The New Yorker:

Los Angeles still gets to ask itself regularly what kind of city it wants to be. For instance: Does it believe in large-scale, outdoor, egalitarian public art? In 2001, the artist Mark di Suvero installed “Declaration,” a twenty-five-ton sculpture, on the boardwalk at Venice Beach. Just over sixty feet tall, made from raw-steel I-beams, the sculpture takes the form of two intersecting “V”s: one tilted open toward the city, the other with its point aiming, prow-like, toward the sea. It was a loan, part of an annual benefit for the Venice Family Clinic, which serves low-income, uninsured people, many of them homeless. Intended as temporary, it has since become a fixture in the landscape.

“Let’s meet at the ‘V,’ ” dogwalkers say—the place of meditations, workouts, weddings. (At its base, on any given day: the stub of a joint, a synthetic petal from a lei.) Between a skate park and a police substation, the sculpture is an icon in a city of few monuments, where verticality usually takes the form of oil derricks or fan palms. At the end of the summer, after an eighteen-year run, “Declaration” will be broken down and transported back to the artist’s studio, in Petaluma, unless someone buys it—the estimated value is five million dollars—and donates it to the city.

Several weeks ago, di Suvero’s gallery, L.A. Louver, which is a few paces off the beach, had a show of his smaller-scale pieces; the gathering doubled as an early sendoff for “Declaration.” I found di Suvero in an upstairs room, where he had just awoken from a nap. He is eighty-five, with bright blue eyes; thick, white, storm-tossed hair; and a beard. He wore a rainbow-colored rugby shirt and paint-splattered dark bluejeans, with leather hiking boots. Di Suvero wears a prosthetic leg. Last year, he burned himself while welding, and his leg, already paralyzed from the knee down—he broke his back in 1960, doing manual labor as a young artist in New York—had to be removed.

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