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>> This is a chaotic universe.
So what we need is our faith, our science, our reason and our art to get us through the day.
>> One thing that art does is help us focus our attention and I think one can make an argument
that in the 21st Century that's something that we're going to need.
>> The digital revolution or the digital Tsunamis changing industries left and right,
changing how we live left and right.
>> It's all about flexibility and bending and working in new ways.
There's no rules.
>> We move through a forest of symbols that is created via film
and video and now the Internet and media.
>> It's inspiring, it's logical, it's irrational.
>> It's art or experimentation that can lead you to the right answers.
>> [Inaudible] ideas will be tolerated.
If not, the thinking is not going to go very far
and I think that's something that the arts helps to foster.
>> What we seek in our lives whether it is in our faith, in our science
or our reason is there are moments when one plus one equals three
and that's what the arts do all the time.
>> Every day we fail a little bit and we examine that failure for a little bit of inspiration.
>> It's pretty clear that art is a way of investigating things
that we can't easily explain and there are shockingly enough many things
that we really can't easily explain through other research methods and art is a way
of tapping into those things that makes us human.
>> This is the role of art.
It wakes us art.
We have to be woken up.
The mortality rate for human beings still stands at 100%
and so what will we do with the time we're given?
>> I was very fortunate to be able to do some traveling in my mid teens and later
and especially in Europe and began to see firsthand some of the great works.
The first time I was at the Wright's Museum, there was a painting there
by Rembrandt called the Jewish Bride,
and it's a very tender painting between a bride and a groom.
The combination of the tenderness imparted between this couple on the one hand
and the light and the thickness of the brush strokes you really felt those are all
connections and I think that was to me something very personal and I almost wanted to reach out
and actually touch that robe and have a connection to Rembrandt
as he was creating this scene of light and love.
My hope for this building and for the whole area is that this is a welcoming home
where students can go to learn, they can go and feel it's okay to make mistakes,
they can find out more in discovering themselves, they can turn their own dreams
and visions into realities, and where they're just going to want to go and create and create
and create morning, noon and night.
>> How would you discuss the ways in which those groups are different?
>> Well, this is very geometrical.
These both the light I see a lot of, but these are like geometry.
>> I think if you ask any faculty member on campus [inaudible],
they'd say that the best learning takes place
when students are actually trying to do something themselves.
They're trying to create something.
So, as they're trying things, as they're learning things and they're working
with another person, their faculty mentor or other students in the class
who are also teasing apart those problems,
they're learning in the best and most effective way.
>> Our visual arts faculty are artists and teachers.
They're great at doing both and they actually teach art by doing art just
as our scientists teach science by doing science.
>> You feel like you have something deep inside of you that you're trying to make into form,
you're trying to make real and through a series of decisions this painting, this drawing,
this sculpture becomes real and it is so satisfying to realize
that you made the right steps to make that happen and it's a joyous feeling, you know,
it's a feeling of very deep, deep satisfaction.
A feeling that I have expressed myself very clearly and there was no muddling,
there was no second guessing; it is a true statement for right now.
I never feel like one totally understands the creative process.
You try to ride it and you try to be with it.
>> What excites me about animation is that it works.
There's this little thing in our eye that allows us to see a sequence of still images
and rapid motion and that will never get old to me.
A lot of people when they hear animation they think characters, they think 3-D bunnies,
they think narrative, but experimental animation is more in line with choreography or painting,
you know, allowing these things to move in time.
Sometimes students have grown up on a certain type of media,
they have an idea of what media should look like.
I'm interested in challenging that.
I want you to make something that doesn't look like anything I've seen on television.
So, for students to go through that is important because it is this process of experimentation
that could lead you say to another right answer.
>> Games are fascinating to me in part because they're a sight somewhat set apart
from everyday life and they allow world to be created by a rule structure
that is determined not only by the game designer but agreed to by the player.
To me that's an amazing source of possibility because we can try things out,
we can act things out, and we can see what positive and negative things could result
from our own decisions, from our own actions, from our own thought processes.
In addition to that, we have a way of thinking about technology itself
and understanding how the digital affects our culture and those kind of deeper questions
about the role of technology in everyday life and the role and technology
and culture really are a place where we can get to some deep human questions
and that's really the heart of humanity is understanding what it means to be human.
>> We want our faculty and our students to think of themselves as the best in the world
and to be world class at anything requires world-class facilities.
When you look at the Black Family Visual Art Center,
you think this is a world-class facility.
This demands world-class talent.
The beautiful thing is Dartmouth alumni built this space.
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>> When Dartmouth alumni were here as students, they were inspired, they were passionate
and now they want to impart that same passion and inspiration to the next generation
of students and, in fact, to every generation of students.
When you look around this campus, that's actually what you see.
You see the imprint of generations of Dartmouth alumni passing on the passion and inspiration
that they received at Dartmouth to the next generation.
>> When I think of the real factors that have made me love art and have art be part
of my life, certainly first I would say was my mother because she was and she still is,
she's 91 and she's still painting.
I remember even as a little boy and her little studio in our apartment was next to my bedroom
and she would come home every week from the art students league where she would be studying
with a group of water colors she had done there.
I would go into the studio and we would review them.
It was a great and enjoyable discipline at a formative age and so clearly
that was one very important influence.
I'd say the second was my aunt, her sister.
She was a terrific art dealer and a very important art dealer back in the 60s and 70s
and she brought a lot of American artists to the fore.
She was always surrounded by artists and by things happening in the art world.
On the transformative side, I took actually one art history class.
That was with John [inaudible] and life comes full circle.
My second son who graduated from Princeton, also had John [inaudible]
as his professor studying pop art and he loved him 5, 6 years old
and to me he was just an eye opener.
When you look for a great professor, part of it is, you know, that he can give you breadth
and depth in a subject but also is being able to present it
in a way that's stimulating and motivating.
>> When I was at Dartmouth, there was no Hopkins Center, there was no Hood Museum;
there was really nothing to reject the creative arts.
>> When I got to Dartmouth, I started thinking about how I could do what I wanted to do
in engineering and art and I didn't think I could do a full double major so I actually went
to the Dean Carl Long of the engineering school and to Matt Weisocky [phonetic] who was chair
of the visual studies department, and I said I'd like to do a modified major.
They both kind of rolled their eyes back and said, well, why would you want to do that?
I'm pretty sure that I was the first formally designated modified major
in engineering and studio art.
It's now the most commonly modified major in the engineering major.
>> Theatre school, arts, media, I think what it does is develop your eye and I think
if you can learn to open your eyes
and see things I think it develops a certain awareness of what's going on in the world.
>> As a child, Mark made animated films with his sister.
Yet when he went to Dartmouth he originally wanted to be a physician.
>> My parents are the only Jewish parents in the world that talked their son
out of being a doctor and becoming a television executive.
[laughter] Bravo.
>> We all ended up moving to New York and called ourselves the Dartmouth Mafia
because we all worked for each other and many
of my early films were done with all my Dartmouth friends.
Even our Dartmouth film professors sometimes came.
Moire Raff [phonetic] who was a film professor who lived in New York,
and I remember showing him an early treatment for a film and him nodding and saying, okay,
yeah, and then later when he saw us he goes, you know, it actually worked.
I didn't think it was going to work when I read it the first time but you actually made it work,
you know, and we were still getting feedback from our Dartmouth professors.
>> Dartmouth has been the leader in many ways in parts of computing and the visual arts
and other elements that come all together to create this community, but they have been
over here and over there and bringing them into one place
where they can have their creative dissonance with all the elements
to make it as powerful as possible.
>> The single most important thing about the new building is it will bring together the community
of faculty and students who over the past decade that I've been here have been spread
across three different buildings.
>> Sharing the same space is going to allow for structure
but then also organic cross pollination of ideas between students and then also professors.
>> We really do want to connect these things to see what happens,
to see what kinds of new discoveries come from those connections with each other.
>> The Black Family Visual Arts Center is designed in the most wonderful way
to make those intersections between disciplines seamless.
>> Dartmouth needs and benefits in my mind from more places
where all those people can come together, and I hope this little pavilion is one
of those places on a nice afternoon.
>> I think that is one of the most exciting things about the seminar to me is that we find
in really creative companies they find ways to force employees together
so that there is an exchange of ideas in the very informal setting.
It's not about a meeting to talk about what you're going to talk about.
It is an opportunity for inspiration and with cross pollination of expertise and I think
that is one of the things that really excites me about this room.
>> My daughter, Anna, graduated from Dartmouth in 2010, and she was a studio art major.
My son, Rhett, who died of cancer when he was 21,
was a student at Maryland Institute College of Art.
He was totally selfless and totally courageous and really it's Rhett I'm trying to honor
with this and the way he went about his life.
>> It will feel like a home to students that aren't necessarily seeing themselves
as becoming practicing artists because it will feel
like a place where their expression can live.
>> I think it's very important to create a whole area or zone or district
which said come here all of you interested in the creative arts.
>> When you walk up the street and you approach those panels walking up Lebanon Street
and you start seeing this color peaking out, you start getting excited, you want to walk faster.
>> What I want you to respond to is how the color in the panels work together
and work with everything else around it.
>> I think Ellsworth Kelly is one of the giants in modern and contemporary art in minimalism.
He's both a painter and a sculptor.
>> I hope that this new piece, which is called the Dartmouth Panels, nice name, nice college,
I hope it gives people the pleasure that I get from it.
>> So the Black Family Visual Art Center has really opened a new door to our campus.
When you stroll into the Muffet [phonetic] Art's Plaza, you really get the feeling that you're
in an exciting new neighborhood and it's the kind of neighborhood that many faculty
and students are going to want to call home.
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>> Dartmouth is committed to liberal arts education.
We feel this is just another step in the right direction broadening the educational
opportunities for the young people.
>> Having a leading facility like the Visual Arts Center will encourage students
from all sorts of majors, all sorts of walks of life, all sorts of disciplines
to come experiment, try to learn, develop.
>> New thinking and new ways of looking at stuff can be extremely additive
to the community and liberating to the community.
>> The ambition that our students already have is going
to be amplified and emboldened in the new space.
You want to make stuff, you want to make things in the building.
>> It'll open up the creative process because the process can apply in any discipline,
the process can lead to beautiful objects and it can lead to scientific discovery.
>> We don't know what's going to happen, we don't know what people are going to produce
and we shouldn't know what they're going to produce;
otherwise we would just be coming up with the same old answers.
>> Even though we sometimes commend the understanding or the importance of arts
to the outer orbit of Pluto it turns out to be the bright burning sun
of this particular solar system called Dartmouth.
>> I have no doubt that this building is really a marker for Dartmouth.
It's a moment.
It is allowing us to do something for our students and our faculty that is transformative
and it's going to stretch well beyond the arts itself.
It will involve the campus and it allows us to say
that that entire arts district is central to this campus's heart.
>> We as people are only on this earth for a short period.
We really ought to enjoy the world and its beauty and all the wonderful things in it.
If Dartmouth can help generations of young people who have imagination
and curiosity, then I think it's well worth it.
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