Rose B. Simpson: Behold

Rose B. Simpson’s Behold stands 24 feet tall and features two figures majestically presiding over the museum’s façade — a parent and child attached together at the hip and connected by beaded necklaces and an ornamental ladder. Rather than commemorating individuals, the sculpture honors relationships, intergenerational connection, and spiritual witnessing.

The work is deeply site-specific: the parental figure gazes over the urbanized landscape that remains a place marked by the colonial violence of the California Mission system and the displacement of Native peoples. Behold is a counter-monument — a refusal to forget. It reclaims space and time, asserting Indigenous presence in a city built on Native erasure. “There were Indigenous people here. They were human with each other, and their stories were bulldozed over,” Simpson says. “There are still people here who are learning how to value tenderness again, to witness themselves enough to reach out and connect with another. We can change this narrative through wonder, witness, and a solid foundation in the soft warmth of our humanity.”

The sculpture invites viewers, who can see the statue as far off as Yerba Buena Gardens, to reflect on land as memory, and to engage with the resilience and futurism of Indigenous communities in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area.