Maren Hassinger Sculpture

UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, Oak Knoll
On view through November 29, 2026
Daily 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Free with Garden Admission
(Closed on Tuesdays)

The UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley (UCBG) is pleased to partner with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in the creation and presentation of Monument (Pyramid) by Maren Hassinger. Built collaboratively using fallen branches from the Garden’s Mather Redwood Grove, the ten-foot-tall sculpture is on view now at the Garden. It is part of the exhibition Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing—the artist’s largest retrospective, on view at BAMPFA from June 6–November 29, 2026.

Since the early 1970s, Maren Hassinger has worked across sculpture, performance, video, and installation to illuminate the deeply interconnected relationships between humans and the natural world. Monument (Pyramid) is a site-specific sculpture constructed anew in each location where it is shown, built using locally sourced sticks and with local communities. This iteration at the University of California Botanical Garden, sources sticks from coast redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Garden’s five-acre Stephen T. Mather Redwood Grove. The collaborative production of the monument is to forge community around the environments we share, rather than that which divides us. The large-scale sculpture resulting from this collective action captures the possibility of our creative engagement with the natural world, standing in contrast to histories of environmental degradation. Additionally, the Garden supplied branch material for multiple sculptures that are on view in the galleries at BAMPFA.

Maren Hassinger Monument (Pyramid), 2022/2026, redwood sticks and metal

To recreate Monument (Pyramid) at the UC Botanical Garden, the framework was deconstructed, transported across the country from its original Yale University location, and reassembled onsite by a collaborative team from BAMPFA and the Garden. Months earlier, staff, volunteers, and UC Berkeley students, collected hundreds of fallen branches from the Mather Redwood Grove—a natural occurrence for the lower branches of coast redwoods. These branches were moved to the installation site on the Oak Knoll. In collaboration with Hassinger’s studio and BAMPFA art preparators, around 35 Garden volunteers spent two weeks sorting and weaving them onto the framework to form the ten-foot-tall pyramid. The material and installation location, including pyramidal echoes in views of the Golden Gate Bridge, creates a uniquely California version of the work.

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles; lives and works in New York) has built an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored such subjects as movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling them to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting them in cement to create an industrial garden. Within the past five years Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee; the Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Bridgehampton, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Rockefeller Foundation, Tarrytown, New York; and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger was recently honored with an exhibition focused on her collaborative performance work with Senga Nengudi at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, that traveled to the Columbus Museum of Art at the Pizzuti, Ohio (2024), as well as a two-person survey alongside Nengudi at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Spain (2025). Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.