No great fall, just a big move for 2 Eggheads

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Workers from Ship Art International use a gantry to hoist one of the Eggheads.
Workers from Ship Art International use a gantry to hoist one of the Eggheads.

Humpty Dumpty, or, in this case, a pair of Robert Arneson Eggheads, sat on a wall, or, in this case, a pair of lawn-covered mounds in front of King Hall, home of the School of Law.

The Eggheads, unlike Humpty Dumpty, did not have a great fall -- thanks to precision work by a crew from Ship Art International of South San Francisco.

The university hired Ship Art to remove the Eggheads to make way for the law school's $24 million expansion.

First, Ship Art wrapped the Eggheads in plastic. Then the crew attached straps to the Eggheads and brought in a gantry. The crew lowered each Egghead onto a specially made platform with wheels, rolled the platforms down to Mrak Hall Drive and then put the sculptures in special crates.

The Eggheads will be stored on campus pending their move to the traffic circle between the law school and Mrak Hall. Before that happens, the university plans to construct two new mounds for the Eggheads and relandscape the traffic circle.

The new design will give roughly half of the circle to the Eggheads and their grass mounds, and the other half to a more woodsy look, with two trees, to complement the nearby arboretum.

These two Eggheads comprise an installation titled See No Evil, Hear No Evil. They are two of seven Eggheads that Arneson crafted for the campus where he joined the art faculty in 1962. The Eggheads were among the last works that he completed before his death in 1992.

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Dave Jones, Dateline, 530-752-6556, dljones@ucdavis.edu

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