If it all seems a little astonishing, blame it on Nancy.
Steve Oliver may be the front man for The Oliver Ranch, a renowned outdoor museum of contemporary works created by many of the leading artists of the age. But Oliver, one of the Bay Area's most respected arts patrons, with a wink fingers his petite wife, Nancy, as the instigator. It was she who set off what became a magnificently mutual obsession that eventually led the couple to turn their 100-acre property in Geyserville into a cradle for world-class art.
As a young mother and re-entry college student in the 1970s going on museum field trips, Nancy became intrigued by the edginess of contemporary art. She began dragging her race-car driving spouse to art galleries and ballets under protest. Eventually, her enthusiasm lit a fire under her reluctant mate, who went on to head the boards of both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the California College of the Arts.
More than 30 years and some 350 acquisitions later, the Olivers have created one of the most ambitious and singular private collections of site-specific sculpture in the country, 18 completed installations — 16 visible — incongruously spread out among the meadows, knolls and trees of an old sheep ranch overlooking the Alexander Valley.
"All this is her fault. There are days she regrets it, I'm sure," Oliver playfully needles.
It is an extraordinary accomplishment not just for the quality of the work but because each monumental piece was developed on site in a uniquely collaborative process with the Olivers that sometimes took years to design, locate and build. Many represent feats not just of artistic genius but of engineering might and ingenuity, not to mention good old tenacity.
But for Steve Oliver, who studied engineering and business at UC Berkeley and whose East Bay construction company, Oliver & Co., has built such high-profile projects as the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, the Oxbow School in Napa and the Presidio Building 39 in San Francisco, a big part of the fun of each project is the planning and problem solving.
"I'm as addicted to the process as the product," concedes Oliver, who's still actively involved in Oliver & Co.
They frequently share this celebrated collection of commissioned art, with the cast of artists a Who's Who in contemporary art: Richard Serra, Robert Stackhouse, Ann Hamilton, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, Miroslaw Balka.
From April to June and September to November, busloads of visitors rumble up the steep hillside for tours the Olivers provide to nonprofits for charity fundraising. However many dozens of times he has done it, Oliver's delight in his ever-growing gallery never diminishes as he delivers an animated and rapid-fire narrative about each piece, its artist and the engineering and construction conundrums encountered in the process.
But when the ranch is quiet the couple, who have two adult children, two grandchildren, and a townhome South of Market in San Francisco, retreat to their country house, an architectural work of art in its own right, so conjoined to the land it literally rises up out of the rock.
"Neither of us has social aspirations," says Oliver, who sat for years on the SFMOMA board and headed the capital campaign to build the current museum, now a San Francisco landmark. "We don't collect art because we're going to have dinner with somebody. You can't be chairman of the board without having to go through some of that. But the more we go through it, the more we decide that's not what we're here to do."
The Olivers bought the ranch 30 years ago, first using it for sheep grazing in collaboration with Bruce Campbell of Healdsburg's CK Lamb. They lived out of a trailer while they carefully plotted out where they wanted their permanent home to be and what they wanted it to look like.
They recruited San Francisco architect Robert Overstreet to design the house. Oliver, whose father had been an architect, had long been intrigued by the iconoclastic work of Bruce Goff, widely regarded as one of the 20th century's great architects, who drew inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan and Antoni Gaud?
"Goff's buildings were so quirky, with these odd radiuses," says Oliver. Sensitive to site and materials, Goff designed many of his buildings out of stone, an indigenous material the Olivers were determined to make a dominant theme in the house. Although Goff had died in 1982, they tracked down Overstreet, one of his nine surviving disciples.
It took five years to build the house — three simply to get the stonework approved as a structural element in earthquake country. They enlisted Henry Degenkolb, one of the world's leading structural engineers, to make the buildings seismically safe.
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