PRINTMAKER/PHYSICIAN ERIC AVERY TO CREATE INSTALLATION AND ART/MEDICINE ACTION AT THE FOGG IN CONJUNCTION WITH WORLD AIDS DAY
Released: September 17, 1997
The printmaker and physician Eric Avery will create an art/medicine action in the Straus Gallery of the Fogg Art Museum and the adjacent print study room on November 30 and December 1, 1997.
The event will be held in conjunction with the exhibition Rome and New York: A Continuity of Cities, and World AIDS Day, and will include on-site AIDS testing and counseling of patients from Zinberg Clinic, the AIDS service at Cambridge Hospital. Eric Avery treats late-stage AIDS patients at The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. His art, primarily prints, three-dimensional paper objects and installations, explores issues such as social responses to disease, death, sexuality, and the body. His works are held by leading collections nation-wide, including the Library of Congress, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the Fogg. Over the past few years he has created several art/medicine actions. The event at the Harvard University Art Museums is organized by Marjorie Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, in coordination with the Zinberg Clinic. The event is also sponsored by the Harvard University Arts Committee on AIDS and the Harvard/Radcliffe Office for the Arts.
For his presentation at the Fogg Art Museum, Dr. Avery has designed an 8' x 12' room, open to the front and back and with an open gabled roof formed by trusses in the standard form of joists and rafters, which will be built on a low platform. The two outside walls will be papered with his wallpaper, based on an Italian eighteenth-century etching, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Prison VII in the Fogg's collection. The room will be installed in the exhibition Rome and New York and the actual etching from which the wallpaper motifs will be derived will hang on one wall of the room.
Given that treatment of HIV-positive patients has so improved in recent years, Avery chose to visually adapt Piranesi's print, with its levels of ramps and winding of stairs, into a metaphor of the staged administration of the effective drug complexes and complementary viral load testing. "The association of Avery's installation with the exhibition Rome and New York is not far-fetched," states Marjorie Cohn. "The exhibition is the product of an undergraduate seminar entitled Prints in Use, and many of the objects on view will be prints with an explicit non-fine-art function, ranging from Renaissance topographical views to nineteenth-century advertising circulars and peepshows. The wallpapered room in the center of the gallery and the activities they will embrace on December 1, Worlds AIDS Day, are yet another usage of prints. Dr. Avery will also create a souvenir print of the event, which will be based on a print in the exhibition, Interior of Saint Peter's at the Jubilee in 1700, itself a souvenir of a Roman ceremony."
The activity on November 30-December 1 at the Fogg will be the transfer of the usual consultations at the Zinberg Clinic to the Straus Gallery at the Fogg. Zinberg patients will see their medical doctor, psychiatrist, nurse practitioner, nutritionist, social worker, and even perhaps an acupuncturist. These will be one-on-one consultations, and the other health care professionals will rotate out to the adjacent study room to lead public discussions of the significance of their specialty to the HIV-positive person and also of the significance of holding these consultations in an art museum setting. A performance artist, Lillie Pink, will orchestrate the movement of people from one space to the other, to lend theatricality to the event and remind visitors and participants that this event is art as well as medicine.
"We have a purpose beyond the more obvious one of AIDS education in an at-risk population, that is, adolescent students, many of them away from home for the first time," states Cohn. "We want our visitors to appreciate the medical realities of a clinic in our museum, even if it does have Piranesi wallpaper, and we want doctors and patients to think of the Fogg as more than just a cool change of scene. We hope to rupture the protective shield constructed by museums against the existence of the disruptive, transitory, and debilitating facts of human physical life, and to remind our visitors that art and healing have only been sundered in this century and culture. Likewise, we hope that medicine, usually confined to hermetic spaces such as clinics and hospitals, can be reintroduced as a healing art in the unexpected context of beauty and human creativity."
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The special exhibition Rome and New York: A Continuity of Cities will be on display at the Fogg Art Museum from November 1, 1997 through January 4, 1998. Prepared by members of the undergraduate seminar, Prints in Use, offered last fall by the Fine Arts Department at Harvard, the exhibition will examine how images of Rome and New York combine to form a profound lineage from the classical era to the contemporary moment on the threshold of the twenty-first century. Urban images range from those customarily accepted as fine art by artists such as Piranesi, Lozowick, and Pennell to topographical views, maps, and advertising posters.
Independent of their creators' intentions, the prints in Rome and New York have a functional purpose which moves beyond artistic representation. They convey the idea of Rome as an ancient center of power and religion and New York as the epitome of the modern city. Certain images, however, run in direct opposition to these conventional views, and this contradiction sets up an intriguing exchange where each city has the flexibility to embody the other's popular traits. There are particular notions, ideals and images which are permanently associated with one city or the other and which emphasize the essence of each city, but at the same time they stress a continuous theme through which both cities are bound. These distinctions and continuities provide the framework for this exhibition.
Rome and New York is organized by Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints.
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For general information on the Harvard University Art Museums, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and on Saturday mornings. The Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June (July/August, Wednesdays only). The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m.
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