For Visiting Faculty, a Role Reversal

The Le Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center, which could perhaps be mistaken for merely a giant ramp across from Sever Hall, is an odd fixture amidst Harvard’s crimson masonry. For those who use the space, however, it is not an architectural oddity, but a canvas. While students in other departments scrambled through shopping week and the informational firestorm that accompanies the beginning of the year, Visual and Environmental Studies hopefuls and others who braved the Carpenter Center’s imposing exterior emerged into a world of role reversal, in which VES professors took a turn at exhibiting their work. This annual event, the visiting faculty show, runs through September 29 and will hold its opening reception this Thursday from 5:30-6:30.

Multiple times a semester, the faculty at the Carpenter Center are charged with filling the building’s concrete shell with a host of works ranging from archived footage and films to curated events in which special guests, themselves veritable giants of the art world, explain their process in the “Artist Talks” series. This constant rotation of artistic material typically showcases the work of those not immediately affiliated with the university. The yearly visiting faculty show, however, gives students a chance to sample their professors’ wares, so to speak, before attending their lectures.

Take, for example, Catherine Lord’s “Untitled (36 from the ONE),” in which scans of dedication pages from various texts to form a work of total devotion to the feminine, from the named “Anaïs” to the more abstract “W.M.” Lord’s course, Visual and Environment Studies 149: "Queer Visuality, Visualizing Queer," continues this theme by taking a look into queer studies in art. Kalup Linzy delves into queer art issues as well, and chooses to approach the subject through multiple media. Linzy’s works operate in discourse with one another: his “Conversations wit de Churen X: One Life to Heal,” a video recording of his performance art, forms an expositional narrative for his gouache and photo collage series. His Visual and Environment Studies 66: "Music, Melodrama, and Performance Art" students can look forward to exploring the role of performance in art under the guidance of someone with substantial experience in the medium.

While most Harvard students will not have the opportunity to explore further these artists’ works and artistic philosophies through the classes they teach, some of the visiting faculty will be holding individual “Artist Talks” that will be free and open  to the public. Roger White will be speaking on October 15th at noon, and Catherine Lord will be doing the same at noon on November 12th.

—Staff writer Jay A. Drummond II can be reached at j.a.drummond2@gmail.com.