SOMA
W Hotel
3rd and Howard Streets
Pneumatic DreamerMichael Stutz
Stutz studied painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and York Street College of Art in Belfast, Ireland. He began his career in San Francisco, supporting himself designing merchandise displays for Macy’s. His commitment to public art grew out of work he did in New Orleans, designing and building large scale papier mache figures for the city’s Mardi Gras parades. Later he began using recycled materials to create sculptures that have been shown throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Pneumatic Dreamer is Stutz’s first work in bronze, and initially, he considered having the piece cast. He consulted a foundry but learned the cost would be “astronomical.” Instead he had it fabricated of annealed bronze strips intricately woven and then welded together at Matt Gil’s Studio, which specializes in doing fabrication work for San Francisco area artists.
The sculpture was specifically designed for installation on the fourth floor terrace of the hotel, overlooking the street below. Stutz points out that the figure, the gender of which is intentionally ambiguous, “could be going into a dream state, or arising from it” and that it illustrates “a very private moment in a very public space.” In keeping with that idea, the piece is literally a woven shell, in which, Stutz says, “the inside is outside, and the outside is inside.”
Pneumatic Dreamer is lit from both the inside and the front, emphasizing the woven lattice aspect of the design. Its bronze patina will weather to a greenish-blue shade in about a decade.
The sculpture was funded by Starwood Hotels in keeping with the SF Redevelopment Agency One Percent for Art Program.
