Shared Space

According to Frank Lloyd Wright, “Space is the breath of art”: The areas around, between and within art can be just as meaningful as the piece itself – and, as Herb Parker and Joseph Burwell ’93 (pictured above) demonstrated in their conjoined exhibits at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art this fall, so can the areas around, between and within the artist’s workspace.

Most, however, are nothing like the idealized art studios that we envision: “After nine years of periodically working on my studio,” says Burwell, “it never became the efficient workplace that I dreamt of before I had to move out.”

That dream studio might in fact be just that: a dream. And so, when these two artists brought their studios together – Parker, a studio art professor, from just down the hall in the Cato Center, and Burwell, from Brooklyn, N.Y. – for one evolving exhibit, it not only compelled an examination of the relationship between the studio space, the artists and the works produced there, but also spoke to the ongoing collaborative relationship between the faculty and alumni at the College.