Art with a point

Mark Alden Branch ’86

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The newest work of art in the Art Gallery’s sculpture garden—on view through the rest of the academic year—is a ten-foot-tall pyramid fashioned from tree limbs set on a metal frame (left). But the way it was built is as much a part of the art as the finished product. Sculptor Maren Hassinger first conceived Monument (Pyramid) in 2022. When the Gallery acquired the piece last year, Hassinger worked with a host of people in New Haven to create this version. The limbs were provided by museum staff and other volunteers who had gathered them as part of a project to remove invasive buckthorn trees from New Haven’s Quinnipiac Meadows Eugene B. Fargeorge Preserve, and the sculpture was assembled by Hassinger’s studio with help from museum staff and a class of first-year Yale College students. Such participation is central to Hassinger’s work. “If people changed their minds about one another,” she said, “if people decided they could work with each other . . . together we could build a world strong and lasting.”