Snake Path: distant view looking west

Smith's work for the Stuart Collection, Snake Path, consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to the Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around a small "garden of Eden" with several fruit trees including a pomegranate. There is a marble bench with a quote from Thomas Gray: "Yet ah why should they know their fate/When sorrow never comes too late/And happiness too swiftly flies/Thought would destroy their Paradise/No more, where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise." The path then passes a monumental granite book carved with a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost. "And wilt thou not be loath to leave this Paradise, but shalt possess a Paradise within thee, happier far."

• 1992

• Stuart Collection (San Diego, Calif.)

• Smith, Alexis (American mixed-media and installation artist, born 1949)

• Beebe, Mary Livingstone (American, born 1940)

Geisel Library: University of California, San Diego; La Jolla, California, United States

cast-in-place concrete; slate tile; mosaic (process)

• University of California, San Diego

• Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost

• Allegories
• Allegory (artistic device)
• American
• Contemporary
• Eden
• Gardens
• History
• Installations (visual works)
• Landscape architecture
• Outdoor sculpture
• Public art
• Sculpture (visual work)
• Site-specific works
• Snakes
• Walkways
• Women artists

Point: 32.881044, -117.236759

• image

• No linguistic content; Not applicable

Architecture and City Planning

Garden and Landscape

Sculpture and Installations

• UC Regents

Under copyright (US)

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2026-05-12