36


just an epiphany for me.” That was when he knew he had to be a sculptor.


Beasley transferred to UC Berkeley in 1959. At that time Berkeley was one of only two colleges that had more than one sculptor on the faculty. His earliest work at Berkeley was made of broken pieces of cast iron. A year later, one of these sculptures was picked by NY’s Museum of Modern Art to be included in the seminal exhibition ‘The Art of Assemblage’.


That year


the museum also bought one of his sculptures, making him the youngest artist ever to be in the museum’s permanent collection.


At Berkeley, Beasley was part of the burgeoning artist foundry movement. Peter Voulkos had just joined the faculty and there was lots of energy and innovation going on. Beasley realized the found-object imagery was limited and he began casting aluminum from sliced and broken Styrofoam shapes. Eschewing a career as a professor, Beasley decided not to go on to graduate school. “You are throwing away a great career”, said the head of the department.


He built his own foundry in a dilapidated


industrial building in West Oakland. During the following year he was selected to be part of the American contingent for the 1963 Biennale de Paris, where he won the purchase prize.


In 1968, he found himself dreaming of transparent sculptures.


the idea of seeing the front and back side of a sculpture at the same time,” says Beasley. He


“I was fascinated by


was successful in creating small transparent sculptures in cast acrylic but experts at DuPont and Rohm & Hass were convinced that it was impossible to do castings as large as Beasley envisioned. That year, the State of California invited Beasley to participate in a competition for a monumental sculpture for the state.


At


first, the jury was unaware that Beasley was experimenting with transparency as a sculptural medium and invited him based on his work in cast metal. Beasley was determined to pursue transparency and proposed a monumental cast acrylic sculpture. Upon seeing Beasley’s proposal, they questioned the sculptor about its viability. He convinced them that creating what he envisioned was no problem, but privately knew that he would have to invent a new process, which he succeeded in doing. His


proposal for ‘Apolymon’, a transparent


sculpture in cast acrylic, won. He installed the piece in Sacramento in 1970.


In 1974, members of the undersea research community approached Beasley to see if he could adapt his technique to cast transparent bathyspheres for undersea exploration. Excited by the idea of using the process he invented to take man’s eyes to the bottom of the sea, he succeeded in creating the bathyspheres for Johnson Sea Link submersibles for Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. It was these submersibles that were deployed to locate the crew compartment on the bottom of the ocean after the space shuttle Challenger exploded upon liftoff in 1986. The bathyspheres are currently in use monitoring the recovery of the


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