When we first moved to the Bay Area, some 35 years ago, we would find ourselves driving along the freeway through the Berkeley flats and we noticed Snoopy and the Red Baron. I mean, who wouldn't notice them? But it helped that we had kids and so it always made that part of the drive easier when we could point out the window and tell the kids: "hey! look at Snoopy and the Red Baron!"
Later, I spent several years working in an anonymous office building on the Watergate Peninsula, and so I become more in-tune with the area, and even realized that the statues, at least some of them, pre-dated the office building where I was working!
Eventually those statues fell apart, which was the expected outcome all along, and now there aren't really very many statues on the Emeryville mudflats any more. (But more about that later.)
But recently I saw a wonderful short obituary of Tyler James Hoare: With fake paperwork and a roguish attitude, he made the San Francisco Bay his gallery and thought about the statues, and about Mr. Hoare, and about the joy that things like that can bring.
Hoare moved to Berkeley in 1965 with his wife and daughter, and he set up a studio in the basement of an old Victorian home. He began installing sculptures on pier posts in the 1970s. He would say that the bay became his gallery.
Another older and very interesting article about Hoare survives in the Internet Archive, archived from the East Bay Daily News: Attack of the 'post people'
So what possessed him to start sneaking his art onto old pilings when he knew there was no money in it and he would have to replace them every six months or so?
Traffic jams.
"I used to have a little shop in Oakland, and driving home on the 80, backups were so bad in those days you wouldn't move for a while," Hoare said. "I thought there needs to be something to look at. And the posts were right there. Should I put a big banana or a giant abstract shape out there? No, what you needed was something people could understand."
An airplane was the right thing. He further decided an airplane should be flying in the same direction as the traffic "so it would feel right."
After I read the NPR article, I was telling a friend about it, and I realized that I didn't really know as much of this local history as I should, so I did a bit more digging and came across some superb resources:
Firstly, you should know about the wonderful Libraries Section of the California College of the Arts: Emeryville Mudflats Sculpture Collection
The CCA Archives house a collection of materials documenting the public artworks created in the Emeryville Mudflats during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The collection is comprised of the Robert Sommer Collection, photographs and ephemera, and the Mudflats Oral Histories, interviews of creators.
And then I found the great work of a local blogger, Joey Enos, who published a series of articles over a many-year period nearly a decade ago:
- Origins: First of a Three-part Series on the History of the Emeryville Mudflat Sculptures
- Radical as Folk: Second of a Three-part Series on the History of the Emeryville Mudflat Sculptures
- The End: Last in a Three-part Series on the History of the Emeryville Mudflat Sculptures
It was from Enos's work that I learned that the Emeryville Mudflat Sculptures actually originally began as the Bay Farm Island Mudflat Sculptures, right next to the land that eventually became the housing development where I've lived for the last 30+ years!
There were many discussions on the widening art scene but there was one in particular that earns its moment in history. This discussion was in a sculpture class at The College of Arts and Crafts in the summer of 1960. Percolating in Professor Everett Turner’s sculpture class was the next generation of notable artists that were asked to exercise the merits of this contemporary trend. In this discussion they decided to get their hands dirty and collectively make a work out of detritus. Alameda native and a student in Everett’s class, Garry Knox Bennett, suggested a forgotten farming community of Bay Farm Island. Bay Farm Island sat between the municipal landfill and the Oakland airport. Once an Eden for foul, it was now covered in driftwood and garbage.
Supplied with a bucket full of nails and cases of beer, Everett’s CCAC Sculpture class went out to Bay Farm Island in the summer of 1960. They went there with no concept of what to build. Without much debate they just started building. The class gathered any kind of interesting junk they could find. Under the warm sun of that Saturday afternoon, a shape began to form. What started out as structural posts resting on the mud, spewed out an energetic interpretation of a ship. It was decked out with a flag on mast and a forgotten doll as a figurehead. To Garry and Silvia Bennett’s recollection, the class named this ship shaped sculpture “SS Eichmann,” assuming it was meant as an effigy of the resent capture of the Nazi War Criminal. The naming of the sculpture reflects the growing political consciousness of students of the time.
Enos also reminded me of something that I knew, but had forgotten: the statues didn't just vanish on their own, the state government actively removed them. Reading his essay, I remembered that happening, although by then I was no longer working in Emeryville every day so I hadn't paid much attention.
After the 1989 Loma Preita Earthquake ravaged parts of Emeryville, a rapid redevelopment of Emeryville and its infrastructure followed. The activity of this new infrastructure changed the sightline of the mudflat sculptures from the freeway. The 880/80 flyover and other freeway construction made the Crescent less visible to those passing by and the audience shrank. In 1998, Caltrans spent millions of dollars to clean up the driftwood and garbage that was in the fodder that created the Mudflat Sculptures. Not surprisingly, Caltrans was opposed to the sculptures, as it caused hazards on the freeway. They finally had the political will to finish them off even if it was under the guise of preserving the ecology.
Well! That was an interesting diversion into 65-year old history that somehow I had never learned. The 1960's were a fascinating decade for many reasons, but here locally they were the time when the BCDC (Bay Conservation and Development Commission) was formed, and when the local history of the Bay Area shifted from "develop and use the Bay" to "preserve and enjoy the Bay".
Though I wouldn't have had this place to live if the BCDC had been formed even five years earlier, I'm still glad for all the success they've had in making the Bay Area the beautiful region it's become.
As the saying goes: history begins at home.
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