Jun 262019
Millenium Tower
301 Mission Street
Public Entrance
White by Yoram Wolberger
On the day I visited this piece it was hard to see as the restaurant has used the wall to stack extraneous furniture. The piece is titled California Mission and is made of Reinforced Fiberglass and Steel covered in a polyurethane paint.
The artist, Yoran Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres Department.
The artists statement regarding the piece:
“The goals for this work were to inspire conversation about a complex Californian past, which encouraging tower residents to engage with one another about their own histories. An over-sized translucent fiberglass model of a mission model is suspended upon the atrium wall, creating a ghostlike structure that retains the flashing and flaws indicative of mass-production. These artifacts allude to the faults of manufactured idealism as well as the mythic romanticism behind a shared convoluted history. Says the artist, “The ‘CA Mission’ project is connected to my previous work in how it exposes the imperfect faces and icons of cultural ideals. While my enlarged plastic miniatures and chrome sports trophy figurines exaggerate the essential ideas of heroism, patriotism, physical prowess and beauty that drive our economy, ‘CA Mission’ taps into similar concepts through a more discordant narrative. California students are instructed to build models of these missions in elementary school; these models inherently refer to a painful period in the history of Native Americans, despite the shrouded treatment of their stories.”
This piece is part of the Millenium Towers 2% for Art requirement. The collection within the tower features artists with significant relationships to art schools and institutions in the Bay Area.