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Thursday nights at Vassar offer a wide range of illustrious options: One can experience the occasional blistering night of painfully hip noise/art/punk/shoegaze at a NoViCE show, or perhaps just lay incapacitated on a bench outside of Lathrop House, tomorrow’s Art 106 lecture but a half-formed thought in the back of your mind. Some may simply be barricaded into their rooms, attempting to bang out a paper. But at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC), the head of Merymose and Jackson Pollock’s abstract splatters await, providing a classy alternative to the usual evening entertainment, and a well-deserved and educational study break. Celebrating its third anniversary this week, Late Night at the Lehman Loeb has become a cultural institution for students, faculty members and Hudson Valley art aficionados alike.
For those unfamiliar with the event, the FLLAC remains open until 9 p.m. each Thursday night, offering refreshments, guided tours of the collection and an ever-changing roster of entertainment, usually by student performers. Late Night was started in response to requests from students and faculty members who were unable to visit the FLLAC collection because of class and work schedules. “We really were responding to a demand that we provide some opening hours that would be more conducive to student downtime, and would also at the same time offer an opportunity for people who work to drop in and experience the collection and various programs during their free time, their after-work time,” said the FLLAC’s Anne Hendricks Bass Director James Mundy. “So we struck on this idea of making it a weekly event where people could come relax, have a little snack, enjoy one another’s company casually, with the occasional extra programming element of music, film, lectures, all kinds of options there.”
Added Office Specialist and Late Night Coordinator Francine Brown, “Other museums, we were noticing more and more, would be open one night a week.” So, in a nod to the once-a-week evening hours of larger collections like The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Late Night began in February of 2007.”
My own visit to last week’s Late Night, planned to coincide with the ongoing Modfest activities, got off to a slow start. Granted, I was a bit early to the party, as the week’s entertainment, violist and composer Adrienne Elisha, who had composed a piece inspired by Harry Roseman’s “Hole in the Wall” installation, was not slated to start until six. But groups began to assemble nearby, basking in the jarring orange glow of Roseman’s installation as they snacked and socialized. I was surprised at the number of attendees who appeared not to be Vassar students or even faculty, though there were certainly familiar faces in attendance. By Brown’s best approximation, the Late Night crowd comes from “mostly the Vassar community, a lot of Vassar students. We do have a significant following from the [outside] community; we have regulars who come at night and sketch. Marist and Bard students come and do research projects at night…and students come at night and work on their assignments.” But I was certainly refreshed by the variety of people congregated; art majors and cultured Hudson Valley retired-artist types were grouped next to mother-daughter pairings.
The galleries still, from my vantage point, appeared mostly empty, largely thanks to the pull of the catering table as food is forbidden from the galleries themselves. But the focus was mostly on company, bringing the room a relaxed and warm atmosphere. And the food was absolutely a worthy distraction: toasted baguette with bruschetta, fresh mozzarella, rice fritters and creamy bite-size spinach mini-quiche. The free wine offered to the over-21 crowd was also a hit (and perhaps explained the high concentration of upperclassmen), causing one man ahead of me in line to joyfully throw up his hands in imitation of a statue situated next to the catering table, saying something along the lines of, “That’s what this wine is doing to me!”
The energy of the FLLAC noticeably changed as the crowd grew. During the day, there’s a certain formality to the Art Center that, while not necessarily off-putting, makes it more difficult to motivate oneself to visit after a day of classes and work. But there was something laid back and very inviting about the night’s setup. This is right in line with the event’s goals, according to The Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings Patricia Phagan.
“It brings a more casual atmosphere,” she said. “When [students are] here with other students, and music is playing, you have a more informal tone to the Art Center, and I think that is very conducive to conversation and to stimulating your imagination … To have your peers around you does help; socializing does help students, I think, connect more with the art and with the exhibitions.”
In order to actually get a sense for the collection in this new light, it was necessary to bravely venture beyond the hors d’oeuvres-intoxicated throngs congregated just outside the galleries. The galleries were, as it turned out, nearly as empty as they are when I stop in between classes or on a lazy Friday afternoon. Despite the joyous din of those mingling echoing just outside, there was something peaceful about having my quiet moments with Pollock, Rothko, Calder and the like. And the faces I encountered when I did cross paths with someone else were unlike those I’m accustomed to in this setting—a portly older man in flannel and suspenders may or may not have been whistling softly while crouched over the Egyptian art, and a girl who couldn’t have been older than 12 marched hurriedly from room to room.
The night’s music began as I relaxed on a bench in front of a pair of Boscarottis, a somewhat harsh surprise that pulled me out of my zen-like state of art admiration. But as Elisha’s piece reverberated room to room, seeming as if it might animate figures in the works in front of me, I was thankful that it so brazenly broke the sterile stillness of my experience. Its addition to the event seemed to give permission to those enjoying the art in near-silence to raise their own voices and share their thoughts on the pieces they were viewing. It was clear that she, not the FLLAC collection, was the main event of the night, but that’s okay; Picasso and the gang will still be around 5 to 9 p.m. next week.
Late Night is an event that has evolved subtly with little fanfare or outside promotion. It relies on a simple, repeated concept, and aside from a steady increase in popularity, has not and likely will not see any drastic changes. As a weekly event, it doesn’t require much in the way of extravagance in order to draw an audience, but funding also plays some role in this. “It’s overtime for everybody,” said Mundy,” “and there are some attendant costs with keeping the lights on and offering refreshments, et cetera, so something we’ve had to do is seek out funding. Fortunately, the Jane W. Nuhn Foundation has risen to our aid, and is funding it for this year; what we do after those funds run out, we’re not sure.”
With roof repairs causing the Art Center to close for eight months starting in May, Late Night will, for the time being, lose its home. But the current plan is to continue holding the event elsewhere at least once a month during that time; said Mundy, “We’re searching for other locations to have art events on campus for the fall semester, for part of the summer…It will be kind of a moveable feast.”
And for those looking to get their fill of Late Night before it takes a break from the FLLAC, this week’s three-year anniversary party is as good a place as any to start. Featuring an all-a cappella musical line-up, both FLLAC novices and Late Night regulars alike will enjoy the opportunity, as described by Phagan, “to come and have refreshments and let their hair down, enjoy an hour or two, enjoy the exhibitions that are on view, enjoy the music that’s being played…It’s a very nice moment to enjoy one another, to socialize and also to learn more about the Arts Center.”
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