Mission

Golden Hour Projects develops and produces creative work to inspire perspective shift and healing.

Vision

Experts on today’s most critical issues need to win hearts and minds
to drive real change.

Barraging the public with data creates overwhelm rather than action.

Place-based creative work is the missing bridge between what people know and what they feel.

Projects and Impact

Wave Chamber Collective founder Christina Simpson envisions a future where every weekend, everyone in the Bay Area has access to a groundbreaking chamber music performance. As a vibrant new addition to San Francisco’s cultural scene, Wave Chamber Collective produced over 20 interactive events and reached over 1,000 audience members in its first year alone, all with less than $300 in marketing spend. Each event transported the audience to a new realm, intertwining the exquisite sound of a string quartet with storytelling from poets, presentations from top scientists, and connections across media with visual artists. Blurring the line between art and audience, these experiences unleashed musicians, scientists, creators, and culture bearers to reach our hearts in a completely new way. Championed by Golden Hour Projects, Wave Chamber Collective continues its transformation into a lasting and renewable resource for the cultural landscape in San Francisco and beyond, forging connections within and between communities every step of the way.

Your support keeps this this groundbreaking style of live event barrier-free, for the benefit of our entire Bay Area cultural ecosystem.

With funding in part from the California Arts Council and the Watershed Research and Training Center, Golden Hour Projects Co-Director Ellen McGehee launched The Fire and Music Project in 2023. This unprecedented initiative showed that by investing in artists, we can shift our collective relationship with wildfire. Over the course of six months of “artist learning immersions,” five chamber musicians, a composer, a poet, and a videographer trained alongside fire practitioners, land stewards, and tribal cultural burning experts. Tasked with interpreting the profound insights offered by these immersions, they began interweaving their respective disciplines to create an evolving series of performances and multimedia works. The art that emerged included a tour of six interactive concerts that engaged more than 300 participants, the new composition “Solastalgia,” a collection of new poetry, and the documentary film pieces "A Walk to the Fire's Edge" and "Fire Says." By the project’s end, participants described themselves not only as artists but as emerging fire practitioners, connected to the world of land stewardship and responsibility. Audiences left transformed, with many audience members’ recorded responses indicating shifts in perspective on fire and ecology.

Your support for Fire and Music enables the next round of transformative programming to directly address our relationship with wildfire in California.

“I wept openly from the beauty of the music, words, images and the great and mighty need for us all to assume responsibility for the health of our land on behalf of future generations.” —Callie Auryn, “Fire and Music Project a moving mixture, combusting and inspiring,” The Trinity Journal, May 8, 2024

“I really believe now that art can change what people think, because I’ve seen it happen.” —Fire and Music Project participant

Science and Strings is an immersive live experience in development, bridging the hidden frontier of cellular biology with everyday civic life in the Bay Area. The project brings together a unique combination of world-first electron and fluorescence microscopy by cellular immunologist Alex Ritter, PhD—showing human killer T-cells attacking cancer cells—with live, genre-crossing performances by the Wave String Quartet. The project skillfully balances the intellectual mind of scientific inquiry with the visceral somatic space of music. With that initial balance in place, deeper sides of both disciplines emerge: the transfixing visual aesthetic and kinetic beauty inherent in cells; and the brilliant, precise technical framework behind string quartet masterworks. Following each activation, the experience culminates in a joyful, nature-inspired dance set by San Francisco’s HABITAAT.

Is it place-based?
Science and Strings connects two incredible places: the microscopic ecosystem made by trillions of cells inside our own bodies, and the macroscopic Bay Area—where some of the most sophisticated cancer research in the world occurs, but so much of the community suffers from lack of access to quality healthcare and structural inequities.

Why now?
We live in an era impacted by collective health trauma and fractured public trust in science. We need public art that demystifies the clinical and inspires wonder. By taking elite science and classical music out of institutional siloes and sharing them freely in the public square, we democratize awe and collective healing.

Your support propels the creative dream team behind Science and Strings from development into execution in 2027 and 2028. In a broad sense the project speaks to all individuals and families impacted by cancer. At the same time, the project specifically reaches out to instersecting communities often excluded from elite institutional spaces: those facing structural barriers to health equity, and those historically alienated from classical arts.

Contact

Email ⟡ [email protected]
Phone +1 (415) 484–6177