California Cathedral by Atlas Lab
15th and K Streets, Sacramento, CA. Photo by Kevin Fiscus
Artist: Atlas Lab
Title: California Cathedral
Medium: Salvaged wood, steel
Year: 2024
Location: SAFE Credit Union, East Lobby Entrance, 15th and K Street
About Atas Lab From the website: Atlas Lab.Com
"Our team brings years of experience working on award-winning and influential projects built across the country. We are proud to be woman and minority owned practice, and are focused on improving the lives of community members through design. To that endeavor, our voice is represented on a spectrum of scales, through leadership and volunteer roles with local and state non-profits as well as national associations."
About the Artist
Atlas Lab is a Sacramento-based landscape architecture, urban design, and public art practice. The studio’s public art practice is led by Kimberly Garza and Erik Prince, landscape architects and artists whose collaborative work explores the cultural and ecological stories embedded within place.
Trained in landscape architecture, Garza and Prince approach art through the lens of landscape—looking closely at the histories, systems, communities, and environmental conditions that shape a site. Their practice combines groundtruthing, resiliency, and whimsy to share stories of place, urgency, and stewardship. Through research and observation, they uncover narratives that may otherwise go unseen and translate them into engaging, accessible public experiences.
Their work moves fluidly between art and landscape, using material, form, planting, light, color, and fabrication as tools for storytelling. Environmental change, cultural memory, movement, ecology, and regional identity become both subject matter and inspiration. Often playful at first encounter, their work invites discovery while creating opportunities to consider the larger forces shaping the places we inhabit.
Garza and Prince share a longstanding interest in the role of design as a form of inquiry and advocacy. Together, their work spans public art, civic landscapes, urban design, climate resilience, research, and community-based projects. Both hold Master of Landscape Architecture degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Garza received her undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley, and Prince from Colorado State University.
View from inside the California Cathedral.
Artist Statement
California Cathedral showcases and reinterprets California's iconic redwoods, pines, cedars, and firs that comprise most of the state's mountain landscape. With the loss of 147 million trees (during 2010-2019) due to shifting climate patterns, the work aims to raise awareness of California's threatened landscape.
The sculpture is comprised of a series of wood planks from salvaged trees lost due to climate change, supported by cylinder frame, that echoes a tree form. The public can interact with the sculpture through an internal experience. From inside looking upwards, wood planks frame a view of the sky, as the soaring trees do in the landscape—evoking a contemplative and uplifting experience.