Finals are now approaching, and stress is setting in for most Tufts students. But imagine for a moment, amidst the onset of research papers and exams, attending two schools at once.
Sounds impossible, right? It's not. Combined-degree students at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) spend their time juggling rigorous courseloads on campus while also pouring equal amounts of energy into making art at the SMFA in Boston. This unique program ties together a liberal arts education and a studio art one. Combined-degree students finish their five undergraduate years with both an academic bachelor's degree from Tufts and a fine arts bachelor's degree from the SMFA.
Take a stroll through Slater Concourse in the Aidekman Arts Center and you'll get an idea of what the combined-degree program is all about. Organized by Jenny Hong, a sophomore at Tufts and a combined-degree student, the new "Part & Parcel" exhibit highlights a number of pieces completed by students in the SMFA program.
"To my knowledge, this is the first show of its kind," Hong said. "I don't think there have been any combined-degree shows [in the Slater Concourse Gallery] before."
She cited an interest in increasing awareness of the program and student artwork on campus as some of the main desires that fueled the creation of "Part & Parcel."
"People don't know much about SMFA. They know of the program but not much about what we actually do," she said.
After a graduating student of the combined-degree program suggested the idea of setting up a show for the program's students, Hong immediately jumped onboard and began researching the gallery to draft a proposal.
As the show was an entirely novel undertaking for Hong and the dual-degree community on campus, organization was tough at the start. Hong said her initial concern was "that there was a lack of things to put up because people were reluctant to send in work."
Faced with the intimidating task of curating a show for the first time, Hong enlisted the help of fellow dual-degree student Joshua Wilmoth. Despite a few initial troubles, Hong and Wilmoth managed to gather more than enough pieces for the gallery and create a unified, intriguing display. Artists featured in the gallery volunteered to hang their own pieces and help set up other works as well.
"We've definitely learned a lot from this first experience," Hong said. "We're hoping it will become an annual thing."
The installation style of the "Part & Parcel" show in the Slater Gallery is surprising at first, but the chaotic mixture of styles and artists is part of its meaning. The curators have organized the work into a salon-style arrangement; it is not a grid or a row, but a smattering of sizes and media. In one area, an abstract painting lies flush with text-based work and reaches out toward a dress on a wire mannequin set up as a kind of votive work.
At first overwhelming, the arrangement works to foster connections between works that might not normally be seen together. "There's a good balance in the works. I think it flows together," Hong said of the show's overall organization.
Rather than hanging next to each other, for example, two large figurative works reach across the hallway, their visual similarities engaging the space that the viewer occupies. The feeling this induces is one of energy and dynamism - the eyes are constantly pushed and pulled from painting to drawing to sculpture, side to side, back and forth between the walls.
The show makes very intelligent use of a normally difficult space. Though the Slater Gallery hallway is compact, "Part & Parcel" makes use of its size to bring viewers into the space of the work.
Once the initial shock of the installation wears off, there remains an overwhelming amount of information to see and process. Where the viewer looks depends on what his or her eye is first drawn to - which piece starts the eye bouncing like a pinball through the show.
One quiet, abstract painting immediately draws one's attention. Painted by senior Trey Kirk, the piece uses solid bands of organic colors to establish a very physical space, akin to an architectural diagram. Kirk's untitled painting stands out because of its calm ambiance and its large size, creating a dramatic contrast with the more bombastic collages and photos in the show.
From there, the eye jumps to the brightly colored collaged maps created by junior Anjali Nirmalan. These pieces are both eye-catching and functional. After the show's opening, they will serve as interactive charts for viewers to document their own experiences. The maps include the classic Tufts University first-day-on-campus map, a map of the greater Boston area and even a brightly colored map of the world.
Though the interactive portion of the maps was not set up during the preview, the pieces are aesthetically interesting beyond their ability to document. Nirmalan destroys parts of the maps, deconstructing rivers and roads into channels of bombastic color and pattern.
Photography has a strong presence in the show. Mostly comprised of snapshots, the artists' different perspectives come through more in the aesthetic presentation of the photos than their subject matters. In a particularly interesting piece, Hong tears photos diagonally across and layers them to create a shifting scene of night in the city. Her other work focuses on the detritus and the out-of-the-way of city life, featuring collections of lampposts and post-office boxes resting wearily against the sides of buildings. The photos share a rough, handmade physicality.
On the other side of the spectrum, junior Nora Chovanec's prints are clean and immaculate, belying the subject matter of cast-off, kitschy buildings. Her William Eggleston-inspired work brings banality to the forefront with straight-on camera angles and high depth of field. The places she depicts are non-places which lack the distinguishing markers of people - just the empty shells of lived-out things.
In one photo, a children's swing dangles down from a tree like a noose, resting on the ground. It is as if death has come to the architecture itself, now vacant of life and meaning.
Several students turn toward figuration, displaying a dexterity with form and color through the medium of the human body. Freshman Molly Hughes-Hallett's "I can be a camel if I want to" is a striking study of the structure of the body as it bends backward. Sophomore Kendall Trotter's "Mask" focuses in on the face, coating a woman's features with a green, textured wash that lends a surprise to the otherwise ordinary. Another large-scale oil painting depicts a nude woman holding a large paper fan in one hand and a hookah in the other.
Yet another handful of artists shown here makes strides toward the conceptual. Kirk, in "A mapping of time through space from the number 1 to the number 21,600 (6 hrs)," counts from one to 21,600 in seconds, writing down each number as it happens. Written on a large piece of paper, the numbers make a swirling composition that's aesthetically interesting as well as an exploration of how time and space intertwine in art.
Walking down the hall, viewers will come across a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on a pedestal. The trick? It's all knitted. Still, senior Kate Martens' piece, "Movable Feast," is a good metaphor for "Part & Parcel" as a whole. The show is a visual feast, taking what we know and tweaking it till it becomes new.
Equally fascinating is the way in which the works reflect the fusion of the academic and artistic worlds. Some of the clearest examples are the architectural and systematic pieces by Kirk. As a biomedical engineer at Tufts, Kirk is clearly influenced by his investigation of science and mathematics. Hong explained how the combined degree makes two potentially conflicting spheres, the world of fine arts and that of liberal arts academia, a harmonious pairing that allows students to explore their interests in unexpected ways.
"The SMFA students are combining arts and academics in some interesting ways," Hong said. "We don't want to give up either, and the [combined-degree] program lets us get a liberal arts and a fine arts degree. Academic and artistic interests are inherently influenced by each other and show up in our work. Sometimes it's something we heard in class or something that we read."
The show could not have had better timing, as crowds of accepted Tufts applicants will be flooding the campus for April Open House.
"Next year's group of combined-degree students will get to see what we're doing, instead of us just talking about it. It's also a great chance for our peers and professors to take a look at what SMFA students have been doing," Hong said.
Without a doubt, the next batch of combined-degree students will be excited by the wide array of artistic endeavors displayed in "Part & Parcel" and the prospect of discovering their own academic and artistic relationships throughout the program. With any luck, their work will be lining the walls of Slater Concourse next spring.
The opening reception for "Part & Parcel" takes place tonight from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Slater Concourse Gallery of the Aidekman Arts Center. The exhibit will remain in the gallery through the month of April.
