Mark di Suvero's Mamma Mobius — a Möbius strip-inspired sculpture in orange-red steel — has been permanently installed on UC Berkeley's Crescent Lawn by BAMPFA, joining a Calder and a Pomodoro in what is quietly becoming an outdoor museum along Oxford Street.

On the west edge of UC Berkeley's campus, where Oxford Street runs past the Crescent Lawn and the Berkeley street grid gives way to university grounds, a large orange-red sculpture in looping curved steel has settled permanently into the grass.

The work is Mamma Mobius (2018), by Mark di Suvero — one of the most widely exhibited American sculptors of the postwar era, now 92, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. BAMPFA issued a press release on April 14 announcing the acquisition; the news also appeared via Berkeleyside in content commissioned and paid for by the museum. BAMPFA acquired the piece directly from di Suvero, according to the press release, with funding from a donor consortium that included the Fisher Family, The Lipman Family Foundation, The Alex Katz Foundation, and Robert Stobo.

The form draws from the Möbius strip, the mathematical surface with a single continuous edge. Di Suvero renders it in sweeping curved steel — dense and open swirls in his signature orange-red — a departure, per BAMPFA, from the more hard-edged monumental work for which he is best known.

His connection to this campus is not incidental. Born Marco Polo di Suvero in Shanghai in 1933, the son of an Italian naval attaché and his wife — both strongly anti-Fascist, according to the biographical record — the family fled in early 1941, arriving in San Francisco. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from UC Berkeley in 1957 and has lived in the North Bay for many years. BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, in the press release: "With Mamma Mobius, he returns to the university where his artistic journey began nearly seventy years ago."

Mamma Mobius is the third BAMPFA work installed on Crescent Lawn. It joins Alexander Calder's The Hawk for Peace — a steel stabile from 1968, 13 feet high and 23 feet long, donated in memory of a Berkeley alumnus from the class of 1916, which returned to the lawn in 2022 after conservation — and Arnaldo Pomodoro's Sphere Within a Sphere (1969), a bronze globe that previously stood outside BAMPFA's former home on Bancroft Way.

Three works, three internationally significant sculptors, on a lawn most people cross on the way somewhere else. The stretch of Oxford Street past Crescent Lawn — where commuters move between Center Street and campus, where the city ends and the university begins — is now, without a sign announcing it, something close to an outdoor museum. Anyone walking that route will find it: the looping form of Mamma Mobius, two stories of orange-red steel, at the campus edge where the sidewalk runs.