Fay Jones School First-Year Students' Design Studio Work Exhibited in Indiana, Texas

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These are some of the black boxes produced during the fall collaborative design studio in the Fay Jones School of Architecture. They will be installed for an exhibit titled "Navigating Nevelson: Environments" at the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, held Feb. 25-28 at the University of Houston.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Work created by first-year design students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture will be featured in exhibitions this month in Columbus, Indiana, and Houston, Texas.

The work was created in two architecture studios last spring and summer and a third collaborative studio in the fall that combined students and faculty members in the architecture, landscape architecture and interior design programs. Students studied "Night Zag Wall" (1969-1974, painted wood), a piece by Louise Nevelson that is in the permanent collection at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

The students began their investigation of "Night Zag Wall" with a series of 4-by-4-inch studies that recorded oppositions observed in the sculpture. Conditions of deep versus shallow, regular versus irregular, static versus dynamic and others provided the students with a compositional understanding of the complex piece.

Students then used one of their 4-by-4-inch studies to generate a pattern of their own. They translated their patterns into individual layers and use the laser cutter to cut them. Those layers were reassembled into new compositions in which physical qualities of deep/shallow and positive/negative were explored.

Using three-dimensional modeling software, the students built a digital version of "Night Zag Wall" and then used that model to disassemble it into all of its parts. The students were encouraged to compose the disassembly in a logical way that revealed more about the part to whole relationship of the sculpture. Then, they were asked to reassemble the parts of the Nevelson sculpture into new configurations that revealed ordering systems like grid, field, centric, radial, linear, pinwheel and serial progression.

The final constructions were built using poplar and then painted black. For their final studio review, the students' assemblages were first arranged in a grid, and then reassembled into various configurations to explore the relationship of the part to the whole as well as scale.

The work will be exhibited from Feb. 20 through April 1 in "Navigating Nevelson" at the Indiana University Center for Art and Design, in Columbus, Indiana. This work is from the 2014 spring, summer and fall studios.

In addition, 50 of the black boxes produced during the fall studio will be installed for an exhibit titled "Navigating Nevelson: Environments" at the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, held Feb. 25-28 at the University of Houston.

Faculty members leading the studios were Russell Rudzinski, Lynn Fitzpatrick and Laura Terry (spring); Frank Jacobus and Terry (summer); and Rudzinski, Fitzpatrick, Terry, Phoebe Lickwar, Windy Gay and Anca Nelson (fall).