Windshield (2011) installed at Brown University

Posted by Ian on May 10, 2011 in blog, news

Windshield (2011) – a new piece of public sculpture by artist Dennis McNulty at the Nightingale-Brown House in Providence, Rhode Island – was installed successfully this past week. Dennis has been in residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University since February 2011. During this time he has completed this sculpture as well as a gallery exhibition at the Granoff Center for Creative Arts entitled Space replaced by volume.

Windshield (2011) is an evocation of one of John Nicholas Brown’s earliest and most important modernist commissions, Windshield House, a summer home for the Brown family on Fisher’s Island, New York. Designed by the Los Angeles-based and seminal modernist architect Richard Neutra from 1936 to 1938, Windshield House was the first house built by the architect on the East Coast. Twice destroyed – first by the hurricane of 1938 and second by fire – the house exists now only as archive, memory and an affective absence.

In Windshield (2011), McNulty has inserted an excerpt from the architectural form of Windshield House into the gardens of the Nightingale-Brown House, John Nicholas Brown’s family home. Almost as if finally landing from the winds of the hurricane of 1938, the work embeds the formal language of Windshield House as an intervention into the atmosphere of historic preservation of the 18th century house, 19th century gardens and 20th century adaptive reuse that constitute the Nightingale-Brown House.

The press release for the installation can be found here: http://ianaldenrussell.com/portfolio/windshield-2011

This project is part of the Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland’s Year of Irish Arts in America 2011, and is made possible through funding from Brown University’s Creative Arts Council, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and Culture Ireland.