In 1989, SFAI graduate student Mark Brest van Kempen won a national public art competition for his installation honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (1964) at UC Berkeley. Brest van Kempen’s piece, installed in the university’s Sproul Plaza and titled Column of Earth and Air, consists of a “six-inch column of land and airspace” in a “circle of soil on campus declared an independent nation” extending from the center of the Earth to sixty thousand feet into the atmosphere. The granite ring surrounding this invisible column is inscribed “This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”
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