Open Call – CCRI’s Knight Campus Gallery
We Talk About Architecture, Architecture Talks Back
An Open Call for artworks inspired by the Brutalist megastructure; the Knight Campus of CCRI in Warwick
This is an Open Call for any artist, architect, writer, as well as CCRI alumnus/a, faculty or staff member!
A chance to interpret a building; An opportunity to dialogue with a style
Exhibition: April 5 – 27, 2011, Knight Campus Art Gallery (possibly other locations of CCRI campus in Warwick)
Panel discussion: Thursday, April 14, 2011, during All College Week
Eligibility: Open to artists working within any medium
Deadline to submit a proposal: January 12, 2011
(proposal should include name, medium, size and preferably also photo of any existing work that you are submitting. For a new piece, please submit a description and/or sketch of what you intend to create. Please consult the gallery director if you have any questions)
Deadline for delivering finished work: March 30, 2011
Installation: March 30 – April 2, 2011
Contact information: Viera Levitt, Knight Campus Art Gallery Director and Exhibition Curator, VieraLevitt@gmail.com, www.ccri.edu/art/
Budget: There is a possibility that a small amount of money might be made available to help cover basic production costs. If you are planning to create a new work and need assistance to cover its costs, please include an itemized production budget.
The Community College of Rhode Island’s Knight Campus Art Gallery director and curator, Viera Levitt, is seeking artworks for a show entitled “We Talk about Architecture, Architecture Talks Back.” Please consider submitting existing artwork inspired by the megastructure of the Knight Campus or create new work in video, photography, painting, drawing, 3D, sculpture, sound piece, dance, oral history, text, architectural model or even a cake inspired by the building created in the architectural style called Brutalist.
You can also contact the gallery director if you are interested in participating in the panel discussion.
The CCRI Knight Campus is the veritable “elephant in the room,” something large, noticed and not spoken about. We will use this exhibition and panel discussion to make the history of the 1972 completed building known to Rhode Islanders (as the one they love to hate) while making its effect on those who study and work there visible and articulated.
The Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission described the Knight Campus building as, “an enormous, flat roofed concrete megastructure with semicircular terminus and twin cylindrical skylight funnels set on a hilltop site and ranging in height from four to six stories”. The building was designed by Perkins and Will Partnership of White Plains, New York, in conjunction with the Providence firms of Harkness and Geddes and Robinson Green Beretta. The design was strongly influenced, the report notes, “by the work of the famous modern architect Le Corbusier and has been reviewed extensively by international critics….”. The Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission Report called it “one of the most striking and innovative contemporary structures in the state” due to its prominent location visible from Interstate Highways 95 and 295. But some people call this well-recognized campus destination the “mothership”, some faculty complain about its loudness, many students get lost again and again in its corridors and many consider this like other Brutalist structures, intentionally overwhelming to the individual.
While Rhode Island has been extremely aware of its 17th to early-20th century architectural heritage, it has not been as attentive to structures built since 1950. Yet it is within this environment where most of us live and work. By creating an art project that is in dialogue with the CCRI campus, we seek not only to explore this building afresh, but to inaugurate an ongoing reconsideration of how late 20th century architecture in general and Brutalism in particular affects us all.
