SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- FOR-SITE presents Andy Goldsworthy: Red Flags, a site-specific exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist, on view at Fort Mason's Gateway Pavillion in partnership with Fort Mason Art.

Marking the West Coast debut of Goldsworthy’s monumental installation Red Flags (2020), the exhibition features fifty 5 x 8-foot flags, each stained red with earth collected from one of the fifty US states. Originally hung in New York’s Rockefeller Center, the flags’ presentation at Fort Mason coincides with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, reflecting on geographic and political boundaries, and on the ties between people, land, and nation.

Rather than displaying emblems that differentiate each state, Goldsworthy’s flags ask us to consider what unifies them — and us. In shades ranging from pale ochre to deep sienna, the fifty flags point to our diversity while insisting upon a shared humanity. “I hope the flags will be received in the same spirit with which all the red earths were collected,” says the artist, “as a gesture of solidarity and support.”

Red Flags was originally exhibited at New York’s Rockefeller Center in 2020, where it hung from flagpoles that typically display the flags of United Nations member nations, and later appeared in the artist’s 2025 retrospective Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, at the National Galleries Scotland.

To complement the installation, a focused selection of Goldsworthy’s works will be presented in the Gateway Pavilion’s Main Gallery, foregrounding red earth as a throughline in his practice—an elemental substance he has worked with for decades. In the artist’s visual lexicon, the material evokes both our connection with the land and the connection between places from Scotland to the South Australian Outback, Goldsworthy has described red earth as “the earth’s veins.”





A film originating from Red Flags will be screened in the Gray Box.

Andy Goldsworthy: Red Flags is organized by FOR-SITE and presented with Fort Mason Art, with generous exhibition support from Haines Gallery, FOR-SITE’s Board of Directors, and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. Installation services are provided by Fides Industrial.

Andy Goldsworthy works with natural materials, such as leaves, sand, ice, and stone that often originate from the local site, to address notions of materiality, process, and temporality. His works have been exhibited in major sites and museums internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK; and permanent works at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Presidio of San Francisco, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Bar Kansas City, MO; Stanford University, CA; and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Goldsworthy has been the subject of several substantial monographic publications, as well as two feature-length documentaries: Rivers and Tides (2002) and Leaning into the Wind (2017).