Students Showcase Interdisciplinary Art Exhibit at Boston’s First Friday

Students in Neil Leonard’s Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute (BIAI) seminar have spent much of 2014 exploring the interplay of light, sound, and architecture.

December 22, 2014

Seminar students in Neil Leonard’s Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute (BIAI), the only program of its kind in the U.S., have spent much of 2014 exploring the interplay of light, sound, and architecture. Earlier this year, the electronic production and design (EPD) majors in the course wowed attendees at the opening dedication of Berklee’s new 16-floor building at 160 Massachusetts Avenue with their “play the building” display, which married colored lights throughout the tower to performances by student bands. At Boston’s most recent First Friday art gallery night on Thayer Street—home to much of Boston’s contemporary art—students reprised the concept for those strolling up and down the strip of galleries with plastic cups of wine in hand.

Time and Space

In preparation for the installation, which was set at the Miller Yezerski Gallery, students traveled to New York and met with famed sound/visual artist Stephen Vitiello, a Guggenheim Fellowship grantee and associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“We went to New York to see some sound installations and met the curators and artists involved with those shows,” Leonard said, chatting in the Miller Yezerski Gallery as his students sort through cables, cords, lights, speakers, and computer programs in setting up the installation. “We saw one at the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Katonah, and then we went to Stephen Vitiello’s gallery, American Contemporary, and La Monte Young’s Dream House in Soho.”

In true interdisciplinary fashion, students in the seminar worked not only with each other on a series of music vignettes, but with lighting designer and artist John Powell, who has worked on major public art projects such as the lighted bridges of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Powell renewed his mentorship role from the “play the building” project but took it a step further by adding a photographic dimension to the project. Powell operated a shop on Thayer Street in the early 1980s, where he put himself through college by making cast iron railings, pursing his art on the side; the new exhibit incorporated photos of Thayer that Powell took back in those days.

“The only reason I have those old images of Thayer Street is that I was testing a roll of black and white Polaroid film, which isn’t made anymore,” Powell said. “Thayer Street was a muddy disaster back then but it had a lot of musicians and it still had people making things like shoe brushes for manufacturing.”

At the installation, the slides and lights were set to dreamlike, almost ghostly music from students in the seminar—the perfect soundtrack for projecting images of Thayer Street past onto Thayer Street present.

Making a Building Sing

Between the lighted imagery and the music, which those passing by experienced via speakers attached to the gallery’s glass windows, the aim, said student Stephen Hensley, was that those traversing Thayer Street for First Friday would get the sense that “it’s the architecture that’s singing, because that’s what’s been here for so long,” a concept Hensley considers both accessible and beautiful.

Hensley, a seventh-semester EPD student who plans to graduate in May, was instrumental to aligning the lights and the music, working closely with Jason Lim ’13, a former BIAI student and co-owner of Brooklyn-based modular synthesizer company Qu-Bit Electronix; Leonard said Lim passed the “play the building” torch to Hensley. Along the way, Hensley found that executing the project involved a lot more work than he would have foreseen from the outset.

“I’m learning that the art is only the beginning part of the process,” Hensley said. “After that, the logistics are actually the hardest part. I think that’s a lifelong lesson that’s really important—stepping back from the art for a bit to understand that there is more to it if you want to get something done.”

It was all worth it, however, when the project came together to draw the eyes and ears of First Friday gallery-goers.

“You really get out as much as you put in, and Neil facilitates that incredibly,” Hensley concluded.

Leonard, too, was pleased with the outcome—both in terms of the art installation and in terms of the takeaways for his students.

“We’ve been looking at sound installations and sound as it connects to architecture all semester,” Leonard said. “One of the things they got from Stephen Vitiello’s critiques was ‘less is more,’ which is not their ‘go-to’ place. They want to show off what they’ve got, but in a context like this, they have to leave space for others.”

In the end, that’s just what the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute students did, creating an alluring exhibit that captivated many First Friday art seekers who took time to soak it all in.