Japanese Artist Tadashi Kawamata and Boston Graduate Students Convert Harvard’s Sert Gallery into Active Studio

Tadashi Kawamata: Boston Project, Plan in Progress Offers Glimpse of Nomadic Japanese Artist/Architect’s Unusual Working Methods, as Students from Boston Area Colleges and Universities Participate in Research and Planning for Public Structures

Cambridge, MA – February 28, 2001 – As part of a collaboration among several Boston area colleges and universities, the Harvard University Art Museums will bring acclaimed Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata to the Sert Gallery, at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, to transform it into a working studio where approximately twenty students will be assigned specific design tasks in the research and planning of one or more site-specific public structures to be built in the Boston area next year. Between March 1 and April 30, 2001, the gallery will showcase drawings, photographs, posters, catalogues, and video documentation of earlier Kawamata projects while also serving as a working studio for the research and planning of these future Boston projects. The gallery will be open to the public during its normal hours throughout this period.

"Bringing Kawamata to the Fogg Art Museum to work closely with students, faculty, and curators is a fabulous opportunity for everyone involved. He is a challenging and intelligent artist, well known for his generous collaborations with students. We hope this will be the first of many opportunities for our art museums to serve as a catalyst for such original creative and educational collaborations," said James Cuno, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums.

Kawamata is known for his ephemeral architectural structures and for the unusual research and planning that precedes their construction. His working method is collaborative, requires extensive preliminary research and documentation, and ends in a ritualistic dismantling of whatever gets built.

The open, scaffold-like structures that Kawamata builds appear to grow out of the buildings that serve as their site, while the sites themselves are invariably selected for their embodiment of some aspect of a city’s social history. Kawamata tends to choose sites that serve or once served as civic institutions -- hospitals or shelters or houses of worship. Frequently these sites have been abandoned, marking the absence or demise of once vital structures; sometimes they are buildings reclaimed, such as a synagogue in northern France that was abandoned and later restored as a secular cultural center. His temporary structures are generally built of scavenged lumber (or chairs or doors), materials that have a relationship to the building site and that add to a sense of prior use. Kawamata’s structures function less as public sculpture than as commentary on the demographics, architectural style, and social habits that characterize a particular urban milieu. He has described them as interventions that act on a neighborhood like "so much noise."

Kawamata, like Robert Smithson or Gordon Matta-Clark or Richard Serra – artists with whom he has often been compared – is intensely engaged with the relationship between the design and planning of urban structures, spaces, intersections, and neighborhoods and the ways in which their inhabitants use such structures and spaces. Like these older artists, he is involved in the analysis of urban terrain and the development of radical structures of his own. What differentiates Kawamata is his collaborative approach to research and building, the way he burrows into the history of each town or city he takes on, and the enthusiasm with which he involves local participants in each stage of his public projects. "Kawamata has a keen sense of what characterizes a given city, so it’s not surprising that he wanted to work with university students in Boston," said Linda Norden, the Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Fogg Art Museum. "I think he realizes that the student population in Boston simultaneously reflects and works against the city’s entrenched hierarchies. He also has enormous energy, which invariably works to galvanize a community, so I am especially excited about the potential this project has to bring together students from disparate institutions and to use their varied contributions to make a larger statement."

Tadashi Kawamata: Boston Project, Plan in Progress involves students from the Massachusetts College of Art, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brandeis University, as well as Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). All of the students participating in this stage of the Boston Project are enrolled in a graduate seminar sponsored by Harvard’s GSD that meets weekly in the gallery. Kawamata will be in residence in early March and again between April 16 and April 30. He will be in the gallery all day on March 1 and March 2 to offer open workshops on his planning process. He will formally present his projects and planning process on the evening of March 1 as part of the GSD’s Rouse Visiting Artist Program lecture series. On April 27, plans for the Boston project will be unveiled to the public during a reception at the Sert Gallery. Monies are being raised to fund the building of these Boston projects during 2001 and 2002.

Programming
Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture
Tadashi Kawamata
Thursday, March 1, 2001
6:30 p.m. at the Piper Auditorium, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Free admission

Gallery Talks
Tadashi Kawamata: Boston Project, Plan in Progress, Sert Gallery
Saturday, March 10, 2 p.m.
Saturday, March 24, 2 p.m.
Sunday, April 22, 2 p.m.
Linda Norden, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, and project participants
Free admission

Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums is one of the leading arts institutions in the United States and the world. It is distinguished by the range and depth of its collections, its groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of its staff. For more than a century, it has been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and is renowned for its seminal and ongoing role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

The three art museums at Harvard – the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum – are all outstanding institutions in their respective fields. The Fogg also houses the Straus Center for Conservation, long a leader in the research and development of scientific and technology-based analysis of art. The 150,000 objects in the art museums’ collections range in date from ancient times to the present and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its areas of focus.

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The collections are divided among ten curatorial areas: Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics; Architecture and Design; Asian Art; Busch-Reisinger Museum; Drawings; Islamic and Later Indian Art; Modern and Contemporary Art; Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Prints; and Photographs. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, these holdings are a uniquely broad and rich resource that is continually enhanced through gifts and acquisitions. Together, the holdings of the three museums comprise one of the finest university art collections in the world, with resources rivaling those of many major public museums.

The Straus Center for Conservation is the oldest fine arts conservation treatment, research, and training facility in the United States. The Center specializes in the conservation of paintings, sculpture, decorative objects, historic and archaeological artifacts, and works of art on paper. Its team members are pioneers in developing new applications of digital imaging in conservation. The Center’s state-of-the-art facilities support a broad range of analytical services.

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