17/07/2012
Ellsworth Kelly’s Flying Colors Land at Dartmouth
By Stephanie Murg on July 13, 2012 7:58 PM
Photos: Martin Grant (top), Corinne Arndt Girouard (inset)
Visitors to the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, New Hampshire will no longer need to ask directions to the Hopkins Center for the Arts. They can simply scan the horizon for the rainbow that was added to the building’s eastern facade this week. The five aluminum rectangles—each measuring approximately 22 feet high and 5.5 feet wide—are the work of Ellsworth Kelly, who created “Dartmouth Panels” for the site and was present for its installation.
Dartmouth alum Leon Black (who earlier this year paid $120 million for Edvard Munch‘s “The Scream” at Sotheby’s) commissioned the wall sculpture, which will be dedicated on September 14 along with the new Black Family Visual Arts Center. Designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates, the 105,000-square-foot building will house the school’s departments of studio art, film and media studies, and the nascent digital humanities program. A plaza with a formal lawn and hardscape sculpture terrace will connect the new center with the Hopkins Center and the Hood Museum of Art. “We are actively pursuing extended loans of public sculpture, as well as commissions of significant new works for the dynamic space where the Black Family Visual Arts Center, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and the Hood Museum of Art intersect,” said Michael Taylor, director of the Hood Museum, in a statement issued earlier this year.
