The Fruits of Diversity

In a panel that offers a bounty of visual and aural pleasures, a museum curator and two artists describe how their work “dissolves boundaries,” in the words of moderator Adele Naude Santos, often “leading to new frontiers.” When she joined Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2001, Elliot Bostwick Davis faced the unique challenge of developing a new wing devoted to art of the Americas. This meant not just designing a space, but figuring out ways of presenting beloved, old masterpieces along with thousands of new works from ancient to modern times, for a new interpretation of American art. Stepping through a rich slide show, Davis recounts how she broke with Museum convention of grouping media together (Boston furniture, American silver), and created a space where visitors travel through time, from ground floor levels and first millennium artwork, to top floors and contemporary art from North, Central and South America. Davis aimed to demonstrate innovation from different periods, weaving together “strands of art” in a way that might capture the attention of a museum-goer, who typically “spends less than 30 seconds looking at any object.” Walter Hood credits the first generation of African-American landscape architects who had the “burden of representing their race,” for giving him “the freedom to improvise.” In a range of settings, Hood has set out to “reshape the old and familiar into something new.” In Macon, Georgia, for instance, in a neighborhood “polarized between blacks and whites,” Hood placed cotton bales in a parking lot with a clear view of a Daughters of the Confederacy obelisk. He helped restore a long-fallow Oakland, California museum, evoking the area’s vegetable cannery history by placing giant spinach tins in the lobby. Hood juxtaposed past and present, “creating a new aesthetic,” in a Pittsburgh hill district once the center of the African-American community but “wiped clean for a new hockey arena.” He created a series of rain gardens in the shado...

Channel: MIT World Video Length: 0s Date Found: Tue, Mar 08 2011 5:34 PM Category: Science Date Produced: Tue, Mar 08 2011 12:00 AM View Count: 0