With Public Art, Students Think Outside the Gallery

This weekend, several artists will challenge the expectation that art belongs in galleries by presenting their outdoor work, created with funding from the Office for the Arts, all over the Yard. Four pieces of artwork will be displayed in public spaces Friday through Sunday in an effort to explore the possibilities of public art and as part of the Arts First festival. The pieces, which were contributed by Harvard graduate and undergraduate students, were funded by grants from the Office for the Arts.

The pieces are “59801,” by Antonio César Méndez, a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; “The Churning Mind,” by Ashleigh Cote ’15; “Exquisite Portraits: A Drawing Game in the Yard,” by Graduate School of Education students Shawn M. Lavoie and Wilhelmina Peragine; and “Hashtag,” a project that displays 50 different “hashtags” throughout the Yard. This last project was created by the Harvard Generalist, a recently founded student-driven arts collective. According to scupltor Nancy Selvage, who advised the student artists, there were originally two other projects planned for the Yard, but one was cancelled due to the events at the marathon and the other was deemed so ambitious that it required a Cambridge building permit.

Submitting entries and applying for OFA funding—a grant that can range from $100 to $500—is a yearlong process. After leading a class to develop a collaborative art project for last year’s festival, Selvage, who is also the former director of the OFA Ceramics Program, now advises on installation logistics for each project. According to Selvage, the artists brainstorm options to integrate their artistic concepts with realistic and feasible strategies to create a structurally sound installation. For some of these artists, the task of creating an art piece that engages with its surroundings is an emotional journey. Méndez, who drew his inspiration for “59801” from the death of his father, aspired to bridge the gap between his response to that life event and the collective human experience. According to Méndez, the project is an attempt to create an architectural representation of his emotional state.“59801” consists of a series of three doors and four pedestals that structure an imaginary room.

Within the room, different types of destroyed wood are presented on pedestals. According to Méndez, these elements are all a play on the impermanence of wood, since the doors and pedestals of the artwork and the surrounding trees in the Yard are all of the same material. “I wanted to explore certain concepts of memory architecturally as opposed to a linguistic system or with words. I chose the format of the room because I thought of myself moving through that space and interacting with different objects,” he says.Méndez says he was inspired by the writings of Svetlana Boym, a professor of Slavic and comparative literature, after taking one of her classes, Comparative Literature 256: “Archeology of Modernity and Visual Culture.” In particular, he was influenced by Boym’s writings on exile, estrangement, and nostalgia.

Méndez ultimately gathered photographs taken and poems read by the students of the class to provide visual and auditory components to his project. “[The photographs] will be used to make a number of comments in the sense that they stand apart [from] the domestic themes of doors and pedestals. Since they are very urban-themed, I wanted to represent the tension between these two realms of social lives, the domestic sphere and the public urban sphere,” he says.

While Méndez drew upon inner experiences to inspire his public art, Lavoie and Peragine interpreted the public space of the Yard to create a project that forces its viewer to physically interact with the piece itself. “Exquisite Portraits: A Drawing Game in the Yard” is essentially a three-sided drawing kiosk on which three people can create “exquisite portraits” of themselves at the same time.

“We imagine that some people would take this [in] a literal way, and others an absurd way. When I was a little kid, we imagined monsters this way,” Peragine says. Believing that play and imagination continue to be important parts of adulthood, Lavoie and Peragine were inspired by the Surrealist technique “the Exquisite Corpse” where participants each add on parts of a drawing in succession to create a composite work.

“We’re trying to figure out ways to make new art. Where does newness come from? It comes from the deep, dark imaginary,” Lavoie says.

—Staff writer Connie Yan can be reached at connieyan@college.harvard.edu.