Exhibitions 2018: Paul Rudolph - Playing the Campus

Sound art/public program series and exhibition

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:

April 17 & 18, 10am-5pm

Site-specific project for outdoor areas of UMass Dartmouth Reading Paul Rudolph.
Across campus, students will share texts by and about campus architect Paul Rudolph and the style of architecture he worked in called Brutalism. They will be writing selected texts with white chalk directly on the campus walls. The project is designed to encourage both the campus community and visitors to understand the original intentions behind the design of our buildings—with their intricate surfaces and concrete 'heroicism' and monumentalism. 

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. 

CVPA Campus Gallery Hours during this exhibition: Monday–Saturday 10am–4pm

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 25, 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 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. 

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.

UMass Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) 
CVPA Campus Gallery
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA 02747
www.umassd.edu/cvpa/galleries
www.facebook.com/UmassDartmouthGalleries
gallery@umassd.edu