Rumi

Mark di Suvero’s sculpture, Rumi, celebrates industrial construction, through its use of steel I-beams and the orange paint of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The work is named for Jala al-Din Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and spiritual leader whose writings inspired Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. Some adherents of this religious order worship God in trance-like dances and are often called Whirling Dervishes. The dynamic form of the sculpture suggests their ecstatic movement. Di Suvero says: “One of the things I try to do, is to be multicultural. The effort in unifying the cultures of the world is one of the…major forces of the 21st-century.”