Mining Circle sculpture finds a permanent home on campus

BERKELEY

Sculptor Bruce Beasley, with his piece Rondo II, before Mondays ceremony formally accepting the piece as a gift to BAM/PFA. (NewsCenter photo by Peg Skorpinski)

A cold winter wind couldnt defeat the warm feelings Monday afternoon as sculptor and alumnus Bruce Beasleys Rondo II sculpture was formally accepted as a permanent part of the UC Berkeley landscape.

Im thrilled its going to stay here, said Beasley, a 1962 graduate of world renown whos works are in museums worldwide. It feels like it belongs here.

Here is in the round pool at the center of the Mining Circle in front of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, where the sculpture was installed early in the summer, one of five from Beasleys Rondo series that the artist brought to campus as an outdoor gallery show.

Invisible underwater struts hold the sculpture just at the water level, giving its intertwined stainless steel rings the appearance of dancing on the surface.

Physics professor Frances Hellman was so taken with the Mining Circle sculpture that she and her husband, engineer and artist Warren Breslau, made a gift of it to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

We have public art, but not enough of it, said Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer in formally accepting the gift Monday. So much of what we do on a university campus is a matter of leading with our minds; art makes us lead with our feelings, and then ask: Why?

Breslauer announced that the sculpture was being dedicated to the late Donald Glaser, who joined Berkeleys physics department as a professor in 1959 and won the Nobel Prize for his advances in particle-physics research. Glasers widow, Lynn, was on hand for the ceremony. Beasley was close to Glaser, Breslauer said.

Bruce Beasley with Lynn Glaser, widow of the late Berkeley physicist Donald Glaser, to whom the sculpture is dedicated. (NewsCenter photo by Peg Skorpinski)

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Mining Circle sculpture finds a permanent home on campus