Syd Mead Lab.

A quiet poem about the hope of human advancement. This concept came to Mead as he routinely gazed at the moon as it lingered in the daylight sky over his home in Capistrano, California. Look once and it is a ghost moon in hushed blue. Look closer and its equator is humming — automated factories have been hollowed into a continuous industrial band circling its surface. What we see is a moon transformed into a vast production center, built to move industry away from Earth so that the planet might recover. Moon 2000 1979 Gouache on board Syd Mead: Future Pastime Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery 535 Washington St., San Francisco Weds-Sun, 11am-6pm On view through December 17 futurepastime.net

"I’m optimistic about the future because we have more people working on problems today than ever before.” -Syd Mead 🎥: Joaquin Montalvan Syd Mead: Future Pastime Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery 535 Washington St., San Francisco Weds-Sun, 11am-6pm Now through December 17 futurepastime.net

Syd Mead: Future Pastime Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery 535 Washington St., San Francisco Weds-Sun, 11am-6pm Now through December 17 Syd Mead: Future Pastime arrives in San Francisco, thirty years after Mead’s last major appearance in the Bay. It is a homecoming to a city that has spent the last three decades building the tomorrow Mead spent his life imagining. Here, in the capital of the industry now most responsible for deciding what comes next, Mead’s paintings pose quiet but pointed questions: what happened to the future we were promised, and what became of the optimism that once powered it? Curated by William Corman & Elon Solo Exhibition design by MAD Architects Syd Mead: Future Pastime is presented at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery, a Yoda PLC property, in association with Estate Real. FuturePastime.net

One of three paintings for National Geographic's Picture Atlas of Our Universe, “Space Wheel Interior” depicts a Stanford torus, a ring-shaped habitat developed during the NASA-Stanford studies of the mid-1970s. Syd takes us inside a deep-space settlement: a self-sustaining agrarian colony of ten thousand people. Shops, laboratories and offices line the high-rise spokes leading to the hub, while crops ripen in soilless racks tended by farmers in white uniforms. Floating mirrors gather sunlight, and moon rock shields the structure like tire tread. For all its scale and technical precision, Mead makes life inside the wheel feel remarkably natural: people work, grow food, move through the city, and carry on beneath a horizon that curves endlessly before them. Space Wheel Interior, 1979 Gouache on board 28 x 37 in Currently on view: Syd Mead: Future Pastime Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery 535 Washington St, San Francisco Weds - Sun, 11a-6p Through December 17