SAN JOSE, Calif. — In the 1960s, as if directed by a single frequency, people began arriving at Emeryville’s tidal mudflats for an extremely strange project. Using driftwood, scrap metal, broken glass and moth-holed fabric, they erected structures resembling totem poles and spacecraft, a crooked windmill and a Trojan Horse with rabbit anatomy. This ramshackle sculpture garden, a California College of the Arts archivist later wrote, “became a mysterious cultural landmark of the San Francisco Bay” that “exposed the populace to a radical form of public art.”
The installation evolved for decades — until the late 1990s, when Caltrans helicoptered out the dilapidated structures and a mountain of mucky garbage. But cultural traces still pop up, most recently in a painting of a wooden windmill at the corner of Horton Street and Park Avenue. Executed by San Francisco artist Ricardo Richey, aka Apexer, it’s one of a dozen-plus murals that appeared in Emeryville last month highlighting marine preservation and local animals like otters and endangered Delta Smelt.
“As a kid, I was always fascinated by the sculptures in the mudflats. I wondered who made them and how they did it,” says Richey. “The mudflat sculptures are part of the reason I paint public art today.”
