This is not meant as a travel guide - I am just saying: In San Francisco there is also di Suvero. And like Richard Serra, his work is worth making pilgrimage to see. If not to big art, then to big trees. And mountains. For now I recommend making way to the waterfront and gazing upwards at the di Suvero planted there where he and his family first landed refugees from China. The wrapped ship shape wobbles slightly as if on unseen waves, and above a compass-like turns round the anchoring four legs extending down to the earth - or conversly lifting the rotating complex high.
Like Serra, di Suvero grew up around the shipyards and got the notion that men could make big things. Di Suvero's story is amazing. For though he made big things - out of huge planks of wood initially - he was crushed in an elevator accident and thereafter made huge things from a wheelchair, single-handedly, from a wheelchair. Leverage, he says, is what it takes. It is something else besides.
The piece on the Embarcadero is somewhat pressed by the stadium and street nearby. But in Venice (CA) the di Suvero on the beach has the air and space to breathe and soar. It is a delicious angular construction of enormous i-beams that lifts you up and out of the small human busyness of the boardwalk. I love it, pointedly above the small knolls of lawn, the palms, the sand and sea beyond. It is grand to stand in and under and near, and on this stretch of public space you can get space and get close.
This last, the just-so image for the Solstice. Amen.
