New Era for the New School

NEW YORK—The opening of the New School’s 32,800-square-foot Sheila C. Johnson Design Center for Parsons The New School for Design is significant for the university for countless reasons—it connects four previously disparate buildings on the Parsons campus to create an “urban quad”; provides a place for students, faculty, and the public to dialogue; and bolsters the school’s identity with a highly visible, innovative, and exquisitely detailed design by Lyn Rice, part of the architectural team behind Dia: Beacon. But perhaps most significant for the art world is the fact that the center includes the new Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, a museum-quality exhibition space that provides the New School with its first opportunity to showcase work from its private collection. The inaugural exhibition, “Soft Parade,” opens Friday and runs through June 20, featuring about 30 highlights from the extensive holdings.

The school’s 1,800-work collection ranges from postwar to the present, including such important artists as Chuck Close, Lorna Simpson, Richard Tuttle, and Kara Walker. But until now, few people were even aware that the New School had a permanent collection, mostly because the works have traditionally been interspersed among the school’s various buildings in New York—about 15 in all, according to Silvia Rocciolo, who co-curated “Soft Parade” with Eric Stark—the idea being to let students “live with” the art.

Many of the works in the permanent collection are by artists who have ties to the university, such as Joseph Beuys, who gave a lecture there during his first visit to New York in 1974. “There have been so many influential artists who have come through the school,” Rocciolo said. She added that some work in the permanent collection has never been exhibited before. “Soft Parade” marks the first time Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s untitled gelatin-silver prints from the Austrian artist’s Aktion Wien portfolio (1965–66) have been shown at the school. An untitled Richard Tuttle mixed-media sculpture from 1985 has had to remain in storage until now for lack of a safe place to exhibit the delicate work.

“This is an important and unsung collection in many ways,” Rocciolo told ARTINFO as we took a sneak peak at the exhibition during Wednesday’s dedication of the new design center. She added that the New School acquires its art without an endowment, relying instead on donations.

“Soft Parade” is aimed at highlighting the university’s historic support for socially engaged artmaking, and in a way, the entire Johnson Design Center serves that mission. Both the public meeting spaces and the Kellen Gallery are lined with huge windows—about 400 linear feet of glass, according to Rice—making them highly visible from the well-trafficked intersection of Fifth Avenue and 13th Street and allowing the public to observe “the design dialogue that is central to a Parsons education.”

“We opened it up completely to create as much transparency as possible,” Rice said.

In addition to the gallery, the center also provides a new home for the school’s Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Archives—a collection of drawings, photographs, letters, and objects documenting 20th-century design. And there are also the smaller Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, which were reconfigured and enlarged during the renovation and installed with movable display walls, which will showcase the exhibitions “Women Empowered: Photographic Portraiture by Phil Borges,” through March 24, and “Parsons Design Workshop: The Margaretville Pavilion,” through March 21. According to the school, the galleries will be used in the future to exhibit art created both on and off campus. Students' artwork is also a permanent part of the center, with super-size graphics created by Parsons own—one a photograph and the other a stencil design—that wrap around the two elevator banks.