After 18 months standing as a towering sentry at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, the 45-foot-tall wire mesh sculpture of a nude woman will leave its station across from the Ferry Building next week.
The controversial artwork, titled “R-Evolution” and recently renamed “I Am” by its creator, Marco Cochrane, was always on a temporary assignment — and after two extensions, its time is up. Cochrane and his team will now disassemble the 13,000-pound sculpture and its 16,000 pounds of anchoring plates, and truck it to his Petaluma warehouse for refurbishing.
“R-Evolution,” originally built for the Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2015 and based on the figure of Bay Area model Deja Solis, is not going out without fanfare. On Friday night, a public farewell party was held by the artwork’s sponsor, the Big Art Loop, a nonprofit promoter of large-scale art on a 34-mile pedestrian and bike trail through San Francisco…