Beasley has been an itinerant and brilliant tinkerer since boyhood. He built hot rods as a teen, attended the Ivy League Dartmouth College, where he intended to study rocket engineering but discovered his calling was sculpture, so the young Beasley transferred to University of California, Berkeley, one of the few strong sculpture programs in the early 1960s. His success and professional career began while he was still an undergraduate when the work Tree House was selected for the ground breaking and art historically acclaimed Art of Assemblage show at the renowned Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961, with renown artists, like Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

On graduation, Beasley immediately set up a professional artistic practice in a blighted, mostly African-American Oakland neighborhood, where he purchased and renovated a dilapidated warehouse, became a neighborhood activist, helped to organize street trees, lights, curbs and a low cost medical clinic. For nearly six decades, Bruce Beasley has lived in that same Oakland neighborhood, building an impressive, state of the art, multi-structure live-work space. Today, the Beasley compound includes a lovely home designed by the artist, filled with a museum-quality collection of Asian and non-Western art. The flowered grounds, fountain, sumptuous sculpture garden and contemporary “museum” building, also designed by Beasley, are the site of curator and public visits, and will eventually become the home of The Bruce Beasley Foundation.