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Spiegel Symposium 2005: Freshman Seminars and College House Tours

The Spiegel Gift is funding several Spring 2005 freshman seminars and College House Tours focused on contemporary art.

College House Tours

The Spiegel Gift funds College House events at the ICA. During the academic year, the University offers special events at ICA for students from all 11 College Houses. These events are designed to encourage students to think of ICA as a place to visit and explore while exposing them to various contemporary artists.

View photos from a recent College House Tour evening.

Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va Seminar

Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art

This seminar is held in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, surveying the art of Barry Le Va.

Since the late 1960s, this highly influential American artist has used broken glass, meat cleavers, wool felt, ball bearings, powdered chalk, cast concrete, paper towels, linseed oil, a typewriter and a gun, among other things, to make his work. Part of a generation intent on knocking art off its pedestal, Le Va claimed the floor as his field of operations by scattering massive amounts of materials, or forms, to create works which he called "distributions." He has likened these installations to crime scenes and invites viewers to look for clues to reconstruct the often violent act or concept that underlies them. Following this lead, this seminar tracks the art of Barry Le Va through major movements of Postmodern art up into the present, where its impact on younger artists is everywhere in evidence. At the same time, students other contexts suggested by the work.

View photos taken during a studio workshop as part of the Barry Le Va freshman seminar.

Environmental Art Seminar

Rebecca Butterfield, Lecturer in History of Art

Over the last 40 years, a number of artists have rebelled against what they saw as the stultifying limitations of the museum/gallery complex. They were disgusted by the idea of the art object as just another luxury commodity whose only function was to decorate private homes or public plazas. Instead, they created art that transforms existing natural or cultural sites into new and extraordinary environments, often designed to engage the total body rather than the eye alone. This course considers a wide range of environmental art, including massive earthworks (such as James Turrell's reshaping of a dormant volcano into a celestial observatory), museum installations (Yves Klein's notorious exhibition of The Void and sale of "immaterial" paintings), sensory chambers (Yayoi Kusama's wonderlands of twinkling lights), ritualistic performance pieces (Ana Mendieta's photographs of her nude body in various landscapes) and monuments designed for public spaces (Maya Lin's controversial Vietnam War Memorial and Richard Serra's infamous Tilted Arc). The artists' goals are as various as their methods: to reintroduce a spiritual dimension into an increasingly market-driven art world, to critique contemporary beliefs and practices, to explore the limits of perception or to memorialize past events.

Students examine the purpose and function of specific environmental works and their reception by various audiences. Most importantly, they are analyzing how each work's style, forms, materials, construction techniques and locations convey meanings to their various audiences. Lectures, readings and discussions are supplemented with visits to specific sites, including a trip to New York City to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" project in Central Park.


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