. I say great art can allow us to see the interconnectedness between all forms of nature, giving us a glimpse of how it shaped the present, and a warning to give our future a chance.
Jennifer Brokaw retired as the San Francisco Fire Department head physician in 2024, and serves on the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture Board of Directors.
