Brown’s Percent-for-Art program has thoughtfully integrated site-specific public art onto campus since 2004. In honor of the 20th anniversary of this program, I sat down with the former director and artists involved to reflect on some of the program’s diverse projects and to gain insight into their perspectives on public art at Brown and beyond.
Walking through campus, you might get used to seeing our collection of monumental public artworks–or more surprisingly, you might walk past major works on campus without even noticing them. That’s the unassuming allure of Brown’s Percent-for-Art program; its works oftentimes seamlessly blend into the surrounding architecture. The context-conscious nature of Percent-for-Art projects comes from the program’s goal: dedicating one percent of all new construction or major renovation projects to the integration of site-specific public artwork. These projects–nestled into quiet courtyards, mosaicked on bathroom walls, spanning lecture-hall floors, or sheathing a glass pedestrian bridge–oftentimes require a closer look to appreciate fully.
Prior to 2004, Brown’s then-named “Sculpture Committee,” chaired by Chancellor Emeritus Artemis Joukowsky, facilitated the acquisition of public art on campus. Jo-Ann Conklin, former Bell Gallery Director and long-time leading member of this committee, recalls this time: “We first started bringing in loans from Noguchi and Lichtenstein; in the beginning, we wanted these modern and contemporary masters that people recognized the name of. We figured that once we had that base, we could move into things a bit edgier and more contemporary.”
Then-President Gordon Gee initiated the Percent-for-Art program during his 1998-2000 tenure, and Conklin spearheaded the program’s development. This wasn’t the first of these programs, and to understand how to structure Brown’s program, Conklin began visiting a number of similar institutions with successful initiatives. “We looked at MIT because they had a great program. Then there's the University of California at San Diego, who has a fabulous public art collection. There's also an organization called the Public Art Network. I went to a couple of conferences with them and started doing research on how this kind of program was structured,” Conklin said.
Standard practice for Percent-for-Art programs is to invite three to four artists to propose projects for a given construction. The committee then selects an artist with whom to further develop and integrate a project. In 2004, the newly-founded Public Art Committee began its search for the inaugural artist for its Percent-for-Art program.
“The first work we commissioned was Diane Samuels’. For that project, we invited five artists, each of whom came in and presented [a proposal for the pedestrian bridge spanning Brown’s Biomedical Center buildings]. Diane’s was far and above. She was the most organized; she'd thought through the project the most,” said Conklin. The project set a number of precedents for later works on campus, the first being a core collaboration with the department whose building the work resides in. Samuels sought out poetry and prose reflecting on the world of science. She describes realizing, “Wait a minute, these are going to be buildings filled with life scientists, and there's a huge Literary Arts department at Brown. I thought, ‘Wouldn't it be great to get people in the building and Literary Arts students to contribute text?’ Then I thought, ‘Why not the whole Brown community? Maybe people would be interested in contributing.’ That's how the ‘people part’ of it [...] transpired.” The project received hundreds of submissions from the community, spanning decades of poetic and literary work, which are now delicately etched into the glass mosaic encompassing the pedestrian bridge’s windows. The work, much like a scientist’s microscope, has a richness at both large and small scales. “In a way, that’s almost a metaphor for working with people. You start with an artwork, you want to do something, and then you [zoom out and] realize that there's this giant community out there who can support it.”
Beyond community engagement, Lines of Sight set another precedent for the program by occupying the windows of the Biomed Center’s pedestrian bridge: the seamless integration of artworks into their architectural surroundings. Other Percent-for-Art works on campus follow this model, possibly the most thorough integration being Sarah Oppenheimer’s P-131317, commissioned for Metcalf Laboratory, which was renovated in 2011. Oppenheimer (‘95) is a self-described “architectural manipulator” whose thoughtful interventions destabilize and subvert standard interaction with architectural space. “Architecture is an incredible lens [through which] to understand how we are interconnected,” she says. Oppenheimer’s carefully considered operations seek to illuminate the subtle interplay between experience and surroundings. In this way, P-131317 is a fitting complement to the cognitive, linguistic, and psychological research conducted in Metcalf’s laboratories. Oppenheimer describes how “manipulating architecture can tune those relationships.”
P-131317 is as much an architectural intervention as it is an artwork. Through a sequence of carefully considered operations, P-131317 transforms the building’s entryway. By inserting angled glass panels into the space and cutting large perforations into the entryway’s floors, the entire atrium effectively becomes an optical instrument, in which subtle shifts in natural and artificial lighting conditions greatly impact our experience of the space. As Oppenheimer puts it, “Making a hole in the wall opens up a whole host of relationships that have nothing to do with the wall itself, that instead have to do with the relationships through the wall.” Conklin describes Sarah as one of “the hardest working artists that we worked with because there was only a very small area of the renovation that she could work in, and it was a historic building. She probably developed five different proposals before we settled on a project we could actually achieve in that building, but she was really committed [to making it work].”
Oppenheimer, who received a Bachelor of Arts in Semiotics from Brown in 1995, is joined in the Percent-for-Art program by fellow artist and alumni Nina Katchadourian, who has two distinct projects in the Percent-for-Art collection. Katchadourian (‘89) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, text, sound, video, sculpture, installation, and performance (not to mention public projects). From an intuitive–and oftentimes humorous– perspective, Katchadourian’s diverse practice investigates themes of knowledge, language, nature, and communication. “I'm often asked where my ideas come from, and often the answer is that they’re from the very immediate circumstances that surround me, not only the things that I'm experiencing and living but often the dumb details of my life, too,” she says.
When she began conceiving her first Percent-for-Art project for the Faunce Student Center, Katchadourian recalled not only her prior experience teaching but also her time as a student on campus. “I remember that feeling so well, [having] all these questions that we’re all facing for the first time in our lives. And [wondering] how we’re supposed to figure these things out when we’re all equally lost [laughs]. You know, feeling like it would just be so nice to talk to someone who might have some wisdom to offer. I feel like it never goes away, that desire to hear a voice that spoke from a place of more experience.”
With this idea in mind, Katchadourian began an extensive series of interviews with alumni, taking advantage of commencement and reunion weekend to conduct hundreds of interviews. Katchadourian describes how “people said the most amazing and varied things. Such a joy for me in this project was how hilariously diverse the kinds of advice were.” Input ranged from “don't put sharp knives in the dishwasher because it makes them dull” (which Katchadourian notes she’s never done since) to advice about love, intimacy, identity, and personal struggles.
Ultimately, Katchadourian’s interviews included decades of alumni representing class years 1939 until 2010. The oldest alum was in his late 90’s at the time. There are roughly 15 hours of recordings in the work, and the chance of hearing the same recording twice is slim. “To me, that’s important to the ‘oracle nature’ of the work, that you really don't know what you're going to hear when you come because you could come every day and not hear the same thing.”
Katchadourian was invited back to campus in 2022 to complete her second project, What I Know About Magic. Installed in Friedman Hall, this piece represents one of many projects in her ongoing Sorted Books series. Sorted Books projects begin with a library, where the artist sorts through curated collections, creating clusters of titles that, when photographed together, form sentences. These phrases run the gamut from poetic, humorous, and critical to surreal.
What I Know About Magic draws from the John Hay Library’s H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana. “You know, when I was told about some of these special collections at the Hay, and this one came up about magic, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that's the one.’ Especially once I saw the books.” Katchadourian’s What I Know About Magic process began with an in-person visit to the library. There, she thoroughly documented her collection of interest. Equipped with photographs of the collection, in addition to notecards holding each book title, she began sorting, resorting, and testing varied assemblages of books, writing with the words available to her on the covers and spines of the books she had documented. Though photographic work isn’t commonly associated with site-specificity, this process effectively painted a portrait of the Hay’s special collection, imbuing the already richly alluring archive with an added layer of clever wordplay.
The interplay between thoughtful observation and intuitive process present in What I Know About Magic is complemented well by Spencer Finch’s The Garden in the Brain. Much like Katchadourian, Finch’s diverse body of work centers on contemplative experimentation in response to close looking. Finch is known for his interest in the ephemeral qualities of light, color, memory, and personal perception, which he reflects on through media spanning light installation, drawing, video, and photography. For Brown’s 10th Percent-for-Art commission, Finch was invited to create his work for the Engineering Research Center (ERC) in 2017.
As Conklin describes, when the committee invited Finch to campus, “We were imagining it solely existing in the building’s entryway, but he came up with this idea of, ‘No, I want it to be all over the building.’ He was excited by the prospect of a series of interventions and a diverse range of materials.” The project, much like Samuels’, began with Finch sitting down and speaking with the Engineering community. Finch approached the department with the idea to work with mathematical tessellations–complex visual geometries representing physical structure. As he describes, the department “was really a good match for me because it gave me something new to learn about, which was tessellation. It’s something which I had real interest in, but really just on a visual level from visiting Morocco and Spain and seeing the tiling there, and also some experience with mosaic titling, which is less mathematical. So, I had an interest in ceramic tiling, but I didn't know that much about tessellations. It was a little bit like going back to school, which is really fun.”
As Conklin mentioned, Finch’s project is possibly the most deeply integrated into the building it inhabits. The work spans nine different interventions, each representing different mathematical patterns. Utilizing media, including fritted glass, ceramic tile, wood flooring, plywood panels, and concrete pavers, these numerous interventions were able to be implemented within budget because of Finch’s idea to work with the architectural materials already budgeted for the building. As he describes, “We were able to do it because there was a budget for these building materials anyway, so I was able to change the existing interior designs to make them more specific to ideas about tessellation. That was really fun–that it just sort of blew up in scale unexpectedly. You know, we thought, ‘Well, we could do the tile there, we can do the pavers outside, there had to be frit on the glass for a big lab space anyway, [which was something else we could design].’ That was a beautiful part of the project: that it didn't require a huge budget [for] fabrication, that art can be integrated with the architecture in that way. We were able to expand the project without expanding the budget.”
Finch’s clever integration into the ERC’s interior architecture not only minimized the budget but concurrently connected the project back to the historical precedent of ornamental tiling, which initially sparked his interest in tessellations. These interventions play within vernacular architectural materials, directly speaking to themes of ornamentation and interior design through an engineering lens.
To date, the Percent-for-Art program has successfully integrated 14 public works onto campus. These pieces, in diverse ways, complement the numerous departments they exist within and stem from a myriad of artistic perspectives and media. As I spoke to artists and curators involved with the program, reflecting on 20 years, I ended my conversations with a question:
“What is the power of public art?”
Though the question lends itself to a positive response, I was surprised (and ultimately grateful) to receive mixed reviews from those I spoke to. Spencer Finch was cautiously optimistic, “I think one can hope that [public art] can shift the person's perspective a little bit. I don't think it's going to change a person’s vote [laughs]. And I don't think it's going to make a bad person a good person or a good person a bad person, but I think that there can be a shift. You know, some sort of humanizing effect, a way of connecting viewers with other people. So there's a lot of positive things that can come from it. [...] My great fear with public art is that if you do something in the public realm, it's usually there for a long time. If it’s bad, it’s just going to stay there and suffer, whereas not as many people see work that goes in the gallery or a museum, and people can put [that work] away into storage. So the stakes are higher in that way.” Nina Katchadourian challenged the pressure often placed upon public art: “There's a kind of expectation that somehow the work should be morally exemplary or something. There's this curious pressure on the artist to show up as a certain kind of ‘citizen,’ that there should be a certain kind of message delivered in a certain kind of way, maybe a little bit on the kind of grand and declaratory end of things. I find that very interesting and fraught. What is this kind of performance that public art is expected to do?” Sarah Oppenheimer’s response was similarly hesitant; Oppenheimer is “suspicious of making public work. It's dependent on the context. Each situation has potential and limitations. [...] How do you negotiate power and agency in making a creative work, given all the interested parties?” It’s understandable, given that those institutions often supporting programs similar to Percent-for-Art are corporate or governmental.
Despite these hesitations, there remained a parallel sense of optimism for this form of artwork in my conversations. Sarah added, “More and more over time, I understand architecture as shaping our social relationships; there's tremendous power in that. And artwork has that same potential.” Nina spoke to the long-term nature of these pieces: “Because you live with these works, some of them [have] this quality of revealing something over time that you couldn't get from the first encounter. That was a huge lesson to me when I began doing public work.” Diane’s love for the process stems largely from the collaborative aspect of these projects, and that they become a learning experience. She thinks it’s those qualities of public art that “artists like. You don't want to keep doing the same thing. And also to be able to wander into someone else's specialty and glean knowledge out of it is incredible.”
It’s important to recognize the bureaucratic structures that underlie and curtail many sanctioned public art collections and to question the interests of the institutions that disperse the funding of these projects. Even in an academic context, these considerations apply. Privately funded public art projects often come with political and economic strings attached, which threaten ideals of artistic freedom and expression. Artists commissioned to make public work for private institutions face the challenge of preserving their artistic identity and moral compass as they forfeit their full creative license. Through multi-stage approval processes, artists must work and rework initial concepts until they please all approval-granting parties involved. Ultimately, public art projects often reflect the give-and-take nature of these processes and the concessions made by the artist as much as they represent an artist’s initial concept. When approaching public artworks in the future, consider what’s missing from these works, what was lost in the push-and-pull of project approval, and question how institutions might be wielding art to bolster their public image and how might this work have been diluted to appease stakeholders.
Though approaching public art programs with a critical lens is crucial, after conducting these interviews, my perspective on “public art” remains hopeful. I still believe in the positive impacts that public art promises: fuller appreciation of space, greater sense of belonging, and increased access to artwork. Moreover, I believe that Brown’s collection represents a uniquely successful case study in which collaborating artists have an atypically high level of creative freedom in conceptualizing and realizing projects. I’m inspired by the cross-disciplinary relationships that these projects have formed and by the diverse perspectives and collaborations that facilitated the completion of these works. My conversations, in particular, made me more greatly appreciate the access I have to such a rich collection on campus. Next time you walk past one of these works, I encourage you to pause, spend more time with it, and reconsider its role on campus and in Providence. I graduate this coming spring, but I look forward to seeing how Brown’s Percent-for-Art program continues to develop and grow in another 20 years.
If you’ve made it this far, I highly recommend you consider attending a public art tour at Brown to better familiarize yourself with the many other projects on campus. If you’ve appreciated hearing the artist and curator insights in this article, check in on our website in the spring, where we’ll publish the full interviews conducted for this project.
(Cover image by Warren Jagger, via arts.brown.edu)
Brown’s Percent-for-Art program has thoughtfully integrated site-specific public art onto campus since 2004. In honor of the 20th anniversary of this program, I sat down with the former director and artists involved to reflect on some of the program’s diverse projects and to gain insight into their perspectives on public art at Brown and beyond.
By examining various historical and cultural practices in regards to fashion, textiles, and fabric-making, Chloe discusses the different ways fiber arts express community and identity in material or design choices.
Responding to the tense familial relations in Tina Barney’s "Jill and Polly in the Bathroom" and Larry Sultan’s "My Mother Posing for Me."