The artist Maren Hassinger looked like she was ready to fly.<\/p>\n
Sitting on a wooden bench at the University of California Botanical Garden here, she was taking a moment to appreciate or maybe meditate on her newest sculpture: a 10-foot-tall pyramid made of interwoven redwood branches, set within a grove of mature oak trees. She was looking up at the blunt tip of the pyramid and the fog blanketing the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Birds chirped above and traffic hummed below. \u201cWe\u2019re so far away from the stress of the city,\u201d said the artist, 78, who was visiting from her home in Harlem for the installation. \u201cThis is really a wonderful place to sit and float.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then she stood up and made a surprisingly slow and regal flapping gesture.<\/p>\n
Busting a move is not uncommon for Hassinger, a dancer-turned-sculptor who has been performing in art galleries and of bringing a sense of motion to her abstract artworks for more than 50 years. \u201cI see the suggestion of movement in everything I make,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
That is the theme of her new retrospective, \u201cMaren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing,<\/a>\u201d organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, just downhill from the gardens. It is her biggest exhibition to date, spanning her career.<\/p>\n It features a mix of sculpture (including the off-site pyramid), performance videos and photographs and large-scale installations recreated for the occasion.<\/p>\n \u201cI kept seeing her work piece by piece\u201d in different museum collections, said Margot Norton, the museum\u2019s chief curator. \u201cI felt there was a larger story to tell, about how her performance informs her sculpture practice, which informs her performance.\u201d<\/p>\n The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n Norton and her co-curator Anthony Graham are also attempting to distinguish the artist from her collaborators in Studio Z, a loosely-knit group of experimental Black artists who energized the Los Angeles art scene of the 1970s <\/strong>with unconventional performances, often in unexpected or urban places such as freeway underpasses. The group included Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, and Ulysses Jenkins.<\/p>\n Hassinger is often lauded as Nengudi\u2019s longtime collaborator<\/a>, but the curators are trying to bump her up from a supporting to leading actor category. Some recent recognition\u2014such as the Getty\u2019s acquisition of her archives in 2023\u2014helps. Raised in Los Angeles, Hassinger planned to study dance when she enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont in 1965. But teachers told her she didn\u2019t have what it takes, steering her away from the major. \u201cI was taking classes every week, but apparently the other students were taking classes every day since they were 5,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n Encouraged by a sculpture professor, she ended up studying art in college and earning an M.F.A. at U.C.L.A. There, officially part of a fiber arts program, she discovered industrial wire rope as a material stiff enough to stand up but supple enough to shape. \u201cShe can take something hard and make it feel soft or growing or alive,\u201d Norton pointed out.<\/p>\n The show begins with some of her earliest wall sculptures from the 1970s, including one that positions an actual tree branch above two lengths of undulating wire rope. \u201cThe river is flowing under the tree,\u201d she said, stopping in front of the work, which has the economy of a haiku.<\/p>\n More expansive installations follow, such as a field of wood dowels tilting at the same angle, like \u201creeds in the wind,\u201d she said. A collection of knee-high bundles of wire rope, which she unraveled at the top and bottom into spiky clusters, vaguely resembles tumbleweed. A wall covered with inflated pink plastic bags adds a shock of color and sense of levity\u2014 \u201cnot every artist would use pink because it\u2019s so girly-girly,\u201d Hassinger said.<\/p>\n Videos from the \u201970s document her collaborative dance performances, while those made in the aughts, when she ran the sculpture school at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), explicitly confront racism and other social issues.<\/p>\n \u201cYou tend to make things inspired by what\u2019s around you,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was a lot of racism in Baltimore. \u201cThe video \u201cLegacy,\u201d from 2006, is particularly bold, listing in white type on the black screen a litany of African American inheritances, from \u201cpeanut butter\u201d and \u201cyams\u201d to \u201chopelessness\u201d and \u201cpolice violence.\u201d<\/p>\n The final gallery includes a new version of her 2008 installation, \u201cWrenching News.\u201d<\/a> Conceived in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it consists of ropes made out of twisted and knotted newspaper strips that cascade down the wall, and it will grow during the course of the show. Hassinger led a workshop with volunteers, her take on a sewing circle, to make the first set of newsprint ropes in early June. A local artist will lead a community workshop<\/a> every month the show is open to make more for the gallery.<\/p>\n About her use of twisting forms, associated with both the natural world and post-minimal sculpture, Hassinger offered, \u201cMaybe it has to do with umbilical cords. Something we were all connected to.\u201d<\/p>\n But she rejected a suggestion that her ropes look like hair, and she doesn\u2019t like to linger in the interpretive or metaphoric realm for long. \u201cReally,\u201d she added, \u201cthe twisting is a way to make material stronger. It turns everyday materials into something you can build with.\u201d<\/p>\n The offsite pyramid was made from eight truckloads of redwood branches that a team of volunteers wove together, the first layer tucked into a hidden steel armature covered with chicken wire. No trees were harmed in the process; coastal redwood trees naturally shed their lowest limbs as they grow.<\/p>\n