DeWitt Godfrey T

Title: Pamplona: Public Art/Moving Site, January-May 2006

Location: New England Communities; The wedged courtyard of Café Pamplona in Cambridge (for which the sculpture is named), the missing building façade replaced with Pamplona in New Haven, and the empty lot in a quiet residential neighborhood in Bellows Falls

The course of my work marks a trajectory that simultaneously shifts away from strongly declarative, autonomous, individual objects to structures that emphasize the relational existence of form to contexts of material, process, place, collaboration, and also moves out into the public realm. The most recent projects, have utilized existing architectural and natural structures as the physical parameters for interaction and collaboration. These interstitial spaces exist as artifacts of larger competing architectural forces, in the collision of old and new building programs, as leftover, unintended and empty spaces subordinated to grand conceptual schemes; the physical intervention of my work restores functionality and meaning to these gaps in the built environment.

DeWitt Godfrey is an Associate Professor of sculpture in the department of Art and Art History at Colgate. In addition to this personal engagement with public space, in 2006 Godfrey co-chaired a symposium Public Art on Campus and produced Bus Obscura by Simon Lee for Colgate University. Professor Godfrey did his undergraduate work at Yale University, was a member of the inaugural group of CORE Fellows at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and received his MFA from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Artist's Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, a Japan Foundation Artist's Fellowship for study on Shikokoku, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Artist Fellowship. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. His current projects include a commission for the Blanchard Road Project from the City of Cambridge in Massachusetts.

DeWitt Godfrey