Fall 2015 exhibitions and programs

Mare Liberum: or, The Other Island
through September 27
Brooklyn-based collective Mare Liberum transforms the Carpenter Center’s iconic ramp, gallery, and terrace by Le Corbusier into a boatbuilding workshop and installation around the collective’s ongoing inquiries into landscape, utopia, watercraft, and water as a commons.

Jennifer Bornstein, Liz Glynn, Betsy Schneider, and Nora Schultz 
VES Visiting Faculty 2015–16
through September 27
Each year leading practitioners are invited as visiting faculty in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies to introduce students to new interests, territories of study, and pedagogical approaches, as well as present work in a group exhibition.

Martin Beck: Program
ongoing–October 2016
Program manifests through a sequence of interventions, installations, and events that draw upon the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the Carpenter Center and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University

Karel Martens: Monoprints
through November 1
Acclaimed Dutch graphic designer and teacher Karel Martens exhibits a selection of monoprints made by imprinting found forms into recycled materials, such as castaway collection cards from museums, blank documents, discarded identity records, and raw packing paper.

Josiah McElheny: Two Walking Mirrors for the Carpenter Center
October 1–25 
Reception: October 1, 5pm 
Two Walking Mirrors for the Carpenter Center are sculptures made of mirror and wood, periodically inhabited by performers who wear the objects using nylon shoulder straps and then proceed along a line drawn by McElheny on the floor of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center.

Kerry Tribe: Critical Mass
October 3–25
Performance: October 3, 5pm 
Kerry Tribe restages Hollis Frampton’s 1971 groundbreaking experimental film of the same title, Critical Mass. In Frampton’s classic structural film, he captures a young couple arguing. In Tribe’s project, actors Nick Huff and Emelie O’Hara perform Frampton’s film, shot for shot and by memory, including all repetitions and stutters of the original work.

Damon Krukowski: NOT TO BE PLAYED
October 8–25 
Reception: October 8, 6–7:30pm
Performances: October 16 and 23, 7:30pm
NOT TO BE PLAYED makes public the materials and sounds of an audio recording Ezra Pound made at Harvard just before World War II, in 1939, of a “bloody sestina” that the poet believed could incite violence. Cut to acetate disk, transferred to magnetic tape, duplicated on cassette, but unshared until recent digitization of the Woodberry Poetry Room archives, the exhibition raises questions about analog-to-digital culture and changing ideas of public and private, permanence and ephemerality. 

Shahryar Nashat: Skins and Stand-ins
October 29, 2015–January 10, 2016 
Reception: October 29, 5–7pm
Berlin-based, Swiss-born artist Shahryar Nashat uses photography, sculpture, performance, and video to examine how contemporary representations of the human body are forced to conform to a perfection idealized across the ages in visual and intellectual culture. Skins and Stand-ins is the first solo exhibition in the United States by Nashat.

Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers
October 29, 2015–January 10, 2016  
Reception: October 29, 5–7pm
Artist talk in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums: November 17, 6pm
Lorraine O’Grady has been working for four decades in performance, photo installation, photomontage, and moving media. Her unapologetic use of autobiographical material continues to raise questions of ideologies of identity, gender, race, and politics of the diaspora. The works for this exhibition reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in the systemic powers affecting social behavior and the way binary oppositions provide a basis for astute observations on human civilization, often deployed in the form of the diptych.

Futurefarmers 
Talk: A Farm Sailed Away and Came Back a Garden
November 5, 6pm
Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding them. At the Carpenter Center they discuss how “nature” and “culture” are perceived, a critical and reoccurring investigation in their work.

About Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is dedicated to the synthesis of art, design, and education through the exhibition of existing works and production of new commissions. It strives to bring people, ideas, and objects together in generative ways that provide unparalleled experiences with contemporary art, ultimately enriching the creative and intellectual lives of our audiences.