Public Art Projects

Mission Bay Branch Library Sculpture by Artist Vince Koloski

Stretching along the upper-level walls of the reading room of the new Mission Bay Branch of the San Francisco Public Library is the sculpture A Library Book by San Francisco artist Vince Koloski. The sculpture, in the form of an accordion-fold book, contains within its pages selected quotations about books and libraries. These quotations were contributed by the patrons of the San Francisco Public Library.

The sculpture follows the form of a book starting with a “cover” panel carved to look like a rock slab covered with petroglyphs. This is followed by eight 5-foot high by 4-foot wide Lexan panels which serve as pages of the book. Each of these pages holds two smaller panels of Plexiglass which have been engraved with the text of a quotation or hand carved with an illustration. The final panel serves as the rear “cover” and is made up of small illustrations and symbols that show the history of the Mission Bay area of the city from earliest times to the present.

The Plexiglas panels containing the quotations and illustrations are illuminated along the edges by LED lights. These LEDs create a colored glow within each quotation and illustration. The twelve quotations were selected by a committee of community members, and Arts Commission and Library staff, from quotations submitted by library patrons.  Local authors such as Anne Lamott, Jewelle Gomez and Ben Fong-Torres are quoted in the artwork. Others with their words in lights are Spike Lee, Groucho Marx and Jorge Luis Borges.

The book pages also include four hand carved illustrations with text in other languages. These illustrations show the progress of human writing from the cuneiform to just before modern printing began.