Although students are back on campus, one familiar icon has not returned. This summer, the bronze sculpture of an acorn head that was located in a planter just downhill of Tisch Library, also known as Colossal AcornHead" by Vermont artist Leslie Fry, has disappeared. In its place is a new piece: "Autruche II," which translates to "Ostrich II," by French artist Quentin Garel. A native of Paris, France, Garel has won five awards for sculpting and drawing between 2001 and 2005, including one from the Acad?mie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Salon de Mai, Paris.
Like "Colossal AcornHead," the ostrich head sculpture is on loan to the university from a private owner for one year. A continuation of the pilot-project that the Tufts University Art Gallery began last year with the installment of the acorn head, the ostrich head is from the Bertrand Delacroix Gallery in New York, NY, from the collection of Paul and Janice Price of Bethesda, Md.
The acorn head has been relocated to the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass., but its time at Tufts sparked what staff members of the Art Gallery hope will become a longstanding tradition of art installations across campus.
The Art Gallery will this fall introduce Museum Without Walls, a Web and mobile application funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, that helps users locate art across campus. The app also provides audio commentary from Art Gallery staff or the artists themselves, as is the case for "Colossal AcornHead."
Similar projects involving technology have been appearing in other art galleries as well. In early 2011, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts challenged a Pablo Picasso quotation - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" - with a poster of Picasso's face made of quick response codes, which linked to his works and the website for buying tickets to the Picasso exhibit.
Amy Schlegel, director of galleries and collections at Tufts, explained that the Museum Without Walls app has been in the making for about five years. Only recently, with the advent of the smart phone, did the university find a proper technological medium to bring the project to fruition.
"We have long wanted to make works from the collection more accessible, not only by making them more physically accessible in present, but in being able to interpret them in a way that could be 24/7, on demand," Schlegel said.
Schlegel attributed a substantial amount of the project's work to Phillippa Pitts, who served for a year as the gallery's graduate curatorial assistant and is working towards a master's degree in art history and museum studies. Pitts' background in creating apps specifically for museums added an innovative voice to the process, Schlegel said.
"Our goal in creating Museum Without Walls was to build something that was entirely user driven," Pitts told the Daily in an email. "We even built in tours, which are self explanatory enough that you can send your parents off with a smart phone and know that they'll be delivered safely back to where they started."
As with most technological projects, there is the possibility of setbacks. Pitts said that she faced many challenges when building the Museum Without Walls app.
"As a first-year graduate student, I was not expecting the sheer quantity of changing exhibitions, building projects and incoming or outgoing loans," she said. "New works pop up in new places very quickly, which made it challenging to reliably navigate people around the campus."
Pitts noted that using a Web application helped her overcome some of these issues.
"Fortunately, there are a lot of design tricks that can simplify that problem on our end, and that's one of the reasons I chose a Web app," she said. "Web apps are accessed through a URL, not the app store, so we can update the project instantly without either waiting for Apple's approval or requiring you to maintain updates."
The Museum Without Walls app requires little maintenance on the part of the user, according to Pitts.
"You can add the app to your phone and know that it'll never push notifications on you and [that] you'll have the most up-to-date version whenever you open it," she said.
As Museum Without Walls makes its debut with "Autruche II," the Art Gallery has a vision for the future of the Web app and other art installations across campus, according to Schlegel.
Last fall, the installment of "Colossal AcornHead" brought art into conversations across campus. A September 2012 article in the Daily featured student commentary on the new sculpture. Some found the sculpture to be "sensual and robust" or "fantastical," while others found it "creepy" and "an expensive eyesore." The 2012 Halloween joke issue of the Daily included an article satirizing "Colossal AcornHead" as a ploy to spy on students with hidden cameras.
Schlegel voiced support for the discourse about the acorn head last year.
"I think it's fantastic to invent these kinds of mythologies about the work," she said. "It becomes animated and takes on a life of its own. I find this to be a very positive sign that there's this desire and thirst for more art on campus and more points for discussion."
Sophomores Casey Betts and Hana Migliorato, both staff members at the Art Gallery, discussed their perspectives as students for whom "Colossal AcornHead" has always been part of the Tufts experience.
"I didn't originally know that the sculpture near Tisch was a rotating piece, so I found that interesting and cool," Betts said. "I wish they had advertised that more and connected the piece with the Art Gallery, because I also didn't know that it had anything to do with the gallery. I was pretty unfamiliar with its origin."
"As freshmen last year, we learned about the campus with the acorn head being there, so we didn't know that it wasn't there before we were," Migliorato said.
Both expressed their enthusiasm for the role that Museum Without Walls could play in reaching out to students who are not aware of the fine arts resources the university has to offer.
Pitts believes that the app will continue to evolve as a resource for the Tufts community.
"There are so many fascinating stories and ideas ... I'm excited to pass that off to the gallery staff," she said. "It's great to know that the project isn't done
