The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University presents Circa 1963, an exhibition on view August 30—October 7, 2012.
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) at Harvard University is Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the last to be completed during his lifetime. In May 2013, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will celebrate its 50th anniversary as an architectural and artistic landmark.
Programming throughout Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 showcases the Carpenter Center’s vibrant history in diverse and creative ways that highlight the uniqueness of the building and its contributions to the artistic life of the University while celebrating Le Corbusier’s inventive synthesis of art and architecture.
circa 1963 opens the anniversary year with an exhibition of iconic works from the early to mid-1960s. Le Corbusier designed the Carpenter Center to be a laboratory for creative and critical thinking. Its open and interconnecting spaces are meant not only to encourage experimentation, but also to create opportunities for interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. The exhibition frames the history of the building critically and historically, and sets the cultural and artistic context for the 50th anniversary exhibitions and programming that will follow. Drawing on works in diverse media, circa 1963 thus presents an eclectic picture of what “contemporaneity” meant in the years of the building’s beginnings. The exhibition includes artists who taught or were associated with the Center in its formative years, many of whom contributed to a vision of “Cambridge Modernism” as a new extension of Bauhaus ideals of experimentation and abstraction, and cross-media explorations of the visual arts. The works featured in this exhibition each present creative and conceptual investigations of color, form, and design so as to open new perceptual relationships between drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography and their social environments.
Curated by David Rodowick, director of the Carpenter Center, the exhibition presents selections from the collection of the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Estate of Peter Moore, including works by Josef Albers, Albert Alcalay, Eduardo Chillida, Dmitri Hadzi, György Kepes, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, George Maciunas, Peter Moore, Yoko Ono, Bridget Riley, Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind and George Sugarman.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617.495.3251
www.ves.fas.harvard.edu