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Ever since the Big Bang created our universe more than ten billion years ago, our Earth has been bathed in light coming from the sun. Light is mentioned in the third verse of the Book of Genesis鈥攖he first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament鈥攊n which God creates the world and illuminates it by saying, 鈥淟et there be light.鈥�

Light, and in particular sunlight, is an essential source of energy and has an incredible effect on how we wander through the world. Every schoolkid knows that thanks to photosynthesis, plants thrive and grow to serve as an essential part of the food chain, not to mention also producing the oxygen we breathe.

Ever since the Greek philosopher Plato proposed his famous allegory of the cave鈥攖hat the world we see is not the real world, and that philosophers have an obligation to tell the rest of society about authentic existence outside the cave鈥攍ight has also functioned as a metaphor for education, knowledge, spiritual and intellectual liberation, and hope. We are 鈥渋lluminated鈥� or 鈥渆nlightened鈥� with intelligence; light draws us out of 鈥渄arkness鈥� by puncturing ignorance with bright 鈥渞ays鈥� of wisdom.

Over the centuries humans have conjured other sources of light. Fire was the earliest, used in the caves of our ancestors as well as in the candles and spirit lamps that were still the main generators of light after dark only one hundred years ago. Today we rely almost exclusively on light powered by electricity, which began with the invention of the incandescent bulb by Thomas Edison and progressed to fluorescent lighting and contemporary light-emitting-diodes, or LEDs.

We have also learned to control light, using it to illuminate our houses and city streets at night, as well as to communicate with one another, as in brightly lit advertising logos, glittering entrance signs to bars and restaurants, and dazzling theater marquees. More practical uses include lighthouses to help boats navigate, Morse code flashes between ships at sea, and the ubiquitous traffic lights around our cities.

One popular source of artificial light, whose heyday came in the mid-twentieth century, is neon. The French scientist, inventor, and engineer Georges Claude is widely considered the father of the neon tube; he was building on the inventions of Heinrich Geissler and other scientist-inventors such as William Crookes, Johann Wilhelm Hittorf, and Daniel McFarlan Moore. In 1910 Claude patented his discovery that neon produces light but (crucially, for its commercial applications) not heat when electricity passes through it. Bright, colorful, bended neon tubes soon began appearing in outdoor advertising of all kinds. One of the first and most celebrated instances was the large sign for the Italian vermouth manufacturer Cinzano, which starting in 1913 illuminated Paris above Boulevard Haussmann with white letters about a yard tall. The first neon signs in the United States arrived from Claude鈥檚 company in Los Angeles in 1923: a pair of signs for a Packard car dealership run by the American businessman and industrial pioneer Earle C. Anthony.

鈥淟et There Be (More) Light鈥� features twenty-one artists who use light as a medium, and who look to the early pioneers of neon and fluorescent art for inspiration. There are many connections between light and art. The most direct one is that they both enable enlightenment鈥攐ne literally, by bringing light into a dark space, and the other intellectually and aesthetically. In 鈥淟et There Be (More) Light鈥� the artworks on display are intended do both simultaneously. Indeed, it is difficult not to think of Plato鈥檚 allegory of the cave in the context of the exhibition, given the architecture of the gallery space: two tall but small rooms in a cave-like storefront in San Francisco鈥檚 bustling Tenderloin neighborhood, a socially and economically heterogeneous zone marked by a distressing and conspicuous collision of concentrated poverty, homelessness, and crime on the one hand and enormous prosperity, wealth, and achievement on the other. The site embodies the contradictory nature of the larger world today in a direct, unidealized, and rather rare manner.