PUBLIC ART: Bruce’s Beach artwork selected in a last minute flip
by Mark McDermott Toni Scott’s proposed artwork for Bruce’s Beach had the feel of inevitability. Not only within the City of Manhattan Beach’s extensive selection process, but the narrative arc of the work itself, and how it came to be. Both the Arts in Public Places Committee and the Cultural Arts Commission had recommended her proposal, “Unity: Circle of Memory,” an eight-foot bronze female figure lifting a circle overhead to frame a view of the ocean. Staff had also recommended the work. And then there was the matter of her bloodline: Scott is family to the Bruce family of Bruce’s Beach. Her great-great grandfather, S.B.W. May, owned investment property in Manhattan Beach in the 1920s. Her grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts and uncles all visited Bruce’s Beach during its heyday. She had planned to interview her cousins Marcus and Derrick Bruce at their mother’s funeral — Aunt Theresa, who was married to Bernard Bruce, was also Scott’s godmother — to document the family’s history on camera. The figure she designed was, in a sense, Willa Bruce herself. “I thought about Willa,” Scott said Wednesday, “and I said, I wonder how she felt when they first came to the beach. I bet her…
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