Translating Art into Life

Three months ago, 28,000 living flowers filled the rooms and hallways of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which, after 91 years of continuous operation, was closing its doors for the last time. For four days, instead of drab carpets and scuffed linoleum, blankets of tulips and clusters of pink heather seemed to sprout from the day rooms and offices. The person behind this transformation was Anna Schuleit, a master of arts in liberal studies (MALS) student at Dartmouth and an installation artist. She and 200 volunteers had sought to restore to the building all the missing flowers from previous decades.

Schuleit, who divides her time between Hanover and Boston, also happens to be a visiting artist at a mental institution. She says she noticed that in contrast to individuals with physical ailments, those in treatment for mental illnesses seldom receive flowers. When she was commissioned by Harvard Medical School to commemorate the closing of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, she decided to create an installation of the flowers that had never been given. She calculated that based on the Center's age and its average occupancy, a minimum 25,000 flowers would be needed.

"For me," says Schuleit, "installation art is not separable from its place. Because you are dealing with a particular building with a particular history, you have to take that into consideration."

This is why Schuleit says an installation of fewer flowers would not have worked. The space and its history had to be honored as a whole.

However, the challenge of collecting so many flowers in bloom at the same time was daunting. Drawing on a long list of volunteers, Schuleit collected donations from across the country, pursuing contributions and stretching her budget to arrive at the final number.

"To have these different flowers arrive from different parts of the country meant to bring something precious from far away to honor the site," she says.

Schuleit is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and recipient of several artist grants, including two fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Currently concentrating in creative writing at Dartmouth, she says the MALS program affords her a rare opportunity to translate her ideas about visual art into words. She has begun work on a thesis that she hopes will express the basis and theoretical underpinnings of her art.

"For a visual artist, it can be important to translate ideas into words," she says. "At RISD, there were a lot of classes in English and writing, and here I look at my work as a way to refine my writing and become a better writer."

One of the ideas she is considering for a thesis is an artist's book-an individually constructed, usually nontraditional book-like object that includes words and visual images, often presented in a way that is impossible to duplicate.

"It is getting back to the idea of there being a single copy," she says, pointing out that Dartmouth has a large collection of artists books in the library's special collections. "There is only a single copy of it, so the goal can't be mass communication. It's something special-an individual thing."

By James Donnelly

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