{"id":3796,"date":"2015-03-16T14:05:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T21:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about-hmc\/?p=3796"},"modified":"2015-03-16T14:05:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T21:05:54","slug":"conceptual-art-installation-turning-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/2015\/03\/16\/conceptual-art-installation-turning-heads\/","title":{"rendered":"Conceptual Art Installation Turning Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the ground floor in the northwest corridor of Harvey Mudd College\u2019s Parsons Building, you\u2019ll find an interesting, if not puzzling, piece of art titled <em>Wall Drawing 305<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The 9-by-28-foot area, filled with intersecting pencil-drawn lines, shapes, focal points and cryptic notes, is an example of \u201cinstruction-based art,\u201d a technique employed by conceptual artists that instructs participants to interpret and execute works based on sets of commands. With Associate Professor of Art Ken Fandell, Harvey Mudd students undertook installation of a piece created by conceptual and minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. The work consists of \u201cone hundred random specific points,\u201d the locations of which \u201care determined by the drafters.\u201d Students use both rational thought and intuition to produce the artwork.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI&#8217;ve always enjoyed process art,\u201d says Alejandro Frias \u201914, a computer science alumnus who spent many hours on the piece. \u201cThe final product isn&#8217;t why I do art; it&#8217;s for what I get out of the process. This piece is all process\u2014even the thought process of the artists\u2014and has the added draw of being very puzzle\/game like. I think Mudders will enjoy the puzzle of retracing the processes involved to create this rendition.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>LeWitt\u2019s works are usually sold to museums and private collectors and installed with the help of representatives of the artist\u2019s estate, but the LeWitt Foundation agreed to loan this work to the College for the students to install.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI reached out to a curator who did a project like this with an art history class at the Middlebury College Museum of Art,\u201d says Fandell, the Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in Arts and the Humanities. \u201cShe put me in touch with Sofia LeWitt and, through conversation, we wound up being able to install this piece.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kirklann Lau \u201916, another student involved in the project, says he was drawn to its collaborative and complex nature. \u201cIt was painstaking to draft the arrangement of lines. It required plenty of leveling, compasses, string, cleverness and teamwork,\u201d says Lau. \u201cI&#8217;ve enjoyed working with my fellow draftsmen in both coming up with points and helping draft them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStanding at the end of the perpendicular hallway and watching the lines come into focus from afar as you approach it is my favorite way of experiencing the wall drawing,\u201d says Lau. \u201cIt does not outright beckon its viewers; it merely hints at a greater complexity when you&#8217;re up close.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the ground floor in the northwest corridor of Harvey Mudd College\u2019s Parsons Building, you\u2019ll find an interesting, if not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"class_list":["post-3796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hsa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}