On Friday, April 1, the exhibitions Crossings: Harriet Bart and Yu-Wen Wu and Passages: Walking in Contemporary Art opened at the Perlman Teaching Museum as part of the WALK! festival happening on- and off-campus this term. The festival is the brainchild of John Schott, a Carleton professor of Cinema and Media Studies who will be retiring in fall 2016. He convinced the museum, visiting artists, and various academic departments from art history to geology to join him in celebrating the significance of walking in varied aspects of life.
Prof. Schott kicked off the evening with a speech in the Weitz atrium about the history of walking and its creative potential. We learned that four-legged apes evolved to bipedal hominids 1.89 million years ago, and even after all this time, walking remains fundamentally fascinating and fascinatingly fundamental. The modern urban spaces of the 19th and 20th century renewed interest in walking, both as an exercise to fuel creativity and as an artistic act on its own. Prof. Schott walked us through some of the most important examples in art history, from Impressionism in the late 19th century to Surrealism in the 1930s, the Situationist International during the 1960s to large-scale earthworks in the 1970s. Prof. Schott concluded by introducing the work of walking artists Angela Ellsworth and Phil Smith, who are both guests of his course on site-specific media this term.
The artists Harriet Bart and Yu-Wen Wu then spoke about their installation in the Braucher Gallery. Both artists incorporate walking into their studio practice as a way to collect data and synthesize ideas. They elaborated on how their piece invites viewers to meditate on the migrant crisis, which reached a devastating milestone in 2014 when the number of refugees worldwide surpassed 60 million. The winding path made by river rocks symbolizes the migrants’ journey, and the numbering of the rocks represents the staggering number of people displaced by war, persecution, or famine.
During the reception, David Lefkowitz and Doug Bratland waged a two-man public relations campaign for the city of Nirthfolde, a “bucolic, yet bustling burg situated in a parallel universe overlapping Northfield, Minnesota, which has existed relatively unnoticed for over a century and a half.” The Ambulatory Nirthfolde Information Dispensary remains open at irregular hours through May 1; Crossings also closes on May 1. Passages is open through June 10. So get moving!