Whither the Gallery?

If Sarah L. Gogel ’06 has her way, visitors to Tommy’s Pizza next week will see a 1000-square-foot mural on a Bow Street wall. And she says she hopes eventually to create similar murals in the building of every Harvard academic department.

Gogel says traditional gallery space for student artists at Harvard is simply insufficient. She’s not alone in wanting more space to show student art.

Although Harvard’s campus teems with student artists, students say finding space to display their work is more difficult than ever.

With the opening of the Winthrop Art Studio this fall by resident tutor Zoe P. McKinness—which expands on the limited studio space in the Houses—students have been given more space to create, but some say not nearly enough to exhibit what they’ve made.

According to Adams House Arts Tutor Jen Mergel ’98, sufficient display space encourages art making and gives up-and-coming artists valuable practice in exhibiting and curating their work before they enter the real world.

“It’s important to give students of all artistic levels a space to display their work, set up initiatives or curate shows,” Mergel says.

Those outside the small Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department have long complained that the department’s courses and facilities often exclude non-concentrators. This problem has prompted a number of efforts to locate additional studio and exhibition space that is not limited to VES students.

Several Houses maintain spaces where students and resident tutors can display their work—and a few, like Adams and Winthrop, even provide studio space—but the distribution of these resources varies greatly among Houses.

According to Nancy Selvage, who directs the Ceramics Program at the Office for the Arts (OFA), VES concentrators can occasionally display their final projects in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts or Hilles Library.

Mergel oversees installations in the Adams House ArtSpace, one of the few on-campus exhibition spaces available for student displays, and the only multi-room gallery devoted to art by the Harvard community.

“The ArtSpace is an amazing resource,” Mergel says. “It gives students who are serious about art the opportunity to do things that they otherwise couldn’t: organize exhibitions, curate shows and display their own work to their community.”

Since this year, the ArtSpace—a set of squash courts converted for gallery use nearly a decade ago—has received more requests for student-curated exhibitions than can be accommodated. According to Mergel, more than 15 exhibits were displayed in the space this year, including every week of the spring semester.

“The ArtSpace is being used much more than before,” she says. “I’ve had to turn interested students away just because there’s been such a high demand to display their work.”

In addition to the ArtSpace, there’s also permanent exhibition space in Mather House and Eliot House.

Amidst the bustle of Adams ArtSpace, Susanna Garcia, resident art tutor in Mather House, says she sometimes wonders where all the artists have gone.

According to Garcia, who oversees installations in Mather’s Three Columns Gallery, six exhibits have gone up this year, each lasting a little over a month.

But not many of them feature student work. The last student installation at Three Columns was a collection of work by VES concentrator Chris Parlato ’03 in December.

“I try to encourage the artists I know in the house to get them to display their work here,” Garcia says. “Ideally, we’d have student shows up every week, but if a student wants to curate an exhibit on behave of an initiative or organization, we welcome that too.”

It’s a unique space. True to its name, the gallery is a group of three columns at the entrance to Mather’s dining hall, not in the tradition of whitewashed gallery walls.

“It is a very interactive and playful space. We’ve seen that students have liked to display 3-dimensional work here, because you can walk around it and see it from all sides and angles,” Garcia says.

Still, while exhibits are always up in the space, few students have expressed interest in displaying their work in Three Columns this year, prompting Garcia and other tutors to search for submissions in local galleries and studios.

Garcia says the non-conventional design of the space explains the lower demand.

“It’s not as big or versatile as Adams, and some people love that while others feel the challenge of it,” Garcia says.

Many of the pieces displayed this year were designed specifically for the gallery, which is well-suited for three-dimensional work.

Garcia says that the gallery, which was formally a vacant vestibule, has helped to generate appreciation for the arts in Mather—despite the sparsity of student exhibits.

According to Office for the Arts (OFA) Program Director Cathleen McCormick, student work may also be displayed in the heavily-transversed Holyoke Arcade in the near future.

Some students, such as art history concentrator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer ’05, think that the best way to increase the limited space is to convert or use existing public spaces.

“My goal is to set up centrally-located exhibition spaces, where a lot of foot traffic will generate new innovative art,” Lehrer-Graiwer says.

After spending time on the campuses of art schools, Lehrer-Graiwer says the free exchange of creative ideas is missing at Harvard.

“Harvard’s a great place, but there’s an inadequate respect for the arts here,” she says. “The fact that there’s no dance department, no theater concentration shows the profound need for more attention to be given to the art community.”

So Lehrer-Graiwer and Nicholas H. Ma ’05 met with OFA Director Jack C. Megan earlier this fall to discuss the possibilities of installing student artwork in the entrance atrium of the OFA early next year.

They also attempted to open up the Science Center for student displays, but soon abandoned their efforts when they were met with administrative opposition.

Although it has less foot traffic, the OFA space came with much less red tape, according to Lehrer-Graiwer.

“Getting this started was a big ordeal,” she says. “We’ve met and talked and now we need to do what we’ve been talking about.”

She and Ma say they hope to begin by installing a student show in the OFA in September, and then setting up an ongoing selection committee of students to review proposals and encourage participation.

Gogel and Andrew J. Conrad ’05 say they agree with Lehrer-Graiwer that student demand for exhibition space well exceeds the current supply.

Gogel, armed with a growing list of more than 60 Harvard students, formed a group called Art Squatters which aims to increase public displays of student art on campus and around Cambridge.

According to Gogel, Harvard’s spring renovations and construction production projects have resulted in many indoor and outdoor spaces that could be utilized for student displays.

“Upperclassmen today are limited and depended on their hour tutors to display their artwork in temporary art exhibition spaces in their own houses,” she says. “We are missing an opportunity to do this on a more permanent and integrated basis.”

With Art Squatters, Gogel has searched for public, outdoor spaces where students can produce or display art. She says Harvard needs a space open around the clock and completely devoted to student art. She has her eye on Holyoke Center, the OFA and William James Hall.

As one of their first projects, Gogel and the Art Squatters plan to paint a mural on Bow Street during Arts First weekend. And Gogel says their goal of painting murals of every department building at Harvard aims to link the university with the artistic community of Cambridge.

“We need to think of exhibition space for art not only as space inside but also as space outside, in the form of murals and other public art,” she says. “The space is there; now the policies need to be adjusted for them to be put to permanent and temporary usage.”

Like the Art Squatters, Conrad’s initiative seeks to make student art more accessible to the Harvard community. His project, Democratizing the Gallery (DTG), gathers art from students and tutors in all Houses, both involved and uninvolved with VES, to display “democratically” in the basement of Eliot House.

In April, Conrad and nearly 40 other students assembled in Eliot’s media room to share art of all mediums from charcoal drawings to ceramics to poetry.

DTG also provided those in attendance with the tools of improvisational art—100 pounds of clay to play with, folk music and paper tacked to the walls of the gallery. DTG currently has plans to repeat the event in Kirkland and Quincy Houses in the near future.

According to Gogel and Conrad, exhibition spaces are a means of creating a cohesive and interactive community among the many students who love visual arts but are not VES concentrators.

“More art spaces would build stronger relationships between the public arts, humanities and higher education,” Gogel says.

Still, some say that these more quirky public display spaces won’t fill the need for more traditional gallery space.

According to Mergel, displaying art in public places limits an artist’s freedom of expression and is logistically more difficult to execute.

“People entering galleries make the conscious decision to view and interact with what is on the walls,” she says. “It’s an art safe zone, where the artist can hang what he likes with no concerns that the public will be shocked because they didn’t expect it.”

Rather than campaigning for public art, Mergel says she believes existing gallery space for students could be used more efficiently and that the resources should be better shared among houses.

Garcia also says that existing gallery space could be better employed—and that VES could play a more visible role in organizing and promoting student exhibitions.

VES Chair Marjorie Garber calls the inability of student artists to show their work “a real problem.”

She envisions a “secondary exhibition space analogous to the [Loeb Experimental Theater]” where students could show their work for a week.

Building such a space isn’t easy; McCormick adds that safety is also an important concern when finding and creating new display spaces.

“We need more space to display student work, but people need to be thoughtful about safety,” she says. “The space needs a fire exit, for example, and needs to be secure enough where there is little chance of the student’s work being stolen.”

McCormick says technical constraints—like lighting and wall room—make it hard to simply use other spaces as makeshift display spaces.

“Not every place you find makes a good gallery,” she says.

—Staff writer Kimberly A. Kicenuik can be reached at kicenuik@fas.harvard.edu.