Viewing the Visual Arts: Campus Art, Campus Life

Click on the slide show above to view images from the exhibition.

Point, line, form, shape, movement, color, pattern, and texture are the fundamental elements of visual design. At art’s deeper levels lie creativity, freedom, expression, and emotion. Six galleries around Boston University’s campus, from the independent nonprofit Photographic Resource Center to the 808 Gallery, provide at least one more element of design for students and visiting visual artists: exhibition space.

This week’s series remembers five of the visual arts exhibitions from around campus in 2006 and 2007, ranging from a graphic look at Hispanic stereotypes in American culture to an exploration of the myths and mysteries of Soviet labor camps. Click here to see “You People: A Graphic Look at Hispanic Stereotypes.” Click here to see “Printmaking, Past and Present.” Click here to see “You People: A Graphic Look at Hispanic Stereotypes.” Check back tomorrow for “Out of the Shadows, the Gulag.”

Campus Art, Campus Life
CFA Class Connects Art to Science

By Paul Heerlein and Taylor McNeil

A dozen large, colorful panels hang gracefully in the Metcalf Center for Science and Engineering atrium, their images — some like cascading cells, others like fractals — represent the mysteries of nature being studied by the building’s scientists. Called Visual Entanglements, they “give visibility and emotional tangibility to the research,” says Hugh O’Donnell, a College of Fine Arts professor of painting. It's the latest installation from his Site-Specific Art class, which is open to all BU students.

“It brings visibility to the talent that’s at Boston University,” O’Donnell said. Other art developed in the class is on display at the Photonics Center, on T signs at the BU West stop, in the FitRec Center, and in Sargent College, and more is planned. One ongoing project, headed by an art education graduate student, brings high school students to campus to design art for Sargent College’s Ryan Center for Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. The students are making mosaic murals of athletes using broken ceramics. “The people who go in there are broken in a way and will see things of beauty made of broken things,” O’Donnell notes.

The Visual Entanglements project was developed by two painting students, Brienne Rosner (CFA’05) and Holland Dieringer (CFA’05), “with the help of a whole bunch of physics, chemistry, and biology graduate students and faculty,” says O’Donnell. The concept was inspired by research on entangled photons, in which two light particles can act as a single unit but perform with twice the efficiency. “They looked at how you can cross-fertilize different kinds of imagery,” he says. “If it’s engaging enough, people can be led to discover the people working behind these things, in research.”

Future projects include more art for the Photonics Center and for the School of Medicine pharmacology department, as well as off-campus work for Red Bull, among others. O’Donnell’s work, site-specific art that highlights the collaboration between the arts and the sciences, is on display on the first floor of the Life Science and Engineering Building, at 24 Cummington St., and in the foyer of the Photonics Center, at 8 St. Mary’s St.

Paul Heerlein can be reached at heerlein@bu.edu. Taylor McNeil can be reached at tmcneil@bu.edu.

“Campus Art, Campus Life” originally appeared on BU Today in March 2007.