Tucked on a corner of a sprawling 350 acre campus of the University of Texas in Austin, stands a building that blends in with the others, however the exterior looks are deceiving. The Blanton Museum of Art gave me the feeling of stepping into another reality in dimension and perception. Built in 2003, the museum was specifically created to showcase pieces acquired by the university, including those housed in the former UT of Austin Huntington Museum.
The transport began immediately as I entered the building. Instantly I felt a beckoning to enter a room past the desks and advertising posters, filled with light and translucent colors of blues and whites. Set off by columns and arches of polished Texas limestone, I realized that I not only entered another room, but also transcended into a piece of art, “Stacked Waters” by Teresita Fernandez, an artist known for her evocative large–scale sculptures and immersive installations that address space, light and perception.
The work is 3,100 square feet of cast acrylic that was commissioned specifically for the Blanton. The only piece of furniture in this atrium is a bench that allowed me to look at, or meditate or transcend to another time and place.
The ceiling is not flat but constructed diagonally with skylights on one side to let in natural light and shadows, which dance across the various shades of blues, greys and whites that surround the atrium. As in a large body of water, darker blues rest on the bottom increasing in illumination, rising higher and higher until only the whites and light greys rest on top.
When the bright light of the Texas sun hit the various colors, the atrium is a beautiful crystal cove of water, however when shadows fall or clouds block the sun, the atrium transforms into an ‘angry’ ocean where whitecaps hover on a darker almost unreflective colors of blue. Fernandez’s vision requires “viewers (to) see vaporous reflections of themselves, the space and others in the surface, turning the work into a kind of projection that marks the real time activity of the museum.”
For more information, see www.Blantonmuseum.org.
By C. Katelynn Pepper/AAPJ Museum series