Art Attack

On a sunny morning in early June, on the lawn just north of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, two sweaty men in hard hats braced themselves against a floating, 3,210-pound tangle of Corten steel, easing it toward the ground. A third man, behind the wheel of the jig lift from which the mass hung by straining nylon straps, slowly lowered the lift’s arm.

The hulking piece—an amalgam of stout spires laced together with what resembled giant, ruddy, undulating lasagna noodles—hung just above a base on the green grass below, a metal plate bearing two pegs that needed to be precisely fitted into corresponding slots on the underside of the forged behemoth. The jig lift’s arm raised, then lowered, then raised, then lowered, the men grunting and shouting directions.

Finally the arm slowly dipped once more, the piece sank down upon the plate, and the men heaved and barked and strained to shimmy it into place. The metal surfaces ground against each other, then locked together. The nylon straps were removed; the jig lift beeped away.

This brutally elegant mass of steel, otherwise known as “Portal,” is a piece by Albert Paley, the modernist American sculptor whose work also can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. “Portal,” along with 14 other pieces, was installed on campus over the summer, composing Engineered Art, a traveling international collection that has come to live at Georgia Tech until at least 2014. Curated by Chattanooga, Tenn.,-based sculptor John Henry, who personally toured campus to select the ideal spot for each piece (including his own sky-scraping “La Tour”), the exhibit is an outward manifestation of a recently sparked effort to broadly and actively engage the Georgia Tech community’s creative side.

Arts@Tech, as the initiative is being called, has been in the works for about two years and should officially launch this fall. Not that Tech students haven’t been making room on campus for artistic pursuits for years now—among many others, DramaTech, the Glee Club and Erato, Tech’s undergrad arts and literature magazine, are all testaments to that. But, historically, arts-related activity on campus has been more bottom-up than top-down. Until now.

“The process of creativity in the arts is very related and very similar to creativity in design [and engineering],” says Rafael Bras, Tech’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “But the Institute had never really stepped out and tried to engage all forms of art as an inherent part of our education.”

The Arts@Tech initiative got its start in 2009 during the development of the Institute’s Strategic Plan. “I felt strongly that the arts and science and engineering have a lot of intersections,” says Bras, who dispatched an arts task force during the strategic planning process. “Many of our students not only appreciate and participate in the arts, but it would help them in their engineering and science as well as in everything else we do.”

Based on the recommendation of his task force, one of Bras’ first actions was to reassess the role of the Ferst Center. Since 1992, the stage has hosted productions by national touring artists, local companies and students alike—but its resources have been entirely focused on the performing arts. Earlier this year, when George Thompson announced he was stepping down as director of the Ferst Center, Bras took the opportunity to redefine what the position would mean for a new hire. The Office of the Ferst Center was recast as the Office of the Arts and will promote and facilitate arts partnerships on campus.

On campus, too, there is now the Council of the Arts, chaired by Aaron Bobick, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing. And Bras spent the summer developing the Georgia Tech Arts Advisory Board, comprising 50 to 60 alumni and friends, including Richard, IE 56, and Margaret Guthman, Hon 12, benefactors of Tech’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.

Most elements of the Initiative were still coalescing during the 2012-13 academic year, but campus life has already felt the ripples. In February, Clough Commons hosted its second-annual Art Crawl, featuring the work of more than 140 students. And in April, the Office of the Arts hosted the first TechArts festival, a two-day event that literally and figuratively provided platforms for creative groups from across campus to showcase their members’ work. The Guthman Competition, now in its fifth year, was the festival’s keystone event, but the schedule also featured student poetry readings, performances from student bands, human-and-robot dance ensembles and other exhibitions from student art organizations.

Though the Tech administration is now taking a more prominent role in arts leadership on campus, these student groups will remain independently run. “There’s no need to do anything for them,” Bras says.

“What the Office of the Arts and the Council of the Arts can do is provide services if they want them—to coordinate. When we have a festival, for example, we can call on the different groups: ‘Do you want to be part of this?’”

It will be more than just networking: All members of the external advisory board will pledge to make a financial contribution, in addition to donations of time, contacts and other resources. Some of the money may be opened up to student proposals, like an on-campus National Endowment for the Arts.

Arts@Tech is supported by funds from the Strategic Plan budget, and despite some student complaints about tuition hikes financing funky sculpture, the Engineered Art collection resides at Tech on loan, cost-free.

Steve Chaddick, EE 74, MS EE 82, a mentor capitalist, serves on the boards of Atlanta’s Alliance Theater and Woodruff Arts Center and has been helping Bras assemble patrons for the advisory board. When he was an undergrad, he remembers, there wasn’t much in the way of art on campus. “DramaTech existed, I guess, and there was some music,” says Chaddick, who’s also the chair of the Alumni Association. “But it was pretty minimal. In terms of visual art around campus, it was even more minimal.”

Even without Arts@Tech, the arts scene at Tech is more active now than ever before; since Chaddick’s days, more and more student groups have stepped in to fill the void themselves. But the world beyond North Avenue has changed over the past four decades, too, lending further urgency to the need to actively foster creativity on campus.

“Forty years ago, the analytical part of engineering was extremely important because we didn’t have computerized design tools—you had to do it by hand,” Chaddick says. “[But] today, somebody with a little training and a CAD program can do better work, faster and for less money. So you’ve got to find different ways to add value. That, to me, is why exposing students to the creative process through art is really valuable as an educational tool, not just an environmentally enriching tool.”

Bras concurs. “Arts@Tech, in my opinion, should become a ubiquitous way of life and thinking,” he says. “We are a university with a clear mission of science and engineering. We are broad spectrum, but everything we do revolves around that. We’re not going to give degrees in art anytime soon, nor do we want to do that. But clearly the arts are part of our personal lives and our educational process, and I think a very integral part to making science, engineering and everything that revolves around science and technology better.”

And it’s not just students that stand to benefit from the increased arts focus. Bras notes that some faculty and staff have been nagging at him to let them enter next year’s Art Crawl, which has so far been students-only. This year at the TechArts festival, a group of four poets—Blake Leland, JC Reilly, Bob Wood and Karen Head, faculty and staff from the School of Literature, Media and Communication—read from their collaborative book-in-progress, to be published this fall by Poetry Atlanta Press.

Head, who has published three books of her own poetry, is excited about Tech’s move toward a more artful campus life. “Art teaches people to take risks. Our students are bright and they are motivated, but they’re not especially risk-takers. They want to know what they have to do to be successful, and they want to do that,” she says. “That’s what I’m hoping that the focus on arts will change in our culture here at Tech—that it will bring out creative thinking. It’s going to make students better risk-takers, it’s going to make them think outside the box, because that’s how you change the world.”

Art on Tech’s campus might even do something much simpler, but no less profound. When Head first joined the Institute as faculty a decade ago, she rarely saw students enjoying themselves—not so much as a Frisbee tossed between classes. “They didn’t stop, ever,” she recalls. “I think work is really important, but if you don’t have some downtime—if you don’t take care of the rest of yourself and your soul—you’re going to have a problem. Sometimes it’s just a matter of turning the corner and seeing a piece of sculpture that stops you. It’s walking [into a building] and somebody’s playing a violin. It makes you pause.”

Even for those too busy to pause, the effect lingers. “People take it in,” she says, “even if they don’t realize they’re taking it in.”

Head, who attended grad school at the University of Nebraska, where a multi-acre sculpture garden displays more than 30 works by renowned artists, was especially thrilled by the installation of Engineered Art this summer: “I stopped and said, ‘I’ve really missed that! Wow! Yeah, that’s great. Can we keep that?’”

Bras, who admits some chagrin at his personal lack of artistic talent, also has been stopped in his tracks by the campus landscape’s new additions. His favorite is Doug Schatz’s “Crown,” a circle of red-orange painted steel spikes that appear to be shooting up out of the the lawn in front of the Campus Recreation Center. “I look at that and I think it was made for that spot,” he says. He’s less a fan of “Squirt,” the large orange curlicue that rests on the lawn between the Stamps Student Center and the Skiles Classroom Building, but he knows his dissent is half the point. “I want three students standing in front of that, looking, and somebody saying, ‘I like it’ and somebody else saying ‘I don’t like it.’ Does it have a meaning? I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

“What I enjoy,” he says, “are the conversations.”

 

To view a map of the Engineered Art sculptures and existing works of art on Tech campus, click here.

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