San Francisco Public Library
Atrium area
Constellation by Artist: Nayland Blake – Lighting by Architectural Lighting Design
160 names of writers are illuminated on a wall that rises five stories behind the grand staircase in the atrium of the San Francisco Public Library.
The old San Francisco Public Library now houses the Asian Art Museum
The artist’s work is inspired by a Beaux Arts tradition with origins in the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve in Paris (a model for the old Main Library). On that building, authors’ names were inscribed on the facade according to the location of their works inside.
Nayland Blake revisits this idea of an index of authors with glass shades placed before fiber optic light beams. Each shade is inscribed with the name of an author whose work is part of the library collection. The wall is designed to hold 200 more names as patrons endow additional shades and lights.
To select the first 160 names, the artist formed a guidance committee of local scholars and community members to develop a list of recommendations. Blake then held a series of public meetings in the branch libraries to solicit community response, as well as suggestions.
Nayland Blake’s mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender.
Blake attended Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, B.F.A. from 1978–82 and then moved to California. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, M.F.A., from 1982–84.
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Blake was born in 1960. He began displaying his work in 1985. Among his most famous pieces are a log cabin made of gingerbread squares fitted to a steel frame, entitled Feeder 2 (1998). When it went on display at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, visitors nibbled off bits and pieces of the cabin’s interior walls, while the smell of the gingerbread filled the gallery.
His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Des Moines Art Center, among others. He currently lives and works in New York City.
This project was funded with the 2% for Art Program at a cost of $14,000.