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January 11, 2008 > News > Book sculptures kick off new effort to increase campus art

Book sculptures kick off new effort to increase campus art

By Margeux Clemmons | Thresher staff

The stacks at Fondren Library seem to have taken on lives of their own following the permanent installation of Mike Stilkey’s art exhibit When the Animals Rebel, just the first evidence of Rice University’s recent efforts to increase art on campus.

The art pieces, which feature ceiling-high piles of colorfully bound books painted with whimsical boxing kangaroos and opossums perched on flowering trees, were originally on display this summer at the Rice Gallery in Sewall Hall. Thanks to the exhibit’s popularity and the work of Kimberley Davenport, director of Rice Gallery, and Mary Bixby, executive director of Friends of Fondren Library, the cantankerous animals have a new home in the library.

“They’re quirky, something to illicit a laugh,” Kelsey Zottnick, a Will Rice College freshman, said. “You see a giraffe made out of books, and that’s something I wouldn’t think to make out of books.”

Comments like Zottnick’s are exactly what inspired Davenport to ask Stilkey to create a large-scale piece for the Rice Gallery’s first summer exhibit. She discovered the new artist’s work while searching for gallery commissions in Los Angeles. At that time unfamiliar with the art business, Stilkey told Davenport he was surprised and honored when he learned about the space he was being asked to transform and the artists he was following.

The exhibit was originally established merely to keep something in the window during the summer months when the Rice Gallery was not in full operation, but according to Davenport, the unusual enthusiasm over Stilkey’s work set a precedent for future summer exhibits to be more than a modest enterprise. Nearly 150 people attended a talk by the artist Aug. 30, making it talk the most well attended Rice Gallery talk to date, Davenport said.

When it came time for the exhibit to be changed, Bixby stepped in to save the work from the usual fate of large installation pieces: permanent dismantlement.

“I think it brings some whimsy to the library,” Bixby said. “It brings some warmth into the spaces.”

Bixby first heard of When the Animals Rebel while she was organizing the library’s annual book sale, a major fundraising event for Fondren Library. Friends of Fondren Library donated over 100 books for the art project out of a total 5,500 hard-back books used in the installation.

The effort of relocating the exhibit was tackled by Rice Gallery Curator David Krueger. Krueger led a team who disassembled the art piece, storing the painted books in meticulously labeled boxes for their trip to Fondren. For one segment of the piece, library volunteers pushed at least 90 boxes from Sewall on carts.

Krueger also oversaw the placement of the various animals and surly human faces throughout the library, locating the works in unexpected places. Plans for the last pieces of Stilkey’s exhibit have been completed in the last few weeks, including the flock of birds near Fondren’s reference desk and one piece near the Digital Media Center, a technology-based branch of the library in Herring Hall, to illustrate the relationship between the facility and the main library building.

When the Animals Rebel is only one brush stroke on overall picture of the future of campus art. Both students and administration have increased their efforts to commission pieces with more diverse media in recent months. One of these changes is the June hiring of University Art Curator Jenny Strayer.

Already Strayer has organized the commission of three major permanent installations, which will be finalized in the coming weeks. She is also working with the Student Association on a low budget project to install temporary student art adjacent to current construction sites on campus and on a larger annual project that will call for one student art exhibit to be featured throughout the year and possibly auctioned off at the end of its display.

“We really look at it [art] as another educational experience for Rice students,” Strayer said, mentioning that some of the artists Rice commissions are highly respected both in art circles and among the general public.

Strayer also said that besides taking Rice culture and potential sites into consideration when choosing art finalists during the commission process, she looks at large-scale art as appealing to the greater Houston area.

“This is a way of building bridges with the community,” she said, stressing that projects such as the one being planned near the Collaborative Research Center on Main Street hold particular potential.

But the list of recent university actions to improve aesthetics on campus does not stop at Strayer’s new position. The university has also established a policy that will ensure 50 percent of all new large construction project budgets will be dedicated to commissioning an artist specifically for that structure. Buildings on the list include the new residential colleges and the Brochstein Pavilion.

Despite these future plans, Davenport said many existing high-profile pieces on campus go unnoticed or unappreciated, including the sculptures in the engineering quad by popular contemporary artist Michael Heizer.

“There are a lot of things hidden in plain sight,” Davenport said. She also suggested that a student project featuring current Rice art through a brochure or guided campus tour would highlight Rice’s unique history and myths.

Nevertheless, many students, faculty, and off-campus patrons agree that more art at Rice will be enjoyed by all and enable the university to stand its own amidst Hermann Park and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

“You don’t have to be a curator at the MFA to have something to say,” Strayer said.

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