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Cape Fox Artifacts Home at Last Did You Remember Your Ear Muffs? Embarking on an Adventure Loving a Symphony Can Women Have It All? C-Span to Look at Life of Betty Friedan Smith Closes Financial Information Gap ............................

Art on the Road, on the Fence and on the Lawn While the Smith Fine Arts Center undergoes a $35 million renovation and expansion, tree saplings have been turned into a turreted three-story treehouse, treasured highlights from the Museum of Art collection have been sent on tour, and a chain-link fence has been declared an exhibition space. And for good reason: Smith is committed to maintaining a strong presence of art on campus even while its new art buildings are, for now, just concrete footprints surrounded by steel skeletons. Forget the whitewashed walls and special lighting of a formal art gallery. Starting this fall, the construction fence that stretches around the Fine Arts Center renovation project becomes a public art gallery au naturel. Last spring, the museum's Fence Committee put out a call for exhibition proposals from artists of any age. The works can be in any medium but should be able to withstand all types of weather as well as to be installed on a chain-link fence. The key ingredient called for in any installation is imagination. Selected works will be mounted on the fence beginning this fall until August 2002 and will stay in place from one day to two weeks. Also, the Museum of Art staff has organized selected works from the museum's permanent art collection into three highly acclaimed touring exhibitions: "Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art," "Corot to Picasso: European Masterworks" and "American Spectrum: Paintings and Sculpture." The traveling collections, stopping at international and national venues, will remain on the road through 2002. News and tour schedules are online at www.smith.edu/artmuseum. Meanwhile, back on the campus, the outdoor sculptural installation known as "Paradise Gate," created by artist Patrick Dougherty in April, remains on the lower campus lawn amidst Smith's science buildings. Dougherty's whimsical structure -- proclaimed by many to be reminiscent of a fairytale castle or a childhood treehouse (or, for this writer, an elaborate house of sticks that the wolf in the Three Little Pigs could never blow down) -- is sponsored by the Museum of Art in collaboration with the Botanic Garden. So magical is Dougherty's structure, made exclusively from tree saplings, twigs and branches, that it seems the perfect place to host a circus. In fact, performers with the 2001 summer tour of Circus Smirkus made a one-day special appearance at "Paradise Gate" in August. Like the circus, Dougherty's sculpture will only be on campus for a short time. "Paradise Gate" is a temporary creation, as are all of the artist's sapling structures, that will remain in place for another year.

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NewsSmith is published by the Smith College Office of College Relations for alumnae, staff, students and friends.
Copyright © 2001, Smith College. Portions of this publication may be reproduced with the permission of the Office
of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063. Last update: 9/9/2001.

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