ART CITIES:Cambridge-Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko painted the Harvard Murals in 1962 and officially installed them in January 1964 in a penthouse dining room of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center. High levels of natural light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows ultimately caused Rothko’s colors to fade over time, and the five paintings showed differing patterns of color loss. Deemed unsuitable for exhibition, the murals entered storage and were largely overlooked in the past half-century.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Harvard Art Museums Archives

Featuring 38 works from 1961–62, including the murals and many of the artist’s related studies on paper and canvas, the exhibition explores Rothko’s creative process. The studies on canvas provide perspective on Rothko’s process as he worked from small to large scale. This new presentation of Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals features innovative, noninvasive digital projection as a conservation approach. The exhibition returns this mural series to public view while also encouraging study and debate of the technology. The technique employs a camera-projector system that includes custom-made software developed and applied by a team of art historians, conservation scientists, conservators, and scientists at the Harvard Art Museums and the MIT Media Lab. The digital projection technology restores the appearance of the murals’ original rich colors. The exhibition includes multimedia components accessible via interactive screens in the gallery. Those components are all also assembled in a Vimeo channel. The content includes interviews with members of the project team as well as with Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the artist’s children, and other individuals who have expert knowledge about Rothko and the Harvard Murals commission.

Curating: Mary Schneider Enriquez, in collaboration with Narayan Khandekar, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Christina Rosenberger and Jens Stenger., The camera-projector system and software were developed with Ramesh Raskar and Rudolf Gschwind.

Info: Harvard Murals, Curating: Mary Schneider Enriquez, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Duration: 16/11/14-27/6/15, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.harvardartmuseums.org