Paul Rudolph: Playing the Campus

UMass Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) celebrates its brutalist residential campus with public events dedicated to Paul Rudolph and his legacy. This series will include art installations, live performances, lectures, film screenings, community forums, tours, and an exhibition in the CVPA Campus Gallery. All events are free and open to the public.
 

Upcoming events:

March 21, 3-5pm 
Sound art installation: To Scale. Artist Andy Graydon presents To Scale (10,000 things for Mark Tobey). Originally created in 2014 as a collaboration with Peter Bjordahl, this public art sound installation will be re-staged for a one-day-only sonic event within a stairwell in the campus Liberal Arts (LARTS) building, designed by Rudolph.

April 16-28
Exhibition: A Visionary Campus: Paul Rudolph and UMass Dartmouth. Drawn from UMass Dartmouth Claire T. Carney Library archives and other sources, the exhibition and accompanying brochure will feature Paul Rudolph’s architectural drawings and campus model, design materials original to Rudolph’s Group 1 (Liberal Arts/LARTS) building concept, as well as interpretive responses from historians, artists, and students.

April 18, 4-6:30pm 
Opening reception: Lead curator, Dr. Anna M. Dempsey, with the curatorial team of colleagues and students, will welcome visitors to the CVPA Campus Gallery exhibition. Special screening of Concreteopia (2017).

April 23, 4-5:30pm
Community conversation: “National Trust Nomination for UMassD LARTS Building” graduate student panel on the pros and cons of listing the Group 1/Liberal Arts building on the National Register of Historic Places, organized in collaboration with Dr. Marisa Angell Brown. CVPA Campus Gallery.

April 27, 3-5pm
Closing reception, with a premiere performance presented by Non-Event: Sonic Section Perspectives (For Paul Rudolph) is an environmental sound performance conceived by José Rivera and Michael Rosenstein for six participant-collaborators. The one-hour composition draws on field recordings made within architectural spaces designed by Paul Rudolph throughout the Boston region. Sonic Section Perspectives will be performed on multiple levels of the College of Visual and Performing Arts central atrium. Introduced at 3pm by Chris Grimley. 

These events are sponsored in part by the UMass President’s Creative Economy Initiatives Fund, 2017-2018. Further information about these and other related events can be found here.

Featured artist and speaker bios
Marisa Angell Brown is an architectural historian and curator with research interests in the architectural movements, buildings, and spaces of the 1960s to the present. She is Assistant Director of Programs, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University. 

Andy Graydon’s artistic practice explores experiences of absence and displacement, such as those encountered in travel, in writing and in recording. This work across media has been exhibited, screened, performed and published internationally, including shows at the New Museum, Art in General, and Participant Inc., New York; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.

Chris Grimley is a partner at the firm over,under, an interdisciplinary practice that creates built environments and designed experiences through the lens of advocacy. His co-authored book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston has been awarded honors by Docomomo and the Boston Preservation Alliance. In addition, he curates the pinkcomma gallery, is a co-founder of Design Biennial Boston, and released the Boston Brutalist Map, published by Blue Crow Media, in 2017.

Michael Rosenstein explores the interaction of acoustic and electronic sounds in collectively improvised settings. In his music, he uses amplified surfaces, oscillators and home-made electronics, distressed field recordings, harmonics and overtones, exploiting and feeding off of the resultant unstable sonic events.

José Rivera (aka Proxemia) is an architecturally-trained multimedia artist who creates electroacoustic and experimental sound works. He explores the intersections of aural and spatial experience through multi-channel installation and performance, aural cartography, architectural design, and environmental sound recording. He studied sound and art in MIT’s program of Art, Culture, and Technology.

Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) was a leading modernist architect, whose unified master plan for the Southeastern Massachusetts Technical Institute (SMTI) was foundational for what is now the UMass Dartmouth campus. The Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at UMass Dartmouth hold a collection of Paul Rudolph & His Architecture.

Non-Event (Susanna Bolle, Executive & Artistic Director) is an independent experimental sound and music series, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 2001, members have presented over 360 concerts by local, national, and international artists in traditional and non-traditional spaces in and around the city. In recent years, Non-Event has organized large site-specific and site responsive performances for iconic buildings, such as the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum and the giant interior mezzanine of Boston’s brutalist City Hall.

The CVPA Campus Gallery is an active, contemporary art gallery particularly committed to serving the College of Visual and Performing Arts community. CVPA also operates galleries featuring rotating exhibitions in their Star Store Campus in downtown New Bedford.