Thousands of students, faculty, staff, and visitors walk past the Henry’s entrance every day. To better engage these passersby and make the public face of the Henry more dynamic, the Henry Art Gallery initiated the Façade Window Project. In late 2010 the museum issued an international open call to artists soliciting proposals for a site-specific, large-scale media project that would transform the façade of the museum’s main entrance. The goal of the Project is to create a site-specific installation that is visually striking and attention-grabbing, arousing interest in and curiosity about the Henry and presenting a unique and captivating artistic vision. This new art installation will serve as a beacon for the museum and as an invitation to the campus and larger community to come participate in the art and dialogue happening at the Henry.
Sarah and Richard Barton (Barton Family Foundation) and Linden Rhoads, Vice Provost of UW Tech Transfer, in an exemplary display ofleadership and commitment, funded the initiative with significant lead gifts. Both Linden and Sarah have been longtime friends and supporters of the Henry Art Gallery; both have served multiple terms on the Henry Gallery Association Board of Trustees.
Submissions were received from ninety-one artists, architects, and art-making teams. The selection committee that juried proposals comprised:
Sylvia Wolf, Director of the Henry Art Gallery
Elizabeth Brown, Henry Chief Curator
Sara Krajewski, Henry Curator
Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts and Director of the Media Studies Graduate Program at The New School
Daniel Friedman, Dean of the University of Washington’s College of the Built Environment
Bill True, Henry Board of Trustees Chairman
Linden Rhoads, Vice Provost of UW Tech Transfer
Sarah Barton, MD, and Richard Barton, co-founder of expedia.com, zillow.com, and pozit.com
After careful debate the jury has selected three finalists, who will each be given a $5,000 stipend to further develop their concepts before the final commission is awarded. The finalists will be asked to complete a site visit before making their final presentations to the jury in November. The commission of $45,000 with an additional $15,000 artist honorarium will be awarded in December and construction willbegin shortly thereafter. The completed project will be unveiled in spring or summer 2012.
The finalists:
Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson are the design principles of Future City Labs, an experimental art, design, and research office based in San Francisco, California and Athens, Greece. Both hold a Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University. Gattegno also holds a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University, St. Johns College, UK; Johnson received his BS from the University of Virginia. Their work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Most recently Gattegno and Johnson were the 2008-09 Muschenheim and Oberdick Fellows at the University of Michigan; the 2009 New York Prize Fellows at the Van Alen Institute in New York City; and haveexhibited work at the 2009-10 Hong Kong / Shenzhen Biennale, the Extension Gallery in Chicago, and the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.
James Coupe and Juan Pampin are Associate Professors at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. James Coupe received his PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington and an MA in Creative Technology from the University of Salford, Manchester, UK. His recent works (re)collector and Surveillance Suite use computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information that he recontextualizes into narratives. Juan Pampin is an Argentine composer and sound artist with a Master of Arts in Computer Music from the Conservatoire National in Lyon, France and a Doctorate of Musical Arts in composition from Stanford University. His work explores the territory delineated by the concepts of site, memory, and materiality, considering listening as an active process of self reflection.
Ed Purver is a New York-based artist whose practice includes participatory, interactive, and site-specific installations with an orientation towards public art. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University and a Master of Arts from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He recently completed In Residence, a site-specific video installation commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial. He held a 2010 Fellowship in Video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has collaborated with and consulted for leading companies in the fields of lighting, theatre and architecture.