California Academy of Sciences
Golden Gate Park
This Marine Grade Stainless Steel wire sculpture (difficult to photograph) is titled Where the Land Meets the Sea, and is by Maya Lin.
This is the first permanent artwork by Maya Lin in San Francisco. The artist was selected through the Arts Commission’s competitive application process in 2005. Although Lin does not usually participate in competitions, she responded to the Arts Commission’s invitation to apply because of her keen interest in the California Academy of Sciences and the opportunity the project would provide to engage with the institution’s scientists. As an ardent environmentalist, Lin wished to develop a project that would make people more aware of their environment and the natural world.
The 36’ x 60’ x 15’ sculpture is fabricated from 5/8 inch marine grade stainless steel tubing. Like a line drawing in space, the sculpture depicts the topography between Angel Island and the Golden Gate Bridge. To make the hills and valleys of the terrain more visible, the actual scale of the landscape is exaggerated by five times above sea level and by ten times below. “This piece was the culmination of a quest to reveal San Francisco Bay—to get people to think about what’s beneath the water line in a new way,” says Lin. “It took almost eight months for us to mesh the land and water data sets because the two sets of data were completely segregated—and this is the whole point! We think of these things as two separate systems even though they are literally connected to each other.” In order to build the sculpture, Lin’s fabricator, the Walla Walla Foundry, recreated the exterior West Terrace of the Academy in their warehouse to ensure precision in the attachment of the sculpture to the terrace’s six columns.
The sculpture is installed outdoors on the Academy’s West Terrace, where it is seamlessly attached to six columns and suspended by nine thread-like steel cables from the overhead solar canopy. It seems to float like a cloud in a Chinese landscape painting against the backdrop of greenery in Golden Gate Park, a dynamic counterpoint to the formal and orderly geometry of the building’s architecture by Renzo Piano. (from the SFAC press release).
You can view this piece from outside the gates of the Academy of Sciences. Entry is $30 for adults.
It is hard to see from the pics and I can imagine it would be hard to catch on the camera. The concept sounds intriguing and I always like wire ‘line drawings’.