Description
The College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (UMD), is a comprehensive college for art, design, and music, offering BA and MA programs with an emphasis on learning through social and community engagement. The CVPA maintains facilities and galleries on the main Dartmouth campus and a New Bedford campus. CVPA seeks Luce funding for the preparation and implementation of the two-part exhibition project Nancy Holt: Massachusetts , inspired by the sculptor and environmental artist’s strong ties to the region and her major work, Spinwinder (1991), a permanent site-specific sculpture installed on the UMD campus thirty years ago. The exhibition is currently slated to run from November 2021 though February 2022 at the Dartmouth Main Campus Gallery and New Bedford Star Store University Gallery.
The exhibition project is the first thorough exploration of Holt’s strong personal ties and artistic roots in Southcoast Massachusetts and their impact on her creation of Spinwinder and other of her works that reference themes of industry, and labor, and regionalism . With the forms of Spinwinder Holt directly referenced her grandfather, Samuel Holt, who served as head of the Weaving and Designing Department of the New Bedford Textile School (a precursor institution to CVPA). Nancy Holt: Massachusetts builds on the success of the recent three-campus exhibition initiative, Local Ecologies, for which contemporary artists were commissioned to create work in response to regional histories of industry and environmentalism.
The focal element of the Dartmouth campus gallery will be the first posthumous U.S. recreation of Holt’s site-specific systems work, Electrical System (1982), a major installation of bent circuits and lightbulbs connected to and illuminating the building’s electric infrastructure. The project team has planned the installation in collaboration with the Holt/Smithson Foundation and a group of UMD electrical engineering students for whom it will serve as their capstone senior project. Features of the New Bedford gallery installation will include: Holt’s critical media artwork Underscan (1973-4) and other records of her epistolary relationship with her Aunt Ethel which charts the changing social and built environment of New Bedford; Samuel Holt’s landscape painting, Holt’s Hope (owned by Nancy Holt); and his teaching notebooks and fabric swatches.
The proposed project promises to be a productive one for the CVPA and UMD. The exhibition will animate a permanent artistic feature of the Dartmouth campus, generate active consideration of its significance, and catalyze on-and-off campus conversations about the region’s industrial and labor histories. The project aligns with the AAP’s support for: the study and sharing of collections, particularly on public university campuses; and the expansion of their relevance through cross-curricular teaching and art-centered public conversations about shared histories. The project will also underpin the ongoing stewardship of Spinwinder, a major work by a female Land Art practitioner, by creating greater awareness and understanding of the work and its local significance. The AAP is supporting a similar project at Western Washington University.
Grant funds would support: research; digitization of the CVPA’s Holt-related archival material (including objects from Nancy Holt’s own weaving studio); creation of archival documentation associated with the reconstruction of Electrical System; shipping expenses for borrowed works; preparation of interdisciplinary course materials for use across the UMD curriculum; a scholarly symposium focused on themes of Labor, Structure, and Artifacts; and the long-planned production of a permanent didactic signage for Spinwinder.
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