In defense of San Francisco’s giant naked woman sculpture

​I have a confession to make: I love the giant nude woman who just moved in next to San Francisco’s Ferry Building.  

That’s not a sentence I’d ever planned on writing. But I feel like it’s my civic duty to defend the sculpture that was installed last week at Embarcadero Plaza. 

Though some are certainly celebrating the 45-foot-tall silhouette of a woman who stands, eyes closed and palms outstretched, on the plaza facing up Market Street, the sculpture has also brought out some of San Francisco’s worst tendencies and illuminated the impossibility of pleasing this all-too-often petulant city.

As the New York Post gleefully noted, the sculpture has “sparked backlash, internet memes and questions about the city’s priorities.” 

I noticed the same thing when I posted photos on X last week of crews finishing up the sculpture’s installation. Vitriolic comments quickly began overwhelming my notifications. 

“This is dumb. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look nice and what a giant naked woman is supposed to represent about SF is not very clear to me,” one user wrote, a comment that generated 848 likes. “Looks disgusting,” read another comment that got more than 1,300 likes. Another commenter added, “Its location and modernism feels disrespectful to San Francisco.” One user asked: “Are these the same people putting the crappy art on the great highway?”  

In a scathing op-ed, Sarah Hotchkiss, a senior associate editor at KQED, argued that the sculpture had “no relationship to its new urban surroundings” and made her “embarrassed for the city of San Francisco.”

Perhaps naively, I thought San Franciscans would embrace the artwork, which was formally unveiled last Thursday at a lively public party. The work is titled “R-EVOLUTION” and was made by the Petaluma-based artist Marco Cochrane. Composed of thousands of pounds of steel rods and tubing covered by a deceptively delicate mesh form, the sculpture is translucent, and for an hour each day, 16 motors in her chest activate to simulate almost disconcertingly realistic breathing. At night, she is radiated from within by lights of different colors — when I passed by on Saturday, she was deep purple and dark blue.

Sure, it’s a little kitschy that the sculpture was first displayed at Burning Man in 2015, but so what? This is an art-loving, offbeat city. The sculpture’s installation was completely privately funded, a San Francisco Recreation and Park Department spokesperson confirmed to me, and she isn’t a permanent addition — she’s only slated to stay at Embarcadero Plaza for six months with a potential six-month extension. And she’ll generate much-needed buzz and tourism in the city’s hollowed-out downtown. 

This outpouring of rage is not only completely disproportionate to the situation, but also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the sculpture is meant to accomplish.

There’s no inherent reason why every piece of public art — particularly a temporary one — needs to represent something about San Francisco in order to be displayed in San Francisco. Art can certainly be enhanced by its explicit connection to or relationship with its surroundings, but it’s also meant to be enjoyed in and of itself. Part of the value of public artwork is that it exists at all. It injects beauty and unexpectedness into everyday life and is accessible to everyone.

But if an explicit connection to San Francisco were indeed a prerequisite, “R-EVOLUTION” has one. The sculpture was built on Treasure Island and was previously displayed there. Another Cochrane sculpture of a nude woman, “Truth is Beauty,” stands near the San Leandro BART station. 

The artworks are part of a three-part series called the Bliss Project that Cochrane created after the abduction and rape of his childhood best friend. He’s said that his goal is to portray women feeling safe and empowered and “catalyze social change by challenging bystanders to see past the sexual charge surrounding the female body.” 

Based on the responses to my X post, that’s a challenge that many viewers are failing. Yes, the sculpture depicts a nude female body and, yes, her proportions are model-esque (the sculpture was based on real-life model Deja Solis). But the artwork is not sexualized, and viewing it as eye candy for the male gaze is reductive. 

The sculpture’s main ethos is serenity. She’s standing in the “mountain pose” yoga position, eyes closed, feet firmly rooted, palms open, breath moving through her body. It seems like she’s gathering her strength before confronting the world head-on.   

She is, in a word, unbothered.

And this puts the histrionics of her critics in even starker perspective. As they decry the fact that she’s blocking views of the Ferry Building or ruining the character of downtown or elevating pornographic imagery, she’s simply standing there peacefully — even as crowds of onlookers jostle at her feet, taking pictures and marveling at the feat of engineering that put her together. 

“What are you getting all worked up about?” she seems to be asking. “This, too, shall pass.” 

Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; X: @emily_hoeven