Mark di Suvero takes root at Crissy Field

San Francisco Chronicle | By Sam Whiting
May 11, 2013

Two years ago, sculptor Mark di Suvero gave a public talk at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art describing his arrival by boat under the Golden Gate Bridge as a 7-year-old immigrant in 1941. 

That speech planted an idea in SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra's mind, and now, if you sail under the Golden Gate, you'll see the orange steel towers of the bridge offset by orange steel towers planted on the banks by di Suvero.  

The exhibition, titled "Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field," marks a homecoming for the famed artist, who grew up in San Francisco but left for New York after college, and a "home-leaving" for SFMOMA, which will go dark on June 2 for 2 1/2 years of expansion. 

"I never thought they would give me a museum show, nope," says di Suvero, being modest for a recipient of the 2010 National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given an artist by the U.S. government. A career retrospective of his monumental towers would never fit under the roof of SFMOMA, or under any roof. 

"So look at what (Benezra) did," di Suvero says. "He closed the museum in order to give me a show." 

The eight sculptures scattered across the 26.5-acre greensward that was once an Army landing strip amount to the largest display of di Suvero's work shown on the West Coast. It is also the largest public single-site, single-artist exhibition mounted by SFMOMA and the pilot for an Art in the Park program by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which manages the field.  

"What I realized right away is that the scale of this space is vast," says Benezra, who curated the show. "I went to Mark and I said, 'There are big di Suveros, and there are really big di Suveros, and to fill this space we need really, really big di Suveros,' and he understood that right away." 

The exhibition is free, and though it is not permanent, it is the nearest thing to it, as these pieces weigh up to 20 tons apiece and will not move for a year, even in the gale-force Golden Gate winds. To install them required two construction cranes, one cherry picker and a crew of 10 or 12 hard hats, including the orange one worn at a jaunty angle by artist di Suvero as he sits down on a "lightweight" sculpture.  

"This weighs about 7 tons, but how much it weighs makes no difference to the spirit. How much did Beethoven weigh?"

At 79, di Suvero walks with the aid of crutches. His legs were crushed in a construction accident when he was 27. From a wheelchair, he learned a welding technique that defines his style, using I-beams as a primary material.  

Though he moved east in 1957, di Suvero maintains a studio in Petaluma. His work is scattered around the Bay Area, most prominently in "Pax Jerusalem" outside the Legion of Honor and "Sea Change" along the Embarcadero, north of AT&T Park. Both are brightly colored, as is "Figolu," the piece he is perched on at Crissy Field, which seems to reference the other two. All three resemble a compass from high school geometry class, set at various angles, though this is a comparison di Suvero himself will not suffer. 

"You mean in words?" he says, when gently asked to describe his style. "Oh, no, no. I cannot describe any of these pieces. I can do better by giving you a massage. How's that?" 

He laughs, then gives it a bit more effort. 

"I do what the sculpture wants me to do. Some of them have movement. Some of them have color. Others are straight-up structures. What you are dealing with is symbolic structures that we call language."  

Benezra, sitting alongside di Suvero on the sculpture, offers a translation. 

"I think of them as tremendous expressions of optimism," he says. "Each of those orange bars seems to exclaim up. To me, they are an exuberant expression of freedom." 

This was the message Benezra got from di Suvero's speech at SFMOMA, which detailed his family's odyssey from Italy to Shanghai, where he was born, then on to San Francisco. 

"Anyone who was there that night will never forget it," Benezra says. "We all heard this very, very, very important artist speak about freedom. This rejuvenated all of our interest in his work." 

So much that when "Mark di Suvero at Governors Island" opened last May in New York, Benezra and other staff and board members flew out to see it. They rode the ferry out to the island, off the bottom tip of Manhattan. Walking among the huge di Suveros, they could see something even huger, the Statue of Liberty. Benezra's mind immediately went to di Suvero's speech about crossing under the Golden Gate.  

"We all came to the conclusion that it would be a bicoastal exhibition about what this country has represented to emigres for decades and decades," Benezra says. 

The show represents five decades of di Suvero. Half the work is from the Governors Island show. Each sculpture took its own flatbed truck to get here, with the exception of one piece that took two trucks. 

The installation began in a brutal weeklong heat wave that finally broke when the fog came blowing in on a cold wind. Benezra wore a jacket and cap, but di Suvero was protected only by a blue oxford button-down over a yellow one. 

He's not afraid of fog and wind. He grew up in it, on 43rd Avenue, two doors away from a younger kid named Richard Serra. "There must have been some kind of electricity out there," says di Suvero, who is not surprised that they became two of the world's leading sculptors working with heavy steel. 

But he is surprised that there is no central location for displaying the oversize works of these two local boys, graduates of Lincoln High School in the Sunset District. 

"There is no great sculpture park here in the Bay Area that is open to everybody," he says. "This could become it." 

His 80th birthday is Sept. 18, in the middle of the show. It would make a nice gift. 

Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field: The free exhibition runs Wednesday through May 26, 2014.

Mark di Suvero: Selected Small Works: Through June 22. John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant Ave. S.F.