JOHN PAYNE, popular metal artist and owner of the wedge on the river front just passed away today at 10.30 am at Mission Hospital. ”Between Roberts Street and a set of railroad tracks is the Wedge Building, a renovated produce warehouse, where two dozen or so artists currently toil. The Wedge’s owner is John Payne, a gaunt man of 58 with a tidy white goatee and hair the color of old piano keys. “I make marionettes,” he told me one afternoon. Given the scale of Payne’s puppets, that would be like Robert Smithson, the creator of “Spiral Jetty,” saying, “I fool around with dirt.” Payne led me down to the far end of his studio, where a steel crow the size of a Piper Cub was balanced on a perch made of flagpole-gauge brass tubing. It had a head like a sharpened watermelon, eyes of a cold, hostile cast and a 16-foot wingspan feathered with black steel mesh.” from the NYT.
The Wedge Brewing Co.will have its Grand Opening Saturday, and it will be, in part, a celebration of John and his legacy. The Wedge will continue.
