Sculptural tribute to Fergusson underway

Freddy Deknatel Arts Editor

The Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC) will honor President Fran Fergusson's 20 years at Vassar with the permanent installation of 20 bench sculptures by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. Vice President of Finance and Administration Betsy Eismeier announced the project via an all-campus e-mail on April 6. Holzer is known for such text-based, public installations as last year's For the City, when, for a succession of fall nights, she projected declassified government documents on the side of New York University’s Bobst Library, as well as poetry on the Rockefeller Center and the New York Public Library.

“Her approach is interdisciplinary—she combines art with literature, with philosophy even,” said FLLAC Director James Mundy.

Indeed, Holzer’s 20 benches—cut from green Laurentian granite, named for the Laurentian Mountains in Canada—will be sandblasted with inscriptions of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop ’34.

According to Mundy, Mark Lerner of the Friends of the FLLAC made the original plans last year to honor Fergusson with a purchase of a work of outdoor sculpture that could then be sited on campus. However, a committee of the Friends, including architect Cesar Pelli, Peter Stearns, one of the founders of the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY, as well as Fergusson herself, refined the idea as they “quickly moved from buying a work—as it were, retail—to a commission,” said Mundy.

When Mundy called Holzer’s New York dealer Cheim & Read of Chelsea on behalf of the Friends, he was surprisingly greeted on the other line by Vassar alumnus Adam Sheffer ’92—“a stroke of luck,” he said. Holzer agreed to come and survey the campus late last fall, and met with Fergusson in New York earlier this year. “Fran mentioned the new Bishop book (Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments) and that suddenly resonated,” said Mundy of Hozler’s reaction to using Bishop poetry in her sculpture.

“She had no shortage of work,” Mundy intoned, referencing Holzer’s current projects in Singapore, St. Petersburg, San Diego, and in Ireland for this month’s Samuel Beckett Centenary Festival, but Holzer signed on to the project after the surveying the campus and meeting with Fergusson. However, Holzer and Fergusson initially disagreed about the location of the installation. “Fran wanted something around the library; Jenny around Sunset Lake,” explained Mundy.

The 20 benches, more than Mundy expected—“I thought five, maybe, if we’re lucky”—will line the pathway from the College Center to the Students’ Building that borders Noyes Circle. Joe Kirchhoff, who owns and operates Kirchhoff Construction, has donated the new path as a gift to Fergusson in recognition of her two-decade presidency. Kirchhoff
Construction has been working around the clock since April 7, removing the existing brick and asphalt sidewalk, widening the path, and pouring new concrete. Holzer’s benches, currently being cut from a quarry in Rutland, VT, will be installed in time for a May 9 dedication ceremony. Lines of Bishop’s poetry will read vertically on some benches, and horizontally on others.

“If [Holzer] didn’t already exist, we would have had to invent her because of this fit,” said Mundy, though he did acknowledge that Maya Lin, famous for her Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall, was briefly considered as well. “The political perspective to [Holzer’s] work, too, which exists in many of her Truisms seemed to fit well at a liberal arts institution,” said Mundy. Truisms is an ongoing project begun by Holzer in 1979 that includes a collection of sardonic confessions, blithe matters-of-fact, and other aphorisms that have been put on street posters, telephone booths, a Times Square LED billboard in 1982, and even on a BMW V12 racecar at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1999.

Much work is still to be done in preparation for Holzer’s installation. Seven hundred feet of new sidewalk concrete will be poured by next week, said Associate Director of Buildings and Grounds Jeff Horst. After Blacktop Maintenance Corporation digs the twenty holes for the benches, filling them with packed gravel that “will allow the landscape to envelope the benches after a while,” Holzer’s granite sculpture benches, each weighing some 800 pounds, will be installed in early May.