Acclaimed artist to speak with Skidmore physics, math professors beneath her monumental sculpture in the new Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences
Latest Dunkerley Dialogue events takes place Thursday, November 17, 6 pm
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (November 8, 2022) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces its next Dunkerley Dialogue will feature acclaimed artist Alyson Shotz in conversation with two Skidmore College professors on Thursday, November 17, at 6 pm: Mary Crone Odekon, chair and professor of the Physics Department and Kenan Chair of Liberal Arts, and Rachel Roe-Dale, director of the First-Year Experience program and professor of mathematics.
The event takes place beneath Shotz’s monumental, site-specific sculpture Entanglement in the Glotzbach Atrium of the new Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences. The sculpture is the first work of art created specifically for a Skidmore College building. Professors Odekon and Roe-Dale were both members of the committee that commissioned Shotz.
Entanglement soars above the Glotzbach Atrium. The 750-pound sculpture turns and twists impossibly in midair, like a giant open knot or a mobius strip that leads the eye in endless movement around its sinewy curves. As a viewer moves beneath the sculpture, its painted steel shimmers and its colors transform from gold to green to blue.
The commission is a return for the artist almost 20 years after her 2003 Tang Teaching Museum exhibition, Opener 5: Alyson Shotz—A Slight Magnification of Altered Things, which presented her sculpture, video, photography, and painting — an interdisciplinary survey that explored art and science connections.
The November 17 event with Shotz, Odekon, and Roe-Dale is part of the Tang Teaching Museum’s series of Dunkerley Dialogues, which pair Skidmore professors with artists in a conversation format. The discussions are often a catalyst for new connections and understandings across disciplines and can spark new ideas for all participants. Dunkerley Dialogues are made possible by a generous gift from Michele Dunkerley ’80.
The event is free and open to the public. Note: the event takes place in the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences, which is on the north side of campus. The closest parking is available in the Arts Quad A and Arts Quad B lots, which are near the main campus entrance at 815 N. Broadway.
For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or tang@skidmore.edu, or visit the Tang website at https://tang.skidmore.edu.
About the Speakers
Alyson Shotz is an artist who works across media, including sculpture, photography, and video. She currently has a solo project at Grace Farms Foundation in Connecticut and was included in the recent exhibition Line of Wit at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has also been included in exhibitions such as The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art and Space at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and Pattern: Follow the Rules at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum in 2003, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 1999 and 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Guggenheim Bilbao; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others. Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Mary Crone Odekon is Professor and Chair of Physics Department at Skidmore College, where she studies the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure in the universe. She has approached this problem using computer simulations as well as data from a variety of telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Arecibo Radio Observatory. Dr. Odekon teaches across the curriculum, having developed over twenty distinct courses. She currently serves on the Lever Press Editorial Board, the board of the Astronomical Society of New York, and Dudley Observatory Board. She earned a BS from the College of William and Mary and a PhD from the University of Michigan, and has also worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Pittsburgh.
Rachel Roe-Dale is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Director of the First-Year Experience at Skidmore College. She received her PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a dissertation entitled Quantitative Models in Cancer Chemotherapy. She also holds a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from RPI and a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee. Her research interests include mathematical biology and medicine, modeling physical systems, and quantitative literacy. In 2016, she co-curated Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science at the Tang, her first foray into curating. Roe-Dale served on the faculty advisory group for the exhibition Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science at the Tang, and she co-teaches the Skidmore course “Math in the Museum,” a quantitative reasoning course that explores the connections between mathematics and art.
About the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences
The Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences (BTCIS) is the single largest academic initiative in Skidmore’s history. BTCIS features flexible spaces that foster unique interdisciplinary connections across the sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences. The first two phases of construction are now complete, and faculty and students are using its new state-of-the-art spaces for teaching and learning. The entire project is slated for completion in 2024.
About the Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for college and university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. The Museum is open to the public on Thursday from noon to 9 pm and Friday through Sunday from noon to 5 pm. https://tang.skidmore.edu