Paul Kos, Andrew McClintock

DOI: 10.64212/ZIIS1500

On a foggy Sunday afternoon in December, Paul Kos picked me up from the SFAQ office in the Tenderloin, and we headed through the deserted streets of the Financial District in San Francisco. Our first stop was at “Poetry Sculpture Garden”, a public art piece he did with poet Robert Hass, (2000) at 199 Fremont. We then headed to the USF campus off 3rd Street in Mission Bay to check out Everything Matters (2011). Standing in front of the mosaic, I felt a little lost due to my red-green color-blindness problems. Finally, I came clean, which led to a color test later in the day, but it made me thankful that I wasn’t suffering from a general lack of understanding of conceptual based public art. We jumped back into Paul’s truck and drove to his studio on Potrero Hill where we sat down at his table with a big glass of beer and began our almost 3-hour conversation in which we covered Paul’s very complex and diverse conceptual art- making practice, public art, his 40 years of teaching, and a bit of art history.