New Engineering building art provides great “Opticks”

Acclaimed artist Beth Nybeck has proven mettle, and she’s brought it to Rowan in a huge, contemplative work of metal.

The piece, a freestanding 23’ by 14’ by 16’ sculpture dubbed “Opticks,” has been installed on the grounds outside the soon-to-open second building for the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering.

Named for the book Opticks, a 1704 treatise on the effects of light by Isaac Newton, the stainless steel and aluminum figure represents a human head, a design intended to reflect the ever-changing quest for, and acquisition of, knowledge.

“A lot of my work over the last three years has had an interactive quality,” said Nybeck, a Kansas City, Mo.-based artist whose works are installed at venues across America, including one in Newark.

She designed “Opticks,” which is framed in stainless tubing and partly clad with aluminum panels, so viewers – students, faculty, staff, the public at large – can walk up and into it.

Nybeck said she studied Rowan, in particular the College of Engineering, in formulating her design.

“All of my projects are site specific,” she said. “I researched the space, the history, the students, what is most important to the college and what speaks highly of them. For this project I wanted to collaborate with students and professors in the making of the piece.”

The result: aluminum panels that partially clad the geometric head’s surfaces are literally etched with equations and notes from Rowan students and faculty. To achieve this effect, Nybeck scanned hand-written materials into a computer and used a laser cutting tool to reproduce them on the metal sheets.

Nybeck said the sculpture was designed to let light and air pass through but also to represent the flowing, ever-changing nature of thought.

“The overall theme is the idea of intellect being shaped or formed,” she said. “The College of Engineering has various disciplines but all seem to work toward something being built or created. I thought a lot about how, in the early stages of this building, you could see its bones, its skeleton. And then I thought about what it would look like if you took the idea of bones and foundations and correlated it to intellect.”

The CoE, which graduated its first class in 2000, has rapidly expanded and developed a national reputation for excellence. In the latest ranking by U.S. News & World Report, released in September, the college placed #22 out of more than 200 schools nationwide where the highest degree offered is a bachelor’s or master’s degree, a six-place improvement over its 2016 ranking and a 12-place improvement over the last two years.

Scheduled to open in January, the building is a $71 million, three-story, 90,500-square-foot addition to Rowan Hall. Its innovative design features an enclosed skywalk to the current building and will enable the college to double enrollment.

Public art such as Nybeck’s piece at new state buildings are required under New Jersey law and funded by a set aside of a small percentage of the cost of construction.

Nybeck, 29, who does much of her work in a converted old firehouse in Kansas City, holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the University of Northern Iowa where she learned to weld and use metals as a medium.

“Welding is a great field, you’re always able to find work,” she said. “But I never really entertained the idea of using it as a back-up plan. I was pretty headstrong about making it as an artist.”