Outdoor Sculpture Department: Olmec Head
The Outdoor Sculpture team during surface cleaning of El Rey, 2004.
This monumental Olmec head, “El Rey,” was presented in 2004 to the City College of San Francisco by the Honorable Miguel Aleman Velazco of Mexico in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Our long time partners Atthowe Fine Art Services moved the sculpture in 2025 and reinstalled it with seismically secure mounting, after which Preservation Arts was brought on to clean and treat the piece.
While produced in 2004, it is actually a hand carved copy of the San Lorenzo Colossal Head, which is installed outside of the Museo de Antropología in Xalapa, Mexico. While ancient Olmec heads were typically sculpted from basalt, “El Rey” has been sculpted from a gray colored tuff, a type of igneous stone formed from lithified volcanic ash that varies in porosity and often has large inclusions. The sculpture appears to have been formed from a single block of stone, tooled to shape, and then detail was sculpted, and the inclusions inherent in the material grew to be more visible as natural weathering wore away at the object’s coating. Treatment included surface cleaning, reducing biological growth, removing old fill materials, filling losses with a more sympathetic material, visually integrating large inclusions and new fills, and applying a water repellent coating.
Before and during treatment.
