Student Art Placed at Forefront in Mass Hall

Just over a year ago, stately 19th- and early 20th-century paintings from Harvard’s massive art collection adorned the walls of the main corridor in Massachusetts Hall. Recently, this hallway, which bustles with the traffic of the University’s top administrators and professors, has been decorated with the artwork of current students. In an effort to inject a contemporary feel into the high-profile space and to increase the visibility of student art at Harvard, University President Drew G. Faust welcomed the work of student artists to Mass Hall on February 5.

The exhibition, which features the creations of 22 students in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, showcases the artistic diversity of Harvard’s undergraduate population.

“We wanted to give a sense of the range of approaches that students in the VES Department take to art,” says Virginia Anderson, assistant curator of American art at the Harvard Art Museum and curator of the Mass Hall exhibit. “We hoped to display their work in a very public place.”

At the hallway entrance, two strategically positioned mirrors refract light from a bent-wire sculpture glistening with museum wax, a substance that drips so slowly that changes to the work are barely noticeable until the next day. This installation gives the illusion of visual dynamism without physical movement.

“The piece is in infinite, continuous flux,” says artist Sara J. Stern ’12, who tailored her work specifically to the space. “Transparency, reflection, shadow, and light are all central to [the piece].”

Directly across from this sculpture, an enormous charcoal-on-paper piece utilizes traditional sketching and shadowing techniques to capture the versatility of human movement within the artistic confines of a linear plane. A few steps down the corridor reveal equally fascinating creations, from faces with penetrating expressions illuminated against silkscreen backdrops to eight colorful digital animations looping on a video projector. One of the standouts is “Do Rivers” by David L. Rice ’10—a black pen on white scroll paper creation that utilized modern animation techniques to convey what Rice describes as “a sense of restlessness seeking peace, a feeling of being always in the midst of roiling phenomena but sensing, out of this storm, a glimmer of quiet, a possible calming unity.”

“Given the extraordinary diversity of the work displayed,” Anderson says, “what unifies the collection is that there is a compelling quality to every piece. You keep thinking about each of [them] even after you have left Mass Hall.” Indeed, each artist employed a unique approach to attracting and holding attention: one student accented a predominantly grayscale portrait with bold green and orange brushstrokes, while another’s imaginative use of materials one might find in a neglected dormitory corner—masking tape, paper towels, red thread, and even human hair—created a hypnotizing, organic mixed media image.

The inspiration for the students’ work was often rooted in their everyday experiences as residents of the Cambridge and Boston areas. Emily C. Milam ’10 was on a bike ride down Cambridge Street when she took a snapshot of an interesting intersection in space between a railroad crossing and a flock of birds flying in a perpendicular trajectory.

Snoweria Y.K. Zhang ’12, whose digital photography piece captured a little girl’s bored yet pensive expression on a Boston subway, describes the simple story behind her work: “It was pretty fortuitous—I was on the T with my camera, and I thought the scene in front of me would be a good picture, so I took it.”

The newfound focus on bringing student art to the forefront of campus life is due in large part to the work of the University-wide Task Force on the Arts, whose December 2008 report included a recommendation that more spaces on campus be dedicated to the arts in addition to broader suggestions for arts-oriented curricular and instructional changes.

“We are looking for spaces throughout the campus where we can showcase students’ talent and artistic energy. For me, daily encounters with the student work in Mass Hall have been a welcome reminder of the artistic vitality at Harvard,” says President Drew G. Faust, who initiated the creation of the Task Force in Fall 2007.

Kayla A. Escobedo ’12—whose acrylic-on-masonite piece “Leda and the Swan” is an abstract, textured interpretation of William Yeats’ poem of the same name—commented on the University’s recent focus on the arts: “I think what President Faust and the College have been doing for the arts is fantastic, and I deeply appreciate the obvious sincerity involved. President Faust showed genuine interest in the students and their work at the opening reception for the exhibition.”

“This push for the arts… is about validating the arts at Harvard as an important part of what the University produces. The Mass Hall exhibit affirms that by putting art in the nucleus of the University,” says Timothy J. Reckart ’09, whose stop-motion animated film “Token Hunchback” in Mass Hall encourages viewers to think about the “ethical status of entertainment careers built on the display of disability,” Reckart says.

While the names of these student artists may not yield Wikipedia search results quite as impressive as those of the 19th century artists whose paintings once graced the Mass Hall corridor, their ingenious, meticulously executed work adds new vigor to the administrative heart of the college.