A high point of my summer vacation was a long-anticipated visit to the sculpture garden at the San Francisco dump.
A while back, my West Coast sister, Colette, became artist-in-residence at the dump, working with recycled materials. She sent pictures of some of her creations. I was especially taken with the masks she made when her patron, the wastemanagement company Norcal, joined in the Chinese New Year parade. It was the Year of the Rat.
“You might expect a garbage company to be a little sensitive on the subject of rats,” she told me. Not a bit of it. In the parade, Norcal employees pushed trash carts filled with their own offspring outfitted unapologetically as rodents. Colette made 40 inspired rat masks using scavenged flourescent paint and new paper plates. They were a hit, and Norcal asked her back for the Year of the Ox. True to form, she confected a gigantic ox head, bright red with golden horns, to adorn the front of a vintage garbage truck.
Pictures are fine and masks are fantastic, but I wanted to see the major works that came out of this artistic tenure. I imagined whimsical constructions along the lines of the driftwood sculptures down by the freeway in my own long-ago Berkeley days. It was hard to square that notion, though, with the news that one of Colette’s dump pieces had been bought as lobby art by a downtown software firm. I was more curious than ever when I heard that her most ambitious work would be installed in a permanent outdoor setting. Two weeks ago, I finally got the chance to see it for myself.
The dump is at the southeast edge of San Francisco, near Candlestick Park, and to reach the sculpture garden you have to drive all the way through it. The area where potential recyclables are collected-where the artists make most of their finds — isn’t bad, but even a glimpse inside the vast shed where seagulls pick over mountains of household waste is unnerving. This is mercifully out of sight by the time you reach your hidden and ingeniously landscaped destination.
A bronze plaque announces the Sanitary Fill Company’s River of Hopes and Dreams Sculpture Garden, dedicated in May 1993. The work of the artists-in- residence, it says, “challenges old habits and raises awareness of environmental priorities concerning waste minimizing, re-use and recycling.”
This message is underscored by the two most conspicuous works. “River of Hopes and Dreams” is a shapeless heap of rough boulders from which flows a meandering cement stream painted swimmingpool blue. Nearby, a teardrop perhaps 10 feet high made of nowdingy bottles — “Earth Tear” — has slumped over on its side.
Continue along the pathway, though, and the prospect brightens. The path’s gravel, incidentally, is made from the freeway that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. A variety of trees and shrubs, and banks of daisies, lavender, and lily of the Nile, appear to be thriving.
In among the greenery, you come upon the charming and aptly named “Ball Gown,” fashioned out of heavy metal screens. The artist, Estelle Akamine, I’m told specializes in costumes, both as art works and as actual attire; one ensemble is made out of electrical wire and another is festooned with audiotape fringe.
Then there is Jim Growder’s “Triton,” a trio of metal sculptures. Tall and thin, vaguely manlike, or tool-like, evoking an oar, a pitchfork, and an elongated butterfly, they are elegant and spare. Growder now is employed at the dump, in charge of sorting metal for recycling.
All the way at the back, you come at last to the work by Colette Crutcher. To my unbiased eye, it is the piece de resistance: a rounded arch over seven feet high sheltering two lesser arches of different heights, titled ” Mother and Child.” It is covered in a swirling, leafy mosaic made of tile and mirror and painted glass, a gorgeous blaze of red, blue, and turquoise-green. When you look at it closely, you see that some of the pieces of glass have been stenciled inside — all with paints and patterned objects recovered at the dump.
Strolling back to the car through the deserted garden, I wondered how well it accomplishes the stated purpose. It isn’t advertised or open to the public because of liability concerns. Every now and then a company function is held there, and schoolchildren on educational tours of the dump are brought by.
Most of the time, though, it’s empty. Few San Franciscans even know it’s there. In refuse-and-recycling circles, it must be a small plus for morale, a mini-PR coup for Norcal; and of course it’s that admirable rarity, a source of temporary work for a handful of struggling artists.
At bottom, though, it’s something else, too, this art-out-of-offal enterprise. I, at least, like to think of those sculptures — that dazzling arch and the others — standing there, even unseen by any but the gulls, in silent tribute to man the contriver, man the beauty-maker.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
