By Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle

As BART heads south past the Coliseum, the bare torso of a woman takes shape on the horizon. She keeps taking shape, and by the time the train stops at downtown San Leandro she is fully formed and on her toes like a ballet dancer, back arched, arms reaching to the sky.

She rises from the dirt of a construction zone and doesn’t stop rising until her hands meet at the sixth and top floor of the building that is at her side.

“That thing is massive,” says Marcus Stevenson, 22, who is seeing it for the first time after riding in from San Francisco, past the junkyards and vacant lots. “It’s really beautiful and a lot better than what was here before, which was nothing.”

The sculpture, by Marco Cochrane is named “Truth Is Beauty,” and any Burning Man regular has seen her standing out on the Playa. But she won’t be back to Black Rock because she has been leased with an option to purchase by the developer of the new San Leandro Tech Campus.