Features

Community members are invited to join Berkeley Civic Arts Commission (CAC) Chair David Snippen for a Sunday afternoon tour and discussion of the proposed location for Spaceship Earth. 

The gathering is a preview to the Parks and Recreation Commission’s Monday meeting which could result in a final decision to locate the artwork in Ohlone Park. 

The sculpture, a massive sphere of bronze-bedecked blue Brazilian quartzite plus a life-size statue of the late Berkeley-born environmentalist David Brower, has been in search of a new home for months. 

Sunday’s gathering will occur at 4 p.m. opposite the softball fields at the southern edge of Ohlone Park near Sacramento Street. 

Mayor Tom Bates has been an outspoken advocate for the sculpture that has received at best a lukewarm response in the community. 

After the Waterfront Commission rejected the mayor’s favored site in the Berkeley Marina, the 350,000-pound creation of Finno-American sculptor Eino was dropped into the lap of the Parks and Recreation Commission, which will vote on the proposed site in Ohlone Park Monday night. 

The cerulean craft and its passenger of “Spaceship Earth” was commissioned by Power Bar founders Brian and Jennifer Maxwell before the former’s death last year. 

The Maxwells originally intended that the weighty work would be installed in San Francisco, and they enlisted some supporters on the Board of Supervisors to plead their case. 

But the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Visual Arts Committee saw things differently, rejecting the piece as “extremely grand and flamboyant” and lacking in “sensitivity to environmental issues.” 

They next turned to Berkeley, and Mayor Bates welcomed it as a friend of both Brower and the Maxwells. 

Considerable opposition greeted the mayor’s invitation, and the work as originally conceived with a life-size bronze Brower perched on the globe and reaching for the stars impressed some as the embodiment of the image of the imperialist urge. 

Eino and the Maxwells agreed to relocate Brower next to the sphere. 

If all goes as planned “Spaceship Earth,” a phrase popularized by inventor and visionary Buckminster Fulller—who hated weighty creations—will be one of two massive memorials to the environmentalist. 

The second, the proposed Brower Center at Allston Way and Fulton Street, will be five stories high. That memorial is currently near the end of the city approval process. 

The arts commission began with a list of 30 potential sites. UC Berkeley nixed sites in Tilden Park and near the Lawrence Hall of Science and others fell by the wayside. 

One by the alternatives were rejected, leaving only the Ohlone Park site. 

The Parks and Recreation Commission will hold their hearing on the siting at their regular meeting Monday starting at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.