This week's installment of the "Berkeley Photo Mystery" is the second of a ten-part series of mosaics photographed by Barbara Wilcox. No one was able to guess the location of the mosaic based on the detail, despite the distinctive plant portrayed in the photograph.
Wilcox reveals the answer to the mystery in the comments field of this article - http://patch.com/A-hcBj - and also provides a second photo that shows the entire mosaic.
In her answer, Wilcox tells us more about the mosaic:
It's Howard Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, soon to become a rehearsal space for the Music Department. This mosaic of the Muses was done by Helen Bruton in 1936 to spiffy up the 1904 John Galen Howard building - Cal's original power plant - for use as an art gallery. Weirdly, the sculptor in the mosaic looks as if he's working on a maquette of what would become Howard Hall's replacement, the concrete University Art Museum on Bancroft. The model for the man was Howard's son. The companion mosaic on the other side of the doorway is by Florence Alston Smith.
A transcript of an interview with Bruton is available here.
