Music and Geometry

A showpiece of outdoor sculpture: Going Around the Corner with X, created and donated by world-renowned artist Fletcher Benton. Its new permanent home is outside the de Saisset Museum.
Sculpture has never been about illusion the way a painting creates a virtual space. Rather, it inhabits an intimate spot between sight and touch, movement and stillness, melody and math. That’s perhaps why renowned Bay Area sculptor Fletcher Benton—whose work now graces the Mission Campus—has described his work in terms of music.

Benton’s Going Around the Corner with X arrived on campus in 2013 as part of the traveling exhibit Fletcher Benton: The Artist’s Studio. Donated by the artist with assistance from Paula Kirkeby in honor of William Rewak, S.J., the steel sculpture now has its permanent home in front of the de Saisset Museum—which this year celebrated its 60th anniversary. The sculpture also inaugurated an expanding outdoor sculpture collection for the museum.

Benton arranged geometrical forms to evoke a response the way music might at first hearing: “If you were to say, ‘I don’t know what I like about it, it just makes me feel good,’ you have said to me what I have tried to give you,” he says. In recognition of his innovative work, his risk-taking, and his educational contributions, Benton received an honorary degree from SCU in 2015.

More on the museum website: scu.edu/desaisset