Douglas Hollis’s three San Francisco studio spaces reflect the dimensions of his increasingly complex, collaborative public art. A square room dominated by computer monitors could be an architect’s office. The small downstairs shop is neatly gridded with what used to be familiar hand tools. The outdoor studio—in a quintessentially San Francisco garden with native plants, stepped terraces, and the sounds of wind, birds, and a foghorn—holds the key, revealing the spirit, energies, and elements that animate Hollis’s subtle yet powerful work. His four-decade career has suddenly become very busy. In a move that perhaps parallels Hollis’s own staying power and new visibility, Aeolian Harp (1976), which was originally installed high above the entrance to San Francisco’s Exploratorium, is being relocated (along with the hands-on science museum) to the Embarcadero, where it will perch on a bridge—a more accessible site that will allow it to be seen as well as heard. On the Virginia side of the Potomac River, two miles south of the National Mall, Hollis is at work on the second of two structures for Long Bridge Park. Arlington County administrators were so pleased with his wind-activated, steel and aluminum Wave Arbor (2011) that they invited him back and asked that his wife, sculptor Anna Valentina Murch, collaborate with him on the next phase. …see the entire article in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
