The University Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Just a Rumor, a new work by nationally acclaimed artist Anna Schuleit. Painted on the concrete facade of the Fine Arts Center, Just a Rumor is Schuleit's three-story-high, upside-down portrait of a face. When the portrait's reflection is viewed on the surface of the adjacent campus pond, the image is inverted, producing a double-portrait: the upside-down original and the right side up reflection. The painting will measure approximately 30' x 40', nearly 1200 square feet, and will be executed in acrylic paint. The opening reception will be on September 10th, from 5 to 7 p.m., and is open to the public.
A current MacArthur Fellow, Schuleit studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA 1998) and is the recipient of numerous art awards, including fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bogliasco, the Blue Mountain Center, and the RISD European Honors Program in Rome. Schuleit's major works include Bloom (2003), in which she filled the Massachusetts Mental Health Center with 28,000 flowers, and Intertidal (2007), a site-specific outdoor installation on the Boston Harbor Islands in which she addressed their military ruins, a work commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2009 Schuleit had her first solo-show of paintings and works on paper at Coleman Burke Gallery in New York.
Commissioned by the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Just a Rumor is a new work that enables Schuleit to connect her ongoing studio practice with her experience in large, site-specific art in an idiosyncratic way. For this project Schuleit selected an outdoor location where the Fine Arts Center meets the campus pond, enabling a low-tech "projection" of the painted face by nature alone, without the use of electronic devices or screens. The effects of the reflected face in the water will be changing constantly throughout the day and into the night, inviting the viewers to re-visit the site over the project's three-month duration. The pond is also home to numerous ducks that the artist regards as her unwitting collaborators in the piece: as they criss-cross the reflected painting, spontaneous moments of abstraction will be created, making the face disappear from the water's surface, and then re-appear at random intervals.
Just a Rumor is the artist's first project in Western Massachusetts since Habeas Corpus, Schuleit's widely-known sound installation at Northampton State Hospital, in which she turned the enormous psychiatric institution into a sound body for a single day in 2000.
Articles, reviews, and scholarly essays on Schuleit's work have appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, Americans for the Arts, and the European Artistic Research Network in Helsinki. She has appeared in radio and television interviews on NPR, CBS Boston, and on The Charlie Rose Show on PBS. Artforum's current issue lists one of Schuleit's works among its Top Ten list. More complete information about the artist can be found at anna-schuleit.com.
Click here to see a photo gallery of the installation process.
Interested in reading the Wall Street Journal article about the project? Click here.
Click here to see Anna's website dedicated to the project..
