The art world weighs in on SF’s giant naked lady sculpture

San Francisco’s latest cultural lightning rod is a 45-foot-tall naked woman. 

“R-Evolution,” which depicts a thin but voluptuous nude woman, was created by Petaluma artist and Burning Man devotee Marco Cochrane. Inspired by the form of Bay Area model and singer Deja Solis, the piece is made up of stainless steel rods and stands still, save for one hour each day when its chest grows and collapses to apparently represent breathing.

“R-Evolution is more than a sculpture; it’s a 45-foot-tall symbol of feminine strength and liberation,” Marco Cochrane wrote on his website. Cochrane did not respond to requests for comment. 

The piece is scheduled to be up for at least six months, and possibly a year, but it has quickly become a cultural football for San Francisco since it was first proposed for Union Square in January. (The sculpture was moved to the Embarcadero due to its weight over an underground parking lot beneath Union Square.) 

After its installation at Embarcadero Plaza last week, the sculpture drew sharp backlash from the arts community. Critics from KQED and the San Francisco Examiner slammed it for lacking community input. When the San Francisco Chronicle published a supportive review, the Examiner’s critic called it a “horrendous take” on social media. The Chronicle’s critic later added he’s just here for the drama.

Most local art professionals don’t want to touch this topic with a 10-foot pole. Despite reaching out to over a dozen experts and approaching collectors and gallerists at art parties all week, very few were willing to share their opinion of the work on the record. (Of course, outspoken art critic Jerry Saltz has no such qualms and was very blunt in his assessment: “All I can say is that it is shite,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine.)

But there were a few brave Bay Area art players with strong feelings on the naked lady of the Embarcadero. Here’s what they had to say:

It’s like the Blue Origin space crew of art. Like, “Yay! It’s a bunch of women on a spaceship.” They didn’t do anything but get on and get off. It feels right for the times, I guess. It feels right for the city [because of San  Francisco’s connection to Burning Man].

But I would argue what’s amazing on the playa isn’t necessarily amazing in an urban setting. The scale and context are different. The audience is different. Everything is different. 

We all have our aesthetic preferences. Still, I’m just really bothered by the fact that this giant naked woman with a model’s proportions is being held up by a man’s symbol of female empowerment. It’s a nude. And there’s a whole tradition of nudes in art history, but don’t try and turn it into something other than that. That’s all it is.

There are plenty of women artists that they could have reached out to do something. Especially in the time we’re living in, to have a male artist do an idealized version of the female body and pass it off as female empowerment, San Francisco should know better. There is no shortage of women in art. 

Public sculpture is incredibly fraught. You have interest groups, different agendas to balance, funders, trying to appeal to a wide audience or the specificity of the local arts ecosystem.

You can find detractors for Richard Serra or George Segal’s Holocaust memorial, even though artists who are critically acclaimed are considered safer. 

The conversation of monuments versus public art is in the ether – I don’t think this works or doesn’t work in that conversation. 

Marco making big giant naked ladies has been a bit of a Burning Man joke for a while, but I’m very happy it’s there. The original impetus of making these sculptures is that they are modeled after one of the dancers of his crew. So if you bring it around to that — I mean, she has such a beautiful body — it’s quite empowering. 

When it comes to empowerment, I mean I just like to see art. I like to see art that makes people talk about it. Ultimately that’s the best thing to be doing in public display. Do I think it represents a lack of empowerment for women? I don’t think so. I think it’s a big beautiful sculpture of a woman. 

I think Marco is very good at big giant life-sized replications of the human body and I think that’s where I am with it. His process is beautiful and the sculpture is amazing. 

This feels like a missed opportunity to truly represent women by giving opportunities to female artists in San Francisco. This city still has a huge imbalance in the percentage of public art made by women artists versus male artists.

 As a gallery owner who has focused much of my program on supporting female artists for nearly 12 years, I would like to see more female curators consulted for these projects. I also would like to see foundations that have the means use their resources to shift this imbalance. If the goal is to empower women there’s a very clear way that this can happen: engage women artists.

There are so few public sculptures of women in San Francisco or even in general. So to have this piece sit at the base of Market, overlooking the city — I just think it was a really extremely poor choice. 

This week is a big week for us with the [San Francisco Art] Fair in town, and the piece is an insult to the San Francisco arts in general. 

Maybe as a Burning Man piece it has merit. I don’t want to deny the artist’s talent. It’s a feat to create something like that and I’m not going to take that away from the artist but it doesn’t belong in San Francisco. But it is bringing up a lot of great conversations about representation and how women are presented and idolized. It’s 2025 and it doesn’t belong. 

Of course it is a technical marvel. It’s kind of an amazing machine at that scale. But it’s just this technical marvel. If it’s called revolution, what is that supposed to mean? What is it saying right now in this particular moment of crisis? I don’t know.

In the realm of public art there’s this idea of plop art — where you just drop this thing in the middle of a plaza and it has nothing to do with the place itself. That’s what this is, it’s plop art for tech culture. And yes it’s temporary, but it’s not going to bring me over there. 

I feel like there’s something obscene about it in the sense that it’s just so direct and so anatomically correct. It’s not pornographic. I just don’t know that it does anything other than kind of recreate a body. 

I remember cycling past it on the Playa; seeing it for the first time 10 years ago. It was one of the strongest pieces on the Playa. It’s a very joyous piece and it’s a celebration of the human form. The breathing is supple and beautiful

This is a great piece and as a metal artist I know how hard it is to sculpt the human form. Technically, the way he fabricated it is beautiful. It’s all welded together but when you look at it you can’t see the structural element to it. It’s very difficult to do this and that’s why I think he’s an incredible artist.

I think everyone has to make their own opinion and that’s what art is about. It’s about the viewer and how it impacts you and what you think of it. I have my own opinions and there has been a lot of discourse about it and that’s really what great art does — that it provokes the viewer into emotion.