The Downtown Public Library’s signature public artwork is Christian Moeller’s Shh….Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray.

About this Mural

In Shh….Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray, Moeller considered the library setting for his conceptual inspiration. He chose books for the medium, and arranged them in pixelated fashion. Today a library is a repository of books as well as a source of digitized information. Because of its large scale, the “portrait” may be difficult to interpret at first glance. But squint, or better yet, take a photo with a cell phone, and the iconic and clichéd library image will pop out. Librarians do not like it.

About the Artist

Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1963, Christian Moeller studied architecture at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He went on to work in a Stuttgart architecture office and served as a guest artist in the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt.

In 1990 he founded his own studio and media laboratory as well as heading a research institute in Linz, Austria, and he joined the faculty at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He moved to the United States in 2001. Currently he is chair of UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts and operates his studio in the Hollywood Hills.

During the 1990s he made the transition from architecture to designing events. In large scale site-specific works, he explores the synergies between architecture and sound, technology and moving image. He works with contemporary media technologies to produce innovative and intense physical responses, created from objects the size of a hand to large-scale architectural installations. Today his public art installations are found in the United States, Europe and Asia. 

Moeller has used pixels in several large-scale works in Northern California. Hands, at Mineta San Jose International Airport, is created with vinyl chips on chain link fence. It covers the entire side of a parking garage. The Baggage Handlers depicts the faces of airport operation workers on two 75-foot panels in the check-in area of Sacramento International Airport.

Moeller is just as likely to use plywood, Pellegrino bottles, LED lights, vinyl chips, sound, robotics or chain link fencing as paint or steel.

Location: At the east entrance in the Downtown Walnut Creek Public Library at Civic Park at 1644 North Broadway, Walnut Creek, CA

Image Credit: Christian Moeller, Shh…..Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray, 2010, 3,960 books and powder-coated steel. Photo courtesy of Shaun Roberts.