Bruce Beasley American, b. 1939

Beasley grew up in Los Angeles and attended Dartmouth College to study Aerospace Engineering. He quickly discovered that art was his passion and transferred to UC Berkeley to study abstract sculpture. In 1961, while Beasley was still an undergrad, his sculpture was included in the paradigm-shifting exhibition, Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, where his work was shown alongside the works of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. That was a meteoric beginning to his remarkable 6 decade-long career that has placed him amidst the top sculptors of his time. Among his many achievements, Beasley, assisted by his friend and late Nobel recipient Donald A. Glaser, was one of the first sculptors to use computer assisted design (CAD) in the conception of his work; the artist helped to design and build one of the first 3-D printers for fine arts sculpture, and discovered a method for large scale crystal-clear acrylic casting that continues to be used by NASA today. In 1992, the Oakland Museum of Art hosted a 30-year retrospective of his works and again in 2005 celebrating his 45-year retrospective. In 2021-2022, Beasley was honored with a 60-year retrospective of outdoor and museum-scaled works held at the 42-acre Grounds for Sculpture, in New Jersey. Beasley has an extensive international exhibition history, more than 50 public commissions and can be found in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums around the world. Since his graduation from Berkeley, Beasley has made Oakland his home and the site of his studio compound. Alongside his professional artistic practice, he has devoted himself to the betterment of the city of Oakland and Bay Area as a social activist and community leader.

Throughout his long career, Beasley has garnered global attention as an innovator whose work is a confluence of fine art, technology and aesthetics. In keeping with his life-long curiosity of technology as a creative means, Beasley employed virtual reality as the origin and inspiration for the works featured in this exhibition. In 2018, Beasley was invited to the acclaimed Pangolin Foundry to investigate the applications of virtual reality for abstract sculpture. "They knew of my career-long pursuit of tools to enhance the exploration of expressive shape, so VR as a shape-making tool was intriguing. I can stand in a space and gesture directly with my hand, the way an Abstract Expressionist might with a brush, and save the gestures as digital information. The organic and sweeping gestures in my Aurai collages and Aeolis sculptures achieve a sense of momentum I wanted to express. VR made it possible.”