Art and Design at Duke

For this documentary assignment, of Art and Design at Duke, I found it fascinating to find out what my friends really thought about art in and around duke. These are some of the questions that I asked, and my friends replies:

Arthur Leopold: Should there be more public art at duke?

Gabe Bender: What is the most important work of art, on the Duke Campus, other than the work found at the Nasher Museum of Art?

Orfeus Shankle: Where would you like to see more public art?

Arielle Silverman: What kind of public art would you like to see on campus?

Rachel Diamond: How can public displays of art at Duke be improved?

After these interviews, it is evident that there is art work on campus that students recognize and know about. However, Students do want to see more art work in and around campus and make it more noticeable in their everyday lives. 

Where is visual art at Duke?

Where is art at duke?

That was the main theme for my project. I went to various sites and took short clips of the art present and finally decided to ask different people where they would go to look for art and how much importance they felt was given to visual arts in general. The overall view was that art was limited at Duke in both taking art courses as well as looking for art around campus. They felt that Duke was not the ideal place to pursue a Visual Arts major and they had to go looking for the art, it did not necessarily come to them. My interviewees were all genuinely interested in art, whether it was in photography, dance, music or paintings and they all felt that art at Duke has to reach out more to its students.

Art on Campus....

People's opinions......

cont....

cont...

Systematic Design

For my conceptual project, where we had to create a design that uses a system with inspiration from Sol Lewitt's work, I decided to create a system of an increasing pattern design. I wanted to make my pattern begin from the center and work its way out, so that there would be a center point on the design. Therefore, I began with a simple four squares in the middle of the graphing paper. 

After this start point, I began to grow my design from the center diagonally from each side. I increased the design outwards by two squares off of each point of the original starting square.

Once those diagonals were in place, I created a box around that enclosed the diagonals. This pattern continues up until my last 10th piece... 

Examples of a few other pieces within the design, and my 10th piece:

   

The color scheme that I chose came from a few experiments. I wanted to create the feel that the design was growing outwards from the page, to create depth from the center. I first tried dealing with red, orange, and yellow, but I realized that no matter how hard I worked on it, it did not really create the feel of depth that I was hoping for. Therefore, I moved onto the colors of green, blue and purple. I felt that these colors all are based off of relatively the same hue, and work well together. I still wanted to create some form of depth, so that is when I made the choice to make the color really dark first, and then continue the pattern with the same color, except for really light. I felt that the darkness of the color followed by the lightness of the color created depth. This pattern continues then, for each color following green. 

Representation of Art at Duke

I decided to interview my friends about the representation of art at Duke, and the interest they thought people took to it.  I did not include all of the interview, but as evidenced by the last clip, art is apparently important to some students more than others.  Matt Davis is an engineer and does not even consider art at Duke, and only really has any idea of art at Duke through his friends.  My friend Ellary also had a hard time coming up with art pieces that she could name off the top of her head, which is implies a lack of visibility for the few works of art that we do see at Duke.  She is more interested in Performance art, but even in this category, as she says, many times the actors are met with a small audience.  To me, art has a small representation here at Duke, and as Ellary says, even the "artsy" students must it seek out.  

Gina & Laura - Art at Duke

Laura and I worked collaboratively for this project to get a feel for how people within the Duke community see art on campus, the university's receptiveness to art, and where they think art should be better represented. Responses varied, but the overall responses we recieved were in favor of more student art, installations, public art, etc. It seemed obvious from our interviews that students' perceptions of Duke are that it is a university campus severely lacking in innovative and thought-provoking artwork.

Gina: Duke is not particularly known as an artistically liberal, creative, art-embracing campus, and unfortunately, some of these external stereotypes actually hold true. Although certain areas of campus are decorated with student-created advertisements, poltical beliefs, or random blurbs of graffiti (namely, the bridge to east campus), Duke's public artwork predominately remains the austere, memorial-type statuary or portraiture. As Babs so eloquently stated in her interview, this campus is in desperate need to art that can shock, inspire, or simply to make campus a more visually-stimulating, artistic environment.

Laura: I actually was not shocked by the student response in our interviews. Art is not a very prevalent element on the Duke Unversity campus. I feel like Duke ought to make more of an effort to showcase student art -- especially in more public areas such as the main quad, bryan center, east campus student union, and even the libraries. Art is a way to broaden minds and has various uses: breaking down social conventions, asking unanswered questions, etc. I hope that we, as students and members of the Duke community, can act upon this.

conceptual project

I chose to my conceptual project about aligned objects that create a face. With each new page, something on the face moves. This concept allows others to think of what they would tweak on the face. The face generally stays the same; however, some parts are altered. I chose to move the eyes, mouth, teeth, and eyebrows. Different color schemes consisting of a primary and secondary color were used and the part that was changing had one color while the rest of the face had the other. This enabled the viewer to focus in on the change.

The face is constructed in a patterned format that was followed for all ten pages. 

-Start by making 4 faint guidelines on the paper vertically. These lines are the outline of the face. All parts are within the lines.

1st-5 boxes in from left

2nd-8 bxes in from left from 1st line

3rd-8 boxes from left from 2nd line

4th-8 boxes in from left from 3rd line

-2 eyebrows 7 blocks  down from top, 1 block deep, 8 blocks wide

fit between 1st&2nd and 3rd&4th guidelines

-2 eyes 3 blocks down from eyebrows. 3 blocks height, 4 blocks width

count 2 in from 1st&2nd and 3rd&4th line

-eyeballs 2 block height & width, in center of eyes

-nose- between 2nd&3rd line 4 blocks down

2 in from 2nd&3rd guidelines. triangle shape with hypotenuse on top.

4 block top length, 2 block width

-mouth- the middle part is 8 blocks down from nose. 8 blocks wide 2 blocks height

between 2nd&3rd lines

the sides of the mouth are two diagonal lines covering 4 blocks on bottom line, 3 on top.

-teeth- two teeth, 4 block squares.  with 2 blocks in between

visual art @ duke

For my video project, I wanted to document existing art, student reactions to art on campus, and potential spaces for new art. Each of these topics is covered in a separate part. I interviewed three of my friends, all of whom have different perspectives on the arts, but who ended up saying similar things: we need more art on campus, especially student art!