Richard Serra's enormous steel sculpture ‘Sequence’ is moving to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it has literally stopped traffic to do so.
The sculpture is 13 feet high, 67 feet long, 42 feet wide, and weighs 214 tons. Moving the piece means that Howard Street, a busy thoroughfare in the South of Market neighborhood, is reduced to two lanes for four hours each day. Cutting down the number of lanes gives the cranes that are needed to lift the sculpture into the museum the room they need to operate.
The panels that comprise the work are being hauled in on flatbed trucks. The trucks are not allowed on certain roads after 5:00 am, and may not unload the sections until after 10:00 am so that rush hour will not be affected. The time constraints, however, add to the challenge of the move.
The sculpture, which will be at the museum for five years, comprises 12 separate pieces, and has been at Stanford University's Cantor Ats Center since July 2011. Visitors can walk through the mammoth piece, and observe how the light changes as they make their journey, as well as how the metal reacts to heat and cold.
Museum officials could work with brochure printers to create a booklet to sell in the gift shop, giving the artist's biography and featuring photos of the work.
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