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One of the defining moments of my life happened unexpectedly—walking past an open classroom at Palo Alto High School and seeing a work of art projected on a screen, and knowing what it was.
In that instant, I realized I had been absorbing a language I didn’t yet know how to name. I had been learning about art without recognizing it.
I thought about that again recently, walking through San Francisco International Airport.
I grew up traveling in and out of this airport, and the art has always been here. But like so many things, I didn’t fully register it at the time. It was simply part of the environment—present, but not yet conscious.
Exiting the gate on a recent trip, I was met by a large, luminous painting by Jay DeFeo. It stopped me. Not just because of its scale or beauty, but because it brought all of those earlier experiences into focus at once—the quiet accumulation of looking, the realization that art had been shaping me long before I understood it.
Earlier this year, I had the director of the SFO Museum as a guest on my podcast, and we spoke about the importance of placing art in unexpected places. Not just in museums, but in the spaces people move through every day.
It’s something I’ve thought about often, and something I prioritized during my time at the Aspen Art Museum—most notably through our collaboration with the Aspen Skiing Company, where art became part of the experience of being on the mountain.
Airports are, in many ways, similar. They are transitional spaces—places of movement, anticipation, and pause. To encounter art there is to be reminded, even briefly, to look.
There is art throughout this airport. And, once you begin to notice it, it becomes difficult to miss—not just here, but in other airports, in other cities, in other moments of transit.
It makes me wonder how often we are already in conversation with art, without realizing it.
