New lecture series planned

By Wiley Wood
Photo by A. Kim

From mid-May to late June each year, Norfolk hosts the 26 undergraduates who attend the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk, but though they live in the houses of Norfolk residents, they go largely unnoticed. A few more young people may be seen walking the roads, stopping to photograph a tree or a waterfall; a hand-lettered sign may appear on the lawn below Whitehouse to announce an upcoming lecture. Only in late June, when strange and brightly colored objects sprout on the grounds of the Battell Estate and the doors to the Art Barn swing wide for Open Studio Day, does the community have much interaction with the art school.

The summer art students, who are rising college seniors, have a reputation for being scruffier as well as quieter than the students who attend the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Lisa Sigal, co-director of the program this summer, along with Yale faculty member Byron Kim, acknowledges this. “And the program is scruffier too,” she says. She points out that the Art Barn is a standing wreck and that the studio building was torn down a few years ago when it became too decrepit.

Sigal describes the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk as vulnerable despite its remarkable 70-year tradition and voices the hope that her tenure as co-director with Kim, which is expected to last at least three years, will see the program strengthened and allow renovations to start on the buildings.

Community involvement is also a distinct part of the plan. 

Sigal and Kim plan to maintain and build on the various points of contact between the arts program and Norfolk. There will still be a weekly drawing class to which members of the Norfolk community are invited. “But there might not be a life model every week,” says Sigal. “We might go out into the landscape for a subject.” Sigal, who has curated exhibitions at The Drawing Center in New York City for the past seven years, believes that drawing “is at the core of so many practices.” There will still be an Open Studio Day toward the close of the summer session in late June, when the production of the past six weeks is on display. 

New this year will be an evening lecture series, organized with the support of the Norfolk Foundation, which will be widely advertised in the community.

Entitled “The Ethics of Color,” the series promises to consider color in relation to a range of social, environmental and ethical issues. The lineup includes Susan Schuppli, of Goldsmiths, University of London, whose work has treated the shrinking polar ice cap and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and who will discuss color as “a material witness to environmental disaster”; Aruna D’Souza, an art historian who writes about cultural appropriation and the racial dimensions of art; and Tomashi Jackson, a painter whose abstractions weave together social and aesthetic theory around the color line.

“We don’t want the lecturers to be constrained by our theme,” said Kim in an email. “We chose them because we thought they were related, loosely, and now that they’ve agreed, we just want them to talk about their work, [and not feel pinned] to our theme.” He added: “Color is impossible to define, so how can it have an ethics?”

Color plays a prominent role in the work of both directors. Sigal’s own images are part painting, part sculpture and part installation, extending out from the gallery wall into the viewer’s space or bypassing the gallery altogether. Her 2008 piece “Line-up” was a broad green stripe, visible from the fifth floor of the New Museum in New York, which ran up the side of a building in the neighborhood, continued across the rooftops beyond it and climbed taller, more distant buildings until it disappeared. Sigal extended the work across national boundaries, enlisting artists in other parts of the globe to prolong the line.

Byron Kim also uses color to engage social issues and provoke reflection. In 1991, he began his large collective portrait “Synecdoche,” now in the National Gallery in Washington. It consists at present of more than 400 panels, each 10 inches by 8 inches and each of a single color, arranged in a grid. Individual panels reproduce in oil and wax the skin color of a person whom Kim has encountered. Possibly the only colors not represented are black and white. More recently, Kim has installed “Sky Blue Flag” in Cheorwon County, South Korea, a region bordering the DMZ. A photograph of the installation, taken on a blue-sky day, reveals a white flagpole quixotically flying a blue flag against an even bluer sky.

“Art is not medium-based anymore,” says Sigal to explain why the summer curriculum is no longer divided into traditional courses on painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking. Art’s response to issues in society is more central, she says, and the students will follow a curriculum that includes courses in critical studies and advanced image making, with no medium specified.

Sigal and Kim are excited about the program’s future. “I love working with students at this age,” said Sigal. “It’s pre-market, pre-commercial, they’re just coming into themselves. They’re at the purest stage.”