Overview:
For more than 40 years a 240-ton sculpture at the Hilltop auto mall has stood without a plaque to reveal its name or that of its artist.
Now, a little more than a year after the death of artist Jacques Overhoff, his daughter hopes to finally rectify this oversight.
Local artists say the omission is an example of the city's overly complicated artist grant program, something they're lobbying the city to fix.
In 1983, Dutch-American artist Jacques Overhoff, who survived a terrifying childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, completed what he believed was his most significant public artwork — a 40-foot-tall, 240-ton concrete sculpture at Richmond’s Hilltop auto mall.
“Torque” is a giant concrete and steel piece twisting and towering over a shrubby median off of Klose Way, flanked by new cars and trucks. True to its name, it seems to shapeshift in physics-defying ways.
But passers-by won’t know its name, or that it’s a monumental work by an internationally known figure in the art world, because there is no on-site signage. Nor will they learn that it was considered an engineering feat of its time, like “seeing a spaceship during the Eisenhower years,” said one man who knew the artist.
Overhoff himself, who died in Germany in December 2024 at age 91, couldn’t fathom why the city never installed a plaque.
“The oddity, still today, there is no sign on the plaza — who did it, who did what,” Overhoff said in a 2019 interview conducted at the sculpture site for a not-yet-completed documentary film, his gruff but gentle voice giving just a hint of a Dutch accent. “Nothing.”
“The monumental tension between arrows and engines. Auto Mall meets iconic art. Pushing the meaning of what could be a humdrum public space, ‘Torque’ juxtaposes a metaphor for the internal com- bustion engine with an homage to Native American history at the site.” — The Jacques Overhoff Foundation
Portrait photography of Jacques Overhoff: Ray Kachatorian
Overhoff said he was promised “four or five times” by top city leaders that Richmond would foot the $2,000 bill for a simple stainless steel plaque. But it never came to be. His only daughter tried later to rectify the oversight but was thwarted, she said, by a burdensome city grant application process that local artists are currently fighting to change.
Critics say city artist grant program isn’t artist-friendly
The fact that none of the city’s current staffers or elected officials were around when “Torque” was built puts the artwork at risk of obscurity, said former Richmond Arts and Culture Manager Michele Seville, an artist who held that position for 15 years.
She said “Torque,” and other significant Richmond public artworks, are proof of the city’s once nationally coveted public arts program, a program that exemplified how a city could beautify the otherwise-mundane spaces of everyday life.
“The institutional knowledge is what is so very much at risk,” Seville told Richmondside. “With the age-out and burnout and passing away of prior people in those positions, it’s very difficult.”
Preserving the city’s arts and cultural history is valuable, Seville and others point out, especially when many changes are occurring on Richmond’s arts scene: The city is hiring a new arts and culture manager; a nonprofit organization wants to create a downtown arts corridor; there’s an effort to build a Black history museum; and the city’s largest gallery, the Richmond Art Center, is celebrating its 90th birthday this fall.
But the city’s arts renaissance has a less positive undercurrent. Artists say the city hasn’t been efficiently spending its artist grant fund (collected from developer fees) to commission new works, and its mini grant program is underused due to a complicated application process. ($160,000 in Neighborhood Public Art mini-grants was awarded to 13 artists as of the end of 2025.) The total 2025-26 Arts and Culture budget was $795,000, with the bulk supporting large institutions such as the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, the Richmond Art Center and NIAD.
One of the major reasons, they say, is that the grant application process is fraught with red tape.
Who was Jacques Overhoff?
Overhoff, described by those who knew him as “whimsical, playful, very smart and articulate,” was born in Amsterdam in 1933. Despite the many articles published about his notable public artworks, a number of which are in Los Angeles and San Francisco, his 2024 death in Germany went unannounced. Recognition such as a traditional newspaper obituary just wasn’t his style, his only child, Serena Overhoff, told Richmondside.
It was a quiet ending for a man who thought so far outside the box that his process was described as “upside down thinking.”
“Upside down thinking challenges assumptions we hold to be so true we don’t even question them. It’s a way of thinking that takes the blinders off conventional wisdom and creates a path toward progress,” is how his approach is described by The Jacques Overhoff Foundation.
Serena Overhoff, who grew up in Marin County and now lives in Ojai, is launching a hemp cement business — a nod to her father’s pioneering work in cement sculpting — and running the foundation. Over several months of interviews with Richmondside, she slowly opened up about him, the pain of his passing still fresh.
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“It was like, ‘Wow,’ exclamation point — to stand here under this seam of cement and look at the shapes and the contours. It looked like an opera fan, very contemporary, or a butterfly.”
— Serene Overhoff, Jacques Overhoff’s daughter
“He was just fearless and self-driven. A pure artist in that he was curious and he was willing to experiment and fail and try different things,” she said.
To even begin to understand Overhoff, one might picture a 1960s-style Leonardo da Vinci, a visual artist who was also a “sculptor / architect / builder / carpenter / engineer / urban planner.”
She said it took her father five years to realize “Torque,” which was commissioned by the auto mall developers.
Pushing the boundaries of designing with cement
The building of “Torque”: Play video and use controls to review the images“That sculpture defined not only his spirituality but (his) pushing the boundaries of designing with cement. Its hyperbolic shape is a geometric statement of poetry symbolizing the auto plaza … respecting the land that it sits on. The shape is a tipping of his acknowledgment to the Native American Indian and at the same time addressing the future forward, the symbolism of horsepower,” she said. “Torque.”
Overhoff came to America in 1955 to study architecture in Oregon but became enamored with the thriving San Francisco beat culture. He moved here and worked in advertising while art and architecture projects continued to call him.
As a college student in Southern California, Serena Overhoff would see her father’s work while attending concerts at the stunning circular Mark Taper Forum, which he designed, but she didn’t see “Torque” in person until she was in her early 20s. She recalls driving a rental car over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, toting her father’s Pentax camera. She saw, for the first time, his work through his eyes, his DNA, she said.
“It was like, ‘Wow,’ exclamation point — to stand here under this seam of cement and look at the shapes and the contours,” she said. “It looked like an opera fan, very contemporary, or a butterfly.”
She also noticed there was no sign or plaque. She recalls running into a car showroom and asking the employees, “Do you know who made that?” They did not.
“It was magnetic to stand there knowing what he had achieved and thinking of my lifetime, questioning, ‘How long will this continue to stand here?’ ” she said. “ ‘How do I help preserve it?’ ”
Much later, in about 2023, before her father died, she tried applying for a Richmond artists grant but found out that she would have to front the money to have an entire landscaping master plan developed, and she couldn’t afford it at the time.
“I got 50% of the way there, and then, it all halted,” she said.
Former Richmond city arts manager Seville, a member of Richmond Renaissance, the group developing the downtown arts corridor, remembers meeting Overhoff at his 2019 documentary interview.
“My takeaway memory when he came out is … They were looking at the piece and you could just feel the pride and the joy that he had for this piece,” she said. “It was such a lovely thing to see — an aging artist looking at one of his creations and feeling that swell of pride.”
Other notable Richmond public art
“Solar Cantata,” (1971), the gold-anodized sculpture by the late Charles Perry, was the centerpiece of the now-abandoned Hilltop mall’s rotunda. If the mall is demolished for redevelopment, the artwork may be at risk. Credit: Jeremy Brooks, via Creative Commons
“Changing Tide” (2029), Richmond Ferry Terminal, by Jeffrey Reed and Jennifer Madden; six 15-foot tall shimmery silver prongs depict bowed strands of eel grass — a critical and threatened part of San Francisco Bay’s ecology. A solar-powered visual feature can show native wildlife such as the fish that flit around the eel grass beds. Courtesy of artists
“Water Is Life, We Are Still Here,” (2021), Ookwe Park, at 27th Street and Richmond Parkway; 11 boulders carved by Berkeley artist Masayuki Nagase at an Ohlone shellmound. The “Ookwe,” project (the word means “healing” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language), features engravings of marine- and medicinal plants and other significant Native American icons. Credit: Maurice Tierney for Richmondside
‘Torque’ celebrates internal combustion engine, Native American culture
Torque — the engineering term for tension — refers to the twisting or rotational force produced by a crankshaft, essentially the “pulling power” that helps a vehicle accelerate to climb hills or tow a load.
And indeed Overhoff, who was interested in torsion, put some twists into his design. When viewed from Google Earth, “Torque’s” thick fan-like slabs of concrete, reinforced internally by steel, form an hourglass.
If you walk around it, it seems to move, and the brick-red colors of its ceramic tile feather details, designed by Heath in Sausalito, morph depending on the day, the light, the weather and the clouds, popping out vividly when skies are blue.
An art sculpture as large-scale as “Torque” may seem incongruous with the car dealerships and nearby shopping center, but the area was mostly undeveloped when it was built. Overhoff said in his documentary interview that he imagined that Native Americans might have used the spot to gaze toward the bay, noting that small arrowheads were discovered during its construction.
“The monumental tension between arrows and engines,” reads his foundation’s description of the artwork. “Auto Mall meets iconic art. Pushing the meaning of what could be a humdrum public space, ‘Torque’ juxtaposes a metaphor for the internal combustion engine with an homage to Native American history at the site.”
At the time, “Torque” was the largest concrete sculpture on the West Coast, and it was honored at the 12th International Sculpture Conference, receiving a national award from The Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute in Chicago.
As is often the case with unconventional public sculptures, opinions about it vary. When asked about it by Richmondside, former Richmond Mayor Tom Butt responded succinctly via email: “I think it’s ugly.”
One newspaper advertorial called “Torque” an “it” and didn’t mention Overhoff, while another article about a cost overrun quoted a Richmond city council member as saying “palm trees” could have as easily been planted there. (The story did note the artist’s net earnings were about 70 cents an hour.)
While beauty is subjective, many in the art and design world knew it was a work well ahead of its time.
Overhoff’s documentarian, Gasper Patrico, CEO and president of Intersection Studio in Los Angeles, said it must have been like seeing a “spaceship during Eisenhower’s time.”
“It was a time where art was being seen as part of communities,” Patrico told Richmondside. “There was an optimism about it. Civic life was ambitious to do great things. Jacques was working with some of the most celebrated landscape architects in the Bay Area and they would just figure out how to do stuff.”
Improving city art grants — what’s ahead
The city’s Arts and Culture website says the arts are “at the heart of Richmond’s identity, shaping vibrant and distinctive communities.”
“Arts and culture are fundamental to the quality of life enjoyed by our residents, whose broad cultural diversity and deep historical roots and contributions make Richmond so historically rich,” it states.
Decades ago Richmond’s public art program was among the first of its kind in the country, Seville said.
Its budget comes from a 1% to 1.5% fee paid by developers, depending on the type of project. Critics say the money isn’t getting spent year-to-year because the city isn’t issuing enough requests for proposals, and the application process is cumbersome.
Its leadership is in limbo following the October 2025 death of director, Winifred Day, and now a group of arts advocates is lobbying city leaders to make changes.
The recently established group, Richmond Arts Advocates along with members of Visual Artists of Richmond, say that since the 1987 creation of the Richmond Arts and Culture Commission, the city “has been a leader in the Bay Area in promoting and supporting public art,“ but in recent years there has been a decline in support for “local artists and their work,” pointing to the dismantling of the Public Art Advisory Committee.
In 2022 the city began public outreach to design a public art master plan, but now it’s not executing that plan, artists say, for example not maintaining existing public art.
The city risks losing more artists, art commissioners, and the trust of its residents if it neglects the issues, particularly the city’s Neighborhood Public Art program’s requirements, contracting process and reimbursement policy. Plus, city understaffing may slow down the art project bidding process.
“We have an excellent master plan, but we are not following recommendations that would help us maintain existing public art, increase resident access to the arts, and expand the number of artists who get funded,” the group wrote in a letter delivered at a Richmond City Council meeting last winter.
Most notably, they say, the process for artists to get city funding includes “very burdensome” insurance requirements and a requirement that artists front some of the money for projects, something that artists aren’t always being made aware of when they apply.
Artist and jewelry designer Kaelen Van Cura, a member of the Arts and Culture Commission since 2022, said when she got involved with city art projects she “quickly noticed some issues that could be working better,” particularly regarding the contracts, which she said are similar to those used in construction projects.
“I noticed we were losing people who had gotten grants because the city was asking them to front all costs,” Van Cura said. “One person had gotten 100K and they wanted this person to buy all of their sculpture supplies and then invoice the city. No mid-career artist could afford to do that.”
Van Cura, Seville and others started meeting with the city manager’s office last spring, and while they were encouraged to see some improvements, things were progressing slowly, so they brought their concerns to the Richmond City Council (see item at 5:34:40) in December to push the city harder.
The council agreed to involve them and the public in the hiring of Day’s successor and to streamline the grant process.
“Money isn’t being spent … not because there’s not a need but because there’s no way to access and no way to spend it,” Van Cura told Richmondside. The group points out that less than 10% of the city’s nearly $2 million Percent for Art Fund has been spent.
It seems like the city is listening. At the Richmond City Council meeting on Tuesday city staffers will give the council an update on addressing the artists’ concerns.
“Through ongoing dialogue with the arts community and the Richmond Arts and Culture Commission, the City is committed to improving transparency, accessibility, and effectiveness in the delivery of arts programs and public art projects,” said a staff report, which outlines 10 steps the city has already taken to help ease grant financial and administrative burdens.
Overhoff said she plans to brave the grant process for a second time, hoping to receive $10,000 to finally give visitors the amenities a visit to a work such “Torque” demands, including benches and interpretive features.
She’s also intent on building up her father’s foundation to preserve his legacy and his mission to “support imaginative public spaces designed to engage and celebrate communities.”
“By the time he passed away he knew his creative spirit would live on,” she said. “It’s a second chapter.”
