Category: Public Art

by Tara Romanella

Georgie Silvarole , georgie.silvarole@independentmail.com 6:43 p.m. ET Feb. 20, 2017

On October 11, students, faculty and administrators were invited to discuss a future public art installation for Lee III located in the College of Art, Architecture, and Humanities (AAH) at Clemson University. Attendees engaged in an inclusive and democratic process to determine the proposal that would be the best fit in the space known as the Lee III Wedge. The event was hosted by the Creative Inquiry public art student team called Atelier Insite.

The ongoing pursuit of selecting and installing public art on campus is guided by Atelier InSite’s six fundamental principles which are considered a necessary process of inclusivity and a forthright decree of “by students, for students.” The specific project for Lee III began in the spring 2016, with 276 artist submissions. The students were charged with filtering down the artists with relevancy of material and medium, likelihood of space considerations, and evidence of experience with previous public art installations. Of the artists who submitted a Requests for Qualifications (RFQ), four were invited to submit a total of six site specific proposals. Potential artists were encouraged to consider the occupants utilizing the Lee III building as instigators of discourse which is one of the six guiding principles used to examine future and existing public art proposals. The specific principles are:

1. Reflect the affected programs attributes
2. Consider aesthetic and special properties
3. Reflect aspects of disciplines within specific program
4. Intellectually engaging and prompt discourse
5. All artwork is determined through a process of inclusivity
6. Consider the public arena and not cause physical harm

Attendees were asked to evaluate the six proposals presented on a 1-to-5 scale making sure to consider the six guiding principles with the participant’s overall enthusiasm for the proposed public art. The evaluations sheets revealed a close to unanimous choice. This exciting alignment of ideals as to which installation will be the best choice for the space builds the anticipation for the reveal of the winning proposal. The chosen artist will receive a $60,000 budget for the public art project. This budget includes the installation as well as maintenance of the public art. Stay tuned for the announcement of the winning proposal coming soon.

To find out more information regarding this public art proposal, visit http://www.clemson.edu/centers-institutes/cva/public-art/Lee%20III.html

About Atelier InSite

Atelier Insite is a unique classroom collaboration where Clemson University students from any major are invited to engage with art faculty and contribute to the on campus public art conversation. All five colleges at Clemson University have been represented in this public art initiative since its inception.

by Peter Kent

A hijacked work of art grows rampant and weed-like into new art.

The first time I met David Tillinghast, at Starbucks, we chatted about woodcraft and archery. An artist and a scribbler, we sat sipping coffee, swapping stories. At the time, I did not know that Tillinghast had created the Secret Book. And he didn’t know it either.

There is a secret book at Clemson. Maybe not so secret. Hundreds of students know about it. They have all had a hand in making the book into what it has become, transforming it from its creator’s artistic vision into crowd-sourced journal for graduating seniors. It has become a tradition, a rite of passage, to write a passage or leave a memento in the Secret Book.

Cooper Library keeps the book on restricted circulation. Students have used it so many times that the book has gone through four rebindings. Often it ranks among the most checked-out library books in the monthly circulation reports, especially at the semester’s end. English instructors use the book as an example in English 103, first-year composition. One made Tillinghast’s work part of a scavenger hunt exercise for her class.

The book comes with a curse and it includes a clue used in solving a puzzle that led to a cash gift for a newlywed couple. It’s a mystery how the tradition started—no one lays claim to it—and problematic in its perpetuation. Is it a willful act of destruction or the realization that public art ultimately belongs to the public?

“You don’t know about the Secret Book?” Denise Woodward-Detrich asks, as though I should have known about it, the way we all should have known about the five mass extinctions in the history of Earth. No, the book isn’t the reason for my visiting her in Lee Hall, where she oversees the Lee Gallery. I have come to find out about the miniature silo. To the people who can see the silo from their windows in Barre Hall, it looks like an abandoned agricultural totem, and they are mostly clueless to its purpose or provenance. Woodward-Detrich laughs. “The silo and the book are connected. You need to meet the artist David Tillinghast. He’s a sculptor, got his master’s here and lives here; his father is an author, retired from the English Department.”

A talk of two vessels

“Do you remember me?” Tillinghast asks.

I nod, lying. We sit at Starbucks, again, and talk. He is lean and long-limbed, with lanky brown hair framing a face serious but open to laughter. His eyes would lose him his shirt at almost any poker table, and, as we talk about the Secret Book, his face goes through page after page of emotions—bewilderment, outrage, resignation, delight.

The students coined the name Secret Book. Tillinghast knows the volume as one half of P211. t45, the title of his campus public art project installed in 2001. The other half is a brick-and-brown-metal, twenty-one-foot-tall silo. Together, the pieces are Tillinghast’s view of the relationship between agriculture and written language. Embossed in a deep brown-red on the original book front cover, P211 .t45 is a Library of Congress call number, ascribing it an address in the history-of-writing collection.

“The silo and book are linked,” Tillinghast says. “Growing crops led to settlements and a way to record harvests and distribution. But the connectedness is more than recordkeeping. Agriculture is a way of organizing nature in fields and rows. Writing is a way of organizing ideas, experiences and events. Nature, from cells to cities, is organized.”

There also is meaning in the “two vessels,” Tillinghast adds. Both the book and silo are containers filled with meaning.

The silo looks empty, but embedded in the floor is a bronze disc with “Cooper and P211 .t45” set in raised letters and numbers. When viewers position themselves to read the legend, it aligns them for the next step in putting together the pieces.

Before the new Academic Success Center arose and broke the line of sight, the silo’s slit portals aligned to point precisely to the reference section bookshelf on which the book was placed. But that was before it became so popular that the librarians moved it to a shelf behind the circulation desk and restricted borrowers, faculty included, to a two-hour checkout.

Chaos and order

The black linen-covered book is a field guide to Tillinghast’s imagery of the age-old struggle between chaos and order. He collected weeds in wintertime, particularly thistles, from roadsides and unkempt patches, and arranged them to create spare assemblages, prickly with brittle stems, sharp leaves, and dried seedpods, pressed like botanical samples set as silhouettes.

“Weeds are nature’s wild antagonists to crops,” he says. “They create tension and relentlessly grow, symbols of nature’s independence in spite our efforts to control it. The tension between the wild and the domesticated is part of human nature.”

Stark black-and-white images evolved as Tillinghast ran the unbound pages repeatedly through a copier, accreting layer on layer of ink, adding depth and weight to the images. He has kept the proofs and a failed version of the book, which he refuses to let me see. “It tried to please an audience. I did not want that.”

Tillinghast rubbed two of the pages with red dirt from the region. There are also drawings of the silo’s rooftop ribs and flashing, an homage to Renaissance architect Brunelleschi’s dome, one of Tillinghast’s favorite artists. Finally, there is one page with two words: “field” and “join.” Tillinghast says the book of symbols is a symbol itself of “a field of pages joining together to make a book—a whole, a oneness, no separation between nature and our making.”

The original book is intriguing—what you can see of it. The Secret Book has nearly obliterated P211 .t45. Personal notes, famous quotes, snippets of songs and poems, wisecracks, witticisms, truths, lies, boasts, smut, smack, doggerel, drawings and photos, football ticket stubs, pennies, buttons, Post Its, playing and business cards, and hundreds of names and dates, a gushing orange hemorrhage of young hearts and minds. The impact is sacred and profane, something less than a canticle to Clemson but something more than the scrawl on a beer joint’s restroom wall.

Students see nothing wrong with what they’re doing. “He should be honored that we have chosen the book to be a tradition,” writes one student in an email. The sentiment is repeated in other emails. I have asked the librarians to invite students to email me; a handful do. Their views are fairly consistent: They do not know who the artist is. They do not know the book is art. Most say they like art and many say they do not know there are artworks on campus. They have found out about the book mostly from Facebook or from other students.

“You have no clue how valuable this is to us,” one senior says at the library. Seniors are the ones who are supposed to sign the book, according to tradition. Woe unto undergraduates who make their mark too early. “If you are an undergraduate and sign it, you will not graduate,” says Katherine Mercer, a library student aide, who graduated last semester.

Mercer has signed the book and has been given a special distinction. Students who work in the library can select a book to have a bookplate attached commemorating their service. Mercer picked the Secret Book. She knows that her bookplate is as vulnerable as the book. “It will get written over, but I’m okay with that, because that’s what happens in the book.”

Tillinghast expected a notation or two. In the back of the book, he included a few blank pages for the seekers to sign and date their discovery of the art installation. “Maybe a few dozen, at most,” he says. In the 2005, he stopped in to see if anyone had signed the book. There were lots of signatures, including ones by family members. “The pages were filling up. I knew something was going to happen, but I didn’t do anything about it.” He did not return until 2013. The second visit staggered him. “The pages had become palimpsest in reverse. The monks in the Middle Ages scrubbed the pages of ancient texts to write their holy words. What the students are doing is writing over the pages, eclipsing my images. It’s the same thing—one wiping out another.”

It was like a cancer claiming his book, and Tillinghast was whipsawed by emotions. “I was angry at first. Then I wanted to do something like take the book back. I thought maybe I could fix it, or wipe out what they had done, or figure out how to market it, maybe sell prints or T-shirts and make some money. Now, well, I am thinking about what’s next.”

Some people want Tillinghast to do a second volume. “This one is falling apart,” says Fredda Owens, circulation librarian.

“We have added blank pages, but the book isn’t in great shape, and we can have it rebound only so many times.” The original covers are now in a slipcase pocket as part of a new binding.

Public takeover

Art professor David Detrich (Woodward-Detrich’s spouse) was Tillinghast’s adviser, and Tillinghast was Detrich’s first graduate student. Detrich leads Atelier InSite, a program whose goal is to sharpen the university’s vision of what it wants from public art.

“Artists who create public artworks deal with additional pressures,” Detrich says. “Public response to the work can be dramatic.” He mentions, for example, Richard Serra, a sculptor whose Tilted Arc in 1981 blocked easy access New York City’s Federal Plaza and was so despised that local officials had it removed in 1989.

If art is about evoking response, Tillinghast’s art has succeeded. But it has been a Prufrockian experience for him. He tells me he has not decided about making a second volume of P211 .t45. “No, it’s become something else,” he says. “Maybe without the signatures and other items the book would remain a dark cave. It’s interesting that while my original book is self-destructing, the new signatures create the new book. The very thing that destroys the book gives it life. The overlapping signatures are like torches illuminating the cave walls.”

While working on this story, I was in the city and stopped by the New York Public Library to ask a question.

“No, we don’t have a secret book I know about,” answered the librarian. “But we do have a disappearing book.”

Before I was allowed to see it, the librarians in the rare book room explained the rules, which include no permanent markers—only pencils—and no bags or satchels, just paper or a computer. On a long, dark wood table, under a pool of lamp light, librarians set out Agrippa in its stone-textured, slate-gray plastic case. Agrippa (a book of the dead) was created in 1992 by writer William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and publisher Kevin Begos Jr.

A cryptic cult classic and scholar’s fetish, it is a poem about childhood memories by Gibson on a computer minidisc set to erase after one reading, inset in Ashbaugh’s book made of light-sensitive paper and ink meant to fade away. Eighty-five copies were made; the library’s copy is thought to be in the best condition, much to the author’s displeasure.

“Gibson was in here a few weeks ago and asked to see it,” said a librarian. “He was disappointed that we had kept it so well.”

Tillinghast chuckles as I tell the Agrippa story. “A disappearing book,” he says. “What a concept.”

Later in an email, Tillinghast, who feels a bond with T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” sends me a quote from the poem: “In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

Peter Kent is a news editor and writer in Clemson’s Public Service Activities.

If you’ve been out and about in downtown Greenville, you’ve probably seen the newest public art sculpture located in NOMA Square. This sculpture was commissioned by the Hyatt. The artist is our very own Emeritus Faculty and Art Department Chair, John Acorn. The sculpture was recently featured in the October issue of Talk Magazine.

To view this sculpture in TALK magazine and read more public art in Greenville, please visit http://www.clemson.edu/centers-institutes/cva/public-documents/talkmag_johnacorn.pdf

CLEMSON – Clemson University’s Center for Visual Arts has expanded its scope regionally as a result of a $100,000 commitment from the Community Foundation of Greenville.

“We are proud that our partnership with Clemson University supports a growing creative community and will increase the economic development for the surrounding neighborhoods,” said Bob Morris, president of the Community Foundation of Greenville, S.C.

This generous gift gives life to Clemson University’s Center for Visual Arts vision to have presence in Greenville. The grant is partnered with a lease for a facility currently located in the Village of West Greenville along Pendleton Street in downtown Greenville. The new Center for Visual Arts – Greenville satellite facility creates a dynamic, hands-on, “real world” space where students, faculty and alumni are directly involved with art historians, artists, critics and curators in developing, curating, installing, exhibiting, documenting and interpreting the best contemporary art happenings of today.

Clemson always has long enjoyed visual arts presence through its students, faculty and alumni throughout the state of South Carolina, but in the past decade, that presence has grown exponentially in Greenville. First graduate of the Masters of Fine Arts at Clemson University, Jeanet Steckler Dreskin, M ‘73 is an influential local Greenville artist. Her art has been collected by major museums including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and can be seen in the Greenville Museum of Art. Throughout the city, former Clemson art department chair and faculty emeritus, John Acorn’s public art is celebrated in downtown Greenville. His public art sculptures are featured in the City of Greenville’s public art tour.

Clemson University’s focus on the arts began with its founder, Thomas Green Clemson.  A known painter and collector of contemporary artwork of his time, he is noted as saying in a speech in 1859 that “art is the magic bond that unites all nations.” Today, this legacy is continued by Clemson President James F. Barker. In dedicating the CVA – Greenville facility, he addressed Clemson’s importance relationship with the arts, “The arts are a very important part, not only of what we see of our history, but also of our future.”

Not long after President James F. Barker took office, he called Greenville Clemson’s “home city,” which has never been more true than today. More than 13,000 alumni, 2,500 current on-campus students and 500 University employees call Greenville home.

The CVA-Greenville is just one example of the ways in which Clemson University strives to partner with the region, and provides visual arts in the area. The presence of this facility provides continued benefit for the citizens of Greenville, and the environs, and allows students and other community members to enjoy, embrace, and grow in the art generated by the area. The grant from the Community Foundation of Greenville supports programming for the CVA – Greenville for the west Greenville and downtown community.

The Center for Visual Arts
The Center for Visual Arts (CVA) in Lee Hall at Clemson University is where students, visitors and scholars explore contemporary perspectives in art and culture through research, outreach programming and studio practice. With a mission to engage and render visible the creative process, the CVA is a dynamic intellectual and physical environment where art is created, exhibited and interpreted. It educates through academic research and practice with art at its core, drawing upon varied disciplines to examine critically cultural issues and artistic concerns.

The Center for Visual Arts – Greenville is a satellite of the Center for Visual Arts at Clemson University, which serves as the umbrella for all visual art activities at the university. Though there is not a physical building for this center, the majority of the activities for the Center of Visual Arts are generated out of Lee Hall on the Clemson University campus.

For more information regarding the Center for Visual Arts, visit

Contacts

Meredith Mims McTigue – Media Contact, 864-656-3883, mmims@clemson.edu

Greg Shelnutt – Center for Visual Arts Contact, 864-656-3880, gshelnu@clemson.edu

The Center for Visual Arts and the Atelier InSite at Clemson University welcomes Mary Beebe from the celebrated Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) located in San Diego, C.A. for a guest lecture entitled, “The Stuart Collection: Making Art Happen on Campus” on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6-7 p.m. in 1-100 Lee Hall.

Mary Beebe has been the director of the renowned public art collection known as the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, for over three decades. The Stuart Collection is a garden of sculptures set around the 1,200 acre campus at the UCSD in which the commissioned artists use specific sites on the campus to install their work. Beebe will discuss within her lecture the process of selecting and producing 18 installations by internationally known artists on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

The collection has received considerable national and international recognition. It received two awards from the San Diego Chapter of the American Institute of Architects; one award for the collection as a whole and another award for Alexis Smith’s Snake Path. It has been featured on CBS’s Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt and received a National Honors Award from the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.). A book documenting the first 20 years of the collection entitled, Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego was published in 2001 by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.  Beebe was personally awarded the Public Art Network Award from Americans for the Arts in 2011.

Beebe’s guest lecture and visit is significant to Clemson University as the institution begins to accelerate its own public art program called Atelier InSite. More than a decade ago university funds were set aside in support of the Art Partnership Program, a collaborative effort among the Office of the President, the Department of Art and other academic units on campus. The program solicits and commissions the creation of site-specific works of art, which are permanently featured at various campus locations.

Clemson’s design guidelines for current and future campus projects stipulate, “All capital development projects that are anticipated to exceed two million dollars will consider the benefits of public art and will apply 1/2 of 1 percent of the construction budget for such work.” Recently, the Clemson University Administrative Council voted to make the public art provision a University policy.

Atelier InSite is a new paradigm for the implementation of public artwork on university campuses that capitalizes on a cross-disciplinary and inclusive approach that is predominantly student driven. Students in this creative inquiry program engage in direct, hands on processes to determine the artwork placed around campus. They also conduct research on the nature of public art as well as investigate the design build process, conduct site analysis, and identify site locations for artwork on the Clemson University campus.

Read a recent Clemson University press release regarding the Atelier InSite public art program.

Admission to the “The Stuart Collection: Making Art Happen on Campus” guest lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6-7 p.m.  in 1-100 Lee Hall is free.

Contact: David Detrich, 864-656-3890, ddavid@clemson.edu

Media Contact: Meredith Mims McTigue, 864-656-3883, mmims@clemson.edu

Clemson’s History in 8 Inch Squares

As you enter Hardin Hall, you’re greeted with an artistic rendering of Clemson’s history. Some very abstract, others more representational, 84 tiles spread across a curved wall that stretches for 60 feet.

Installed in 2004 in the then newly renovated home of the history, philosophy and religion departments, the project was sponsored by the Art Partnership Program and funded through the R.C. Edwards Endowment. Artist Kathy Triplett was chosen through a regional competition that spanned six Southern states.

“The title [“Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny”] is inspired by the idea of the single cell and how it progresses to a complex organism,” said Triplett. “I used this idea of progression as a metaphor to represent the development and evolution of the University, from the initial spark of an idea in Thomas Green Clemson’s mind, through its expansion, diversification and growth into a complex and more open institution, which is in many ways like the growth of the individual student.”

The tiles range from the expected — commemorating Thomas Green Clemson and M.B. Hardin and the always present Tiger — to the unexpected — depicting the development of the Phorid Fly and the illusion of parallel lines. In an interview in 2009, Triplett compared the work to a poem.

“At first you grasp it with the heart,” she said. Perhaps the best description comes from Denise Woodward-Detrich, director of Lee Gallery, who said, “Standing at either end of the installation, you can’t see the other end. Just like the arc of the University’s history.”

Visit Atelier InSite to learn more information about this public art program at Clemson University and others .

Original article found in the 2013 Spring edition of Clemson World magazine on pg. 34: http://www.clemson.edu/clemsonworld/2013/spring/