Umar Rashid
at The Guardhouse
Main Entrance, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
September 11 – November 18, 2025
FOR-SITE is honored to present Umar Rashid’s work as part of The Guardhouse Program, which invites three artists each year to create temporary installations in a historic former military guard station at the entrance to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. Free and open to the public, the installation can be viewed through The Guardhouse windows 24 hours a day.
Umar Rashid’s installation at The Guardhouse, California Spectacle, Cosmic Errors (2025), re-imagines California’s landscapes as stages where history, myth, and pop culture collide. Together, these two paintings fold documented history into a global meditation: the human cycle of error, fleeting peace, folly, and the perpetual failure of empathy.
This installation is linked to the themes explored in FOR-SITE’s exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold at Fort Point National Historic Site from June 6 to November 2, 2025.
Umar Rashid, Surf or Die. Or, a silent prayer for the sun to burn our pursuer’s eyes out and lead us to safety beyond the rocky shore. A sacrifice is made. Vengeance to follow., 2024; Acrylic and ink on canvas; Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition photography by Shaun Roberts.
About the Artist
Umar Rashid is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work reimagines colonial histories through a poetic, Afrocentric lens. Using painting, drawing, and sculpture as conduits for storytelling, Rashid constructs alternative historical narratives where Black and Indigenous figures are recast as heroes, rulers, and revolutionaries. Fusing eighteenth-century portraiture with street art and pop culture, his work spans empires, battles, and spiritual realms, functioning as both an artistic epic and a subversive rewriting of the past. Rashid has exhibited his work widely and is represented in many institutional collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA Miami; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa.
Umar Rashid at The Guardhouse is presented by FOR-SITE in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The Guardhouse Program is made possible thanks to generous support from the ARB Fund.