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Sculptor Stacy Levy will work with Lafayette students and local artists to create an installation titled Blue Lake over three or four days starting Monday. The piece will be exhibited April 1-May 8 at the Williams Center for the Arts Gallery.
There will be an informal opportunity to speak with Levy and see the work in progress 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 30, at the Williams Center. Levy will give a lecture noon Friday, April 22 — Earth Day — in the Williams Center Black Box theater. She also will attend a closing reception at the Williams Center 3-5 p.m. Sunday, May 8. Reception visitors are invited to take home a “bouquet” of stems from Blue Lake for Mother’s Day.
The artist typically focuses on themes such as water, wind, tides, pollution, and decay; her works tell the stories of specific sites and their intersection of ecological and cultural influences. Her Lafayette installation, a project she has had in mind for several years, is a departure. Using steel rods, blue vinyl discs, and particle board — not unlike some of the materials Levy used in her Urban Oldfield installation — Blue Lake will not be a representation of an existing lake, nor use materials from an existing body of water, but will be like a “mirage,” representing a longing for water and the absence of a perfect blue lake in the landscape.
In awarding her a Fellowship in the Arts in 1992, the Pew Foundation stated, “As an artist, Ms. Levy acts as nature’s translator by using technology or representation to, in her words ‘create an instant of wonder and understanding for the viewer.’ [She] tempers that sense of wonder with the assertion that we are continually moving farther from nature and that we are forever in danger of losing touch with our roots.”
Levy, who has an MFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, combines art and science in her work. She minored in forestry as an undergraduate sculpture major at Yale and is trained in environmental science and landscape architecture.For Testing the Waters, Acid Mine Drainage and Art at Vintondale, Pa., 2002, she was part of a team creating a park for acid mine drainage (AMD) water treatment. (AMD occurs when rainwater comes into contact with the coal on the surface and in the walls of abandoned coal mines, creating acid water.) She has described the Vintondale project as a “piece of art also working as a water treatment plant.”
She collected water from the Delaware River and its tributaries to create Watercourse, 1996, an installation at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, of 8,000 cups filled with water that mapped the river in the gallery. The color of the water in the cups varied depending on the algae in the collected water. Empty cups represented creeks that no longer exist. As the water evaporated, different-colored residue was left behind.
Levy worked with mold and algae to created micro-floral designs with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wis. For Urban Oldfield at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, she created a full-scale “diagram” of what plant life would have existed on the lot if the ICA had not been built. In the installation Clerestories: Seeing the Path of the Wind, 1991, fans were placed in the gallery around a field of more than 1,000 organza flags. These fans received information from a weather station installed outdoors, which replicated the path and strength of winds inside the gallery.
Upcoming projects include Tide Flowers, Saline Gradient for Hudson River Park, Piers 25 and 26, New York City, with Sasaki Associates. In an earlier river project, Levy, artist Winifred Lutz, and Delta Group Landscape Architects designed Confluences: Flows of the Schuylkill for Schuylkill River Park in Philadelphia.
Levy’s recent one-person gallery/indoor exhibitions have been at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wis.; University of Texas at San Antonio; and the ICA. She has been included in recent group exhibitions at Santa Fe Art Institute; Heinz Architectural Center, Cincinnati; Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany; and Mass MOCA, North Adams, Mass. She is represented by Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, as well as noon-5 p.m. the first Sunday of each month for First Sunday Easton; a half-hour before Williams Center performances; and by appointment. For more information, call (610) 330-5361, email artgallery@lafayette.edu, or visit www.lafayette.edu and choose “Cultural,” “Williams Center for the Arts,” then “2004-2005 Exhibition Schedule.” The Williams Center is located at the intersection of Hamilton and High Streets on the main campus of Lafayette.
The Williams Center gallery is funded in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts.