A giant solid marble carving of a hand, cupped as if to receive the bounty of harvest, left its perch of almost 30 years at the Santa Rosa Mall last week, to great fanfare in the local press. It has already found a new home.
It’s being installed at the corner of Geyserville Road and Highway 116, across the street from Catelli’s restaurant and just down the sidewalk from the Locals tasting room. In fact, it’s there now, behind fencing, though there will be a public dedication ceremony next Saturday, May 17, to formally introduce the hand to its new community, and vice versa.
As it turns out, moving it wasn’t as easy as hitching a ride with that big thumb. It had been deeded to the public for its original Santa Rosa location, and untangling it from that obligation didn’t happen overnight. And finding someone to safely move the artifact was no easy task.
The 7.5 ton (or larger) hand was created by environmental artist Larry Kirkland of Portland, Oregon, and installed at the mall in December 1996. Its proper title is Agraria, though it has been referred to by other less formal names. A full 12 feet long, six feet tall and three feet wide, it was carved from a single marble block twice its size from Carrara marble in Torrano, Italy, where Michelangelo got his stone.
Agrarian community
The name of the piece reflects its purpose, according to the plaque that adorns the severed wrist end, which states: “The hand represents a symbol of the thousands of settlers, farmers, men, women and children who have worked the soil of the Sonoma County area.” That’s one of the reasons that moving Agraria to Geyserville makes sense.
“It’s a serious work, and it’s also the symbol of our agricultural community,” said John Cash, the present head of the Geyserville Community Foundation. “We did a survey of our community sponsored by our planning committee five or six years ago. And the overwhelming desire of this community was that we remain an agricultural community, and that we don’t become just a tourist destination.”
In 2024, the Santa Rosa Mall, owned and operated by the Simon Corporation, revealed plans to lease a “fusion Chinese” P.F. Chang’s restaurant in the midsection of the mall, right behind the big hand. Various planning department meetings followed, and the removal of the hand was eventually authorized in favor of another lane of traffic and parking.
Even prior to that decision, however, the county’s Creative Sonoma agency was contacted by the mall about finding a new home for the sculpture. The Geyserville Community Foundation threw in their claim, and the advantages of Geyserville’s unincorporated status made a difference.
“Because we are not an incorporated city, we don’t have to deal with a lot of the bureaucracy of placement of public art and that kind of stuff,” said Bryce Jones, who owns the property where the Geyserville Sculpture Garden is located, one of the most visible of the town’s public works. Added Jones, “We can often just, you know, somebody sends me a picture of a sculpture, I send it to Victoria, she says yay or nay.”
Public art
Victoria Heiges is the originator of Geyserville’s sculpture program. She had previously organized the Marin Artworks project in downtown San Rafael. And when she moved to Geyserville about 15 years ago, she started up a similar project for her new agrarian home. “I was just so excited about bringing public art to people,” said Heiges this week. “You don’t need to take an art history class; you don’t need to get past a guard or anything. It’s just there.”
What’s now known as the Geyserville Sculpture Garden was launched in 2010 on Jones’ property at the Geyserville Road offramp from Highway 101. Today, this 1.32-acre lot is home to a series of idiosyncratic sculptures: Dinosaurs, chimera, unknown undersea creatures and tin humanoids, grazing silently in the sometimes-overgrown acre.
To handle the growing collection, and to create a fundraising vehicle for other community projects to support local human service organizations, the Geyserville Community Foundation was created in 2013, and the Sculpture Garden has grown to become a Sculpture Trail.
Many of the 30 or so art works currently affiliated with the Geyserville Sculpture Trail are on loan, though the Geyserville Community Foundation owns a couple of them outright: Bryan Tedrick’s rearing rusted horse, Victory, in the sculpture garden at the south end of town; and at the north end of town, in another freeway-adjacent lot, the giant wire-frame of a running man, Run Home with Couch, by Max Heiges, Victoria Heiges’ son.
There are now about 30 pieces of art in this rambling open-air gallery, from front yards to commercial space downtown as well as the two freeway-side lots that are home to the biggest pieces at either end of town.
Adding Agraria to this meandering museum just makes sense. It’s big, and evocative, and the kind of art anyone can appreciate. It’s also user-friendly: Children and adults have been clambering over it for almost 30 years. And aside from a couple interactions with political activists (it was painted black in 2020, and has been splashed with red “blood”), it’s remained unbreakable.
And after almost three years of negotiation and planning, this spring the foundation received official ownership of the piece as a gift from the Simon Corporation of the Santa Rosa Plaza. “It was actually a donation to us,” said Heiges. “But you know, no good deed goes unpunished, or whatever the saying is, because we had to raise $25,000 to remove it, transport it and place it. That was a significant amount of money for our shoestring program.”
Now the hard part
Once the money was raised, thanks to considerable support from Hal Hinkle, the challenge became all Geyserville’s to meet. The first step was finding someone who could handle an impossible job.
“We moved a pizza oven from San Francisco to Petaluma, so I guess they saw that in the newspaper. It was one of these jobs that nobody wanted to do,” said Bob Sherman, a property manager in the Healdsburg area with a knack for getting things done. “We just do jobs that nobody else wants to do. We figure ’em out and do ’em.”
Moving the enormous marble sculpture was also a job that nobody else really wanted to tackle, but the biggest challenge may have been getting it out of the ground in front of the mall. The installation drawings from 30 years ago were tough to track down, and when they were found they did not match how the hand was installed anyway.
“So what they did is they changed the whole install process, just laid it in cement,” said Sherman. “So we had to jack hammer all the way around out to loosen it, and then stabilize it, get the slings on it when the crane got there and then cut it loose after that.” Sherman and his crew—his four sons, working together as Sherman and Sons LLC—spent two days “uninstalling” it, and another day lifting it onto a flatbed with the help of Precision Crane, driving it to Geyserville and putting it on a new recycled metal platform in the middle of the downtown.
Precision Crane was able to weigh the sculpture once it was out of the ground, and came up with a figure of 18,250 pounds—more than 3,000 pounds heavier than the 7.5 tons the artist had estimated.
Sherman talks as if it was the easiest thing in the world, but admitted the job did get to him. “The day before we started this, I woke up at two o’clock in the morning, and I had a dream that a finger broke off. I was up the whole night just stressing,” said Sherman.
“But it went like clockwork. I mean, you just do things right. And we had all the safety precautions in place, and no problems at all,” he added.
And finally, he said, “It worked out. I mean, you just, if you find a problem, you just figure it out, you know?”
New home
The unique sculpture is in its new home now, albeit surrounded by a fence and caution tape. Other artworks share the corner lot, which has been leased to the Geyserville Community Foundation on three-year renewable terms, from Art and Tracy Torano. On the wall of the building to the north, where Locals is, a faded and peeling mural that’s almost 50 years old is overdue for a paint-over, a project that will be the foundation’s next undertaking.
Before that’s settled, an installation dedication will be held on May 17 to formally welcome the piece to Geyserville. They hope to have blessings not only from the local church but from a Pomo elder as well, along with some food and refreshments.
“It’s so worth it. It’s really an incredible piece, and I’m really glad to have it here,” said Heiges. “And I just love that he got the marble from the same quarry that Michelangelo used.”
Which brings us to the next big purchase that the Geyserville Community Foundation has in mind, but that’s the subject of another story.
Further information can be found at geyservillecommunityfoundation.org.
