M couldn't help but notice the bright orange people hanging onto inner tubes bobbing in Fort Point Channel this morning. Begin Fort Point and all, it is, of course, art, specifically, SOS (Safety Orange Swimmers):
S.O.S. invokes the Fort Point Channel Basin as a metaphor for the seas across which people have always traveled in search of shelter, freedom, prosperity and safety; seas in which they have often lost their lives. The Swimmers symbolize the world’s refugees and migrants, and the long history of global migration on which our city and nation are largely built.
Artists Ann Hirsh & Jeremy Angier hope to provoke discussions about the changing identity of the Channel by asking: how are we, a city in the midst of an economic boom, responding to the current global refugee crisis?