Art experiences and happiness: a visit to the museum

Can experiencing art improve your wellbeing? What better way to answer that question than to visit an art museum at Washington State University.

Ryan Hardesty, executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, takes Washington State Magazine editor Larry Clark on a tour of the museum in WSU Pullman’s Crimson Cube. They have plenty to discuss about how people benefit from seeing, hearing, and experiencing art as they visit the exhibits—including Trimpin’s sound sculpture, Keiko Hara’s works of landscapes and dreams, Juventino Aranda’s powerful explorations of identity and home, and Irwin Nash’s photographs of Latino lives in migrant worker communities of the Yakima Valley.

See the exhibits and find out how to visit the museum at museum.wsu.edu.

Read more about art and happiness in “The joy of handiwork” in the Fall 2022 issue of the magazine.

Transcript

Larry Clark:

Can experiencing art improve your wellbeing? What better way to answer that question than to visit an art museum? Welcome to Viewscapes, stories from Washington State magazine, connecting you to Washington State University, and state and the world. 

[music]

I visited the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at WSU to talk with museum director Ryan Hardesty about how we benefit from seeing, hearing and experiencing art. As we toured the Crimson Cube at WSU Pullman, the exhibits gave us plenty to contemplate and discuss. Join us as we head to the museum.

[music]

Hi, Ryan. 

Ryan Hardesty:

Hi, Larry. 

Clark:

Thanks for having me over at the museum today. I'm looking forward to talking with you about some of the exhibits and how people feel when they see them and what people gain from seeing art.

Hardesty:

Larry, I'm happy to have you and it's a pleasure to talk about this. Of course, this is exactly what the museum is all about: bringing people in and providing a space for exploration and discovery.

Clark:

So should we head on in?

Hardesty:

Excited to walk around with you and explore. 

Clark:

So this is right next to the entrance. Tell me a little bit about it.

Hardesty:

So we're standing outside of Trimpin’s Ambiente432 installation. And I have to say that, you know, when we were talking about building a new museum on campus, we always knew Trimpin was going be a part of this project. He kind of shows up in the earliest concept drawings for the new museum, which is really cool. And so I commissioned Trimpin way back in 2016 to create this new work of art for the WSU community. And we debuted it when we had our grand opening in 2018. So it literally is a sound sculpture. It's activated by our movement through the space. And I think what's so interesting about this work that really connects to what we're talking about today is Trimpin really kind of designed it thinking about creating a healing work of art for our community, as well as for the staff. After those conversations talking about he wanted something that people can come in to kind of soothe the nerves, you know, have a little bit of a recharge to their day. 

Clark:

And there's a particular tone, right? 

Hardesty:

There is, so he tuned these horns to 432 hertz, which is a slightly lower tuning than the 440 that were used to for middle A. So it's a little bit more of a resonant. You can you feel it in your body. He kind of also connects it to sound frequencies that have been used in Tibetan prayer bowls, different things like that.

Clark:

That's so cool. Should we check it out?

Hardesty:

Let's walk in.

Clark:

And so it works by just walking around?

Hardesty:

It sure does. And so as we move across the space, we're going to hear it kind of activate. Larry, I think one of the neat things about this work of art that maybe is not readily understood is that everything we're hearing is an acoustical instrument, nothing is amplified. So he's a classically trained musician, as well as now a fine artist. What we're hearing is the vibration of reeds, pushing air through pump, organ reeds and these horns.

[musical tones]

Clark:

So this isn't something digital, it's not digitally created sound. Such a beautiful sound.

Hardesty:

So we've made this work has really become a kind of favorite of ours. And we've started many visits the museum in this space, often with our K through 12 groups, our younger visitors. We actually have them come into this gallery and lie on the ground and just close their eyes and listen. You know, they don't know it, but what we're doing is actually taking them through a bit of a guided meditation. And then we find that everybody's just a little bit more relaxed when we go visit the rest of the exhibitions.

Clark:

Yeah. I could see how that would work. You know, I'm starting to feel relaxed now. 

Hardesty:

That's working for us as well. I think music therapy is probably one of the more studied areas of art and healing. I'm no scientist or doctor. I can't go too deep into this. But you know, I think there is evidence that auditory stimulation has been shown to kind of calm our minds, you know, kind of reduce our stress. Probably depends on the type of music we're listening to.

Clark:

Sure, you mentioned Tibetan prayer bowls as an example, you know, and I've heard those and they do have that tone that just relaxes you and settles you into kind of a better mind.

Hardesty:

It's absolutely right. Yeah. Well, should we head into the rest of the exhibition?

Clark:

Yeah, let's do it. Oh, it's singing us away.

Hardesty:

All right. So we're entering the gallery hall now. Back in this space, we have three exhibitions on view. So where should we start? I might suggest we start with Keiko Hara exhibition. So this is kind of a longtime dream to have a retrospective of Keiko Hara’s work. I have known her for just about 20 years and admired her all that time. She's now turning 80 this year. And this exhibition really marks about a 40-year retrospective of her endeavor. She was born in North Korea to Japanese parents and then moved to Japan and she was just three spent about half her life there. But um, really, you know, wanted to come to America. She thought it would kind of offer her kind of greater artistic freedom. So she came and continued her studies here and then eventually took a position at Whitman College down in Walla Walla. She has been there ever since. So what we're seeing here is a room full of just the richest color and subtleties of imagery that I think definitely connect ideas of landscape. Yeah, forms of memory.

Clark:

Yeah, this piece that we're looking at now, it's “Space, Sky and Field.” And you can feel it, the rich color and color very evocative of exactly that.

Hardesty:

Absolutely. I think, you know, much of her work is connected to ideas around strong connections, we have senses of place we all have a hold in our hearts, places that are very dear to us. So we can think about like those important places we've been or maybe lived in our past. And that's a kind of powerful thing, you know, kind of centers us. I think a lot of her work is about that. And what I see in her work is this kind of mutual connection to both kind of thinking back to her homeland of Japan, and the Inland Japanese sea that we see in certain works. But then this kind of new home in Walla Walla, where the fields have kind of become a new ocean and a sense of space. And so in certain works, we'll see kind of a combination of those two influences and memories. 

Clark:

Yeah, I could definitely get that sense from it. And, you know, I mean, you say, you mentioned home and this sense of place is so powerful, it really is connected to our happiness and our wellbeing. You know, for many of us, we think about our happy place, you know, for lack of a better term. 

Hardesty:

Well put. Yeah, I reflect on that often, I think a sense of home and a sense of belonging is really powerful stuff. You know, I think we all crave that. And I think about that for our students that come to WSU Pullman, and they move great distances to join us here, and they're away from maybe a home that's elsewhere. And how do we kind of provide a kind of a second home in their time here with us? And I like to believe that the museum can be a big part of that, that we can provide a very welcoming, inclusive space.

Clark:

Yeah, I think it helps. You know, when you have art like Keiko Hara’s work,  I'm not really all that familiar with her work, but I instantly feel a connection to it. And feel that sense of, of joy, just from the color.

Hardesty:

That's excellent. Yeah, I'm glad you're picking up on that.

Clark:

So she works in different media.

Hardesty:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I would say that her foundation is printmaking. It's really where she started. And then she's kind of grown into painting throughout the years. So what we're seeing in this exhibition of about 40 years worth of work is kind of both that both examples of her printmaking endeavor as well as her oil paintings. And right now we're looking at some of those prints. We're looking at two columns that stretch from the floor, straight up to the ceiling of lithographic prints. They're double sided so you can walk around these columns. And the imagery kind of, of course, develops and changes depending on our position in the room. We'll see different things on the backside of these columns. These were printed off of a stone lithographic process. And much of the imagery of what we're seeing on this kind of harkens back to that idea of memory of the Japanese sea, like we were talking about earlier. So you might pick up on certain shapes that maybe resemble a shell or the sense of water on a tidal flat.

Clark:

And I think I see what might be seaweed or kelp forests in there. 

Hardesty:

Yeah, that's an astute reading. She actually talks about memories of going down to the shore every morning, and looking at what the ocean had washed up, you know, and then left there lying there almost as if it had kind of laid out and your composition on the canvas, so to speak, up at the beach every day. She actually became kind of a really active shell collector at one point in her life and she talks about this. She had hundreds and hundreds of seashells and she would kind of study their shapes and particularities. She became so kind of obsessed with them that she would dream about the shells at night and kind of imagined new kind of ideas for her artwork through those dreams.

Clark:

And speaking of joy and wellbeing, there's nothing like finding a really nice shell. I hear what she's saying. So what are some of these other pieces over here on the wall with what looks like a different treatment in blue gray? 

Hardesty:

We're looking at four woodblock prints here called “Topophilia Number Seven.” And this is actually a really important work for Keiko because it was at a moment her career where she worked with a really established Japanese woodblock printer, kind of a master of his trade. And I think through that experience with working with that master printer, Keiko kind of saw new possibilities for what she could do with woodblock printing. And of course, if you know anything about the history of woodblocks, Japan has one of the longest histories of using that genre in that medium. And so, Keiko was interested in taking that kind of history of those ukiyoe prints that emerged in the 18th century, 17th century and developing them in a contemporary sense. What more could she do with them? Well, we have a series of four, we can also think that we have four seasons. And so there's maybe a kind of a connection point to that idea. In the central composition of each of the four prints is kind of like a gate-like form, which she uses over and over in her work: this idea of kind of a portal, you know, some sort of space and internal space that we can cross through to observe the work and to travel, you know, mentally, conceptually within the work. The works are so subtle, so rich in color. There's also a sense of writing on the works that she's collaged in and Keiko tells me that these works actually connect to a Japanese piece of theater. It has to do with a kind of real kind of sad story of a mother looking for her last son on the riverbanks.

Clark:

You know, kind of thinking about art and looking at these they do jump out. The colors are so strong and so rich. And you mentioned that passageway to internal spaces. I think that really comes in it really reaches into in many ways. 

Hardesty:

It does. Yeah. And she's made both intimate work such as these as well as…maybe we could walk over here. Works that are just monumental in their scale. You know, we're now looking at a four-panel oil painting that is, I don't know, Larry, around 28 feet long. It is towering above us. You know, I think if we're feeling low and energy, and we need a little color therapy, we just need to come back and stand in front of this work and get a jolt. Because the scale does allow that kind of immersive experience where we can almost get enveloped within this works. Yeah, color and space wraps around us.

Clark:

That certainly is what is happening here. I mean, these panels, these four panels put together. I wouldn't say overwhelming, no, but maybe, yeah, in a good way. I hope so I like the term envelop, you know, you stand in front of it and can wraps around you.

Hardesty:

Well, they're very active, aren't they? And they're charged with movement, pattern. I definitely feel very stimulated by them visually. It was talked a little bit about this work in reference to dreams again, in just that idea of our dreams are often fragments when we wake up. And there's that frustrating moment of trying to recall just what you experienced in your dream world. And slippery, that kind of reality is you know, in the waking hours. And so trying to hang on to those fragments of a dream is something that she's referenced with this work.

Clark:

She certainly has wonderful dreams if she captures even fragments here.

Hardesty:

I suspect that our dream life is pretty rich.

Clark:

So these are called “topophilia.” Tell me a little bit about that word.

Hardesty:

Yeah, that word is a word that's come to be connected to this idea of a profound love of places. That concept we were talking about earlier. It shows up through kind of historical record by different writers through time. And she's adopted it. It's a real kind of guiding conceptual framework for much of her career. Again, what are those special places in our life? What do they mean to us? How do we access them via memory? Those spaces that are so profound to us can be literal, you know, could be a pine forest up near Spokane, Washington, where I grew up, and the smell of those trees. Or that could exist, you know, more kind of on a conceptual, you know, through our memory and our kind of recall of those spaces.

Clark:

Yeah, certainly. Well, you know, it comes through in her work. And I think that's, you know, we had talked about that, that sense of space and that, that love of a place. 

Should we look around?

Hardesty:

Let's do it. Why don't we cross into another gallery here are really making a gear shift. We are looking at another Walla Walla based artist, and this is the work of Juventino Aranda. He's a younger artist in his 30s. And this is a kind of 10-year survey of his recent work. And I'm very proud of this work. I came to know him when he was still student at Eastern Washington University, and he was completing his BFA. And you know, when you meet those bright students, and they've got all the right stuff, you know, and he was that. I saw in him this artist that was going to definitely go far, because he was already kind of trying to place his work, you know, at the highest level. He was kind of trying to set it up on the same shelf as the artists that we really look up to. And I admired that kind of aspirational aspect. So much of Juventino's work again, I think there's some shared themes across all of our exhibitions right now this fall, and like Keiko in her kind of journey from Japan to America and what that meant for her, Juventino's work is so much about also trying to find a sense of home in America where he was born with his parents migrated out of Mexico a generation before. And so this sense of feeling a degree of foreignness within Juventino’s homeland is at the core of his work. 

So we're going to look at the largest work in the exhibition. This piece is a created at the exact same dimensions as Monet's water lilies. And Monet painted, I think, upwards of 170 to 200 water lily paintings in his career. So there's not just one canvas, but um, there's a particular water lilies piece that hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And this work of Juventino Aranda is in reference to that. It's made to the exact same dimensions, just like Monet's water lilies at the MoMA. This piece has kind of a triptych organization with a left and right wing that kind of fold out to us. And Monet always talked about that he had envisioned all of his water was at some point being hung in the round, so that you could kind of step in and be fully immersed in this tapestry of light and color, and, you know, reflection, the surface of the water and the interplay of light on those surfaces of lily pads. And so Juventino has picked up on that. And he's referenced the lily pads in certain areas of his composition. But the big difference here, of course, is there's no color, right?

Clark:

It's all monochromatic, essentially. 

Hardesty:

It's black on black. Yeah, what we're seeing in front of us, Larry is, you know, gradations of texture, and reflectivity from kind of gloss to matte, that give us a sense of composition, we can see where those lily pads are, you know, by the difference in kind of materiality, the thickness of the paint, the reflectivity, what's happened, you know, after here, in some ways, he's talking about what happens when we pull away all the color in the world. The title of this work is “Fog of War.” And so we might start to think a little bit about, you know, a battlefield here, you know, that kind of sense of a charred space and burnt over landscape, which isn't the happiest of ideas, is it? But I think it's a good reminder of what war can take away.

Clark:

You know, that makes me think, you have a piece like this, again, immersive, you know, just in its scale, the more you look at it, the more you see. It's fascinating, and I can when I first looked, I didn't see some of the detail in the gradations you're talking about. But it does have kind of a very ominous feel, in some ways. So how does that help somebody who's going to a gallery to see a piece like this, that might have kind of a darker meaning? What does that do for somebody?

Hardesty:

Well, I appreciate so much what you just said. I mean, first, yes, art does unfold over time and it deserves to be seen over and over again, because, depending on the day and how long we spend with work, we're going to take more and more away from it. And then to your second point, absolutely. Not all art is you know, of course created to soothe. I think art and artists have long played an important role in society as being kind of agents of change. And what I love about artists that are really pushing ideas and presenting difficult ideas is they give us we can think of them in there already almost as a screen upon which we can project our own ideas and fears and aspirations. But the artists can act as a bit of a mediator, it makes it less personal, right? Hopefully, it decreases the level of confrontation in a polarized society and kind of gives us something to wrap your thinking around. So that I think in that way, it's helpful and instructive, you know, artists can pose difficult questions for us. It's a safe space to come and explore those ideas here in the museum.

Clark:

And it does. It stirs ideas, kind of get us thinking. And I like what you said, because it makes it less personal, less confrontational, and allows somebody to absorb a piece like “Fog of War” by Aranda, to really take what you can from it.

Hardesty:

I think one of the great attributes of art and art appreciation is, maybe sadly, something that I think it's being a little bit lost in society right now. And for me, it's this idea of our ability to, to really linger and dwell in zones of ambiguity, to enter spaces of unknowing. The gray matter of life. And that's what the world's about. And we've become a little too polarized, too black and white. And I think art keeps kind of forcing us to be open to new ideas, new perspectives that are not around. And to be okay with that.

Clark:

Yeah. I think that's well said. And it's wonderful, because looking at and think, you know, a young artist was able to put together here this beautiful art, I'm very excited for what he does in the future, too.

Hardesty:

We are too. He's gonna go far. 

Let's walk across the hallway, we're gonna look at one more exhibition which is a really exciting project that we did in collaboration with WSU Libraries, and specifically the Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections branch of the libraries. They have the most tremendous collection of photographs by a photographer named Irwin Nash. Irwin Nash started traveling out to the Yakima Valley in our state around 1967. He was on assignment to document migrant farm working communities there that were working in the fields, that were living in the valley to help with agricultural work, right? He got hooked and trust kind of grew between him in the community and the families. And he started going back every summer and he went back 10 summers in a row. By the end, he created a kind of collection of almost around 9400 photographs. And this is where I get a little foggy on my history but at some point, WSU happily made a purchase of that collection and entered the library's collections. 

So only recently has this collection really started to get its due, and it's been fully digitized at this point. And the great stewards of the library of this collection have started sharing each image on Facebook, with the communities in the Yakima Valley, with the idea, hey, help us figure out what we're seeing here. These are your stories, not ours. They're your relatives, right? What's happening in this image? You know, who is that? And what was that event that was photographed by Nash all those years ago? 

So that's kind of, you know, what we're looking at right now. This is obviously not 9,400 images in this exhibition, it's around 40. It's a small selection. But you can see the ways in which it connects to Juventino Aranda’s exhibition. Again, it's about, you know, migration, why do people travel for work for a sense of building a home? From a largely Mexican American community in this case,

Clark:

Yeah, it's a community that I don't think has been seen all that much, you know, in the past. So it's wonderful to have a collection like this. Yeah, I'm looking around the room at these black and white photos. You know, people in their lives, you know, this one over here with the, maybe the father of the baby… 

Hardesty:

A father and a child image, a real tender moment. Yeah, we, you know, like I was saying this collection is so expansive, you know, and so how are you going to curate it into an exhibition? We worked with Lipi Turner-Rahman as a guest curator from the library and Lipi and I talked really early about that we wanted this exhibition to really focus on: intimate moments. Because I think even, you know, the term migrant labor is so problematic, because that doesn't sound like a person. 

Clark:

It doesn't. It's just like a cog in the machine. 

Hardesty:

It's a cog. It's invisibility. We don't know, but these are real people with real lives and hopes. And there are people that still live in the valley. And so we thought, okay, of course it talks about protests and different you know, labor movements, Cesar Chavez, different aspects of activity within the valley to gain better rights and working conditions. But we wanted this exhibition to focus a little more on those intimate moments in the home, around the home, that really humanize this collection. And these people.

Clark:

Yeah, these really are like windows into their lives, you know, making meals and you know, a girl at her quincenera? 

Hardesty:

That is her quincenera. You know, and you can just get the feel of joy that they have and family with some of these celebrations. And yeah, absolutely. It's these intimate moments. And I would never wish to speak for the community. But my sense is that this has been really kind of a powerful project for individuals involved, you know. We're kind of talking about art and wellbeing today in this conversation. And I think there's actually something about being represented, kind of in the historical record, in a really respectful way that gives a person that sense of belonging, sense of being seen. And I think this project has a lot to do with that.

Clark:

You know, for me, not being a member of the community, this really helps me feel empathy and connect to them in some small way, you know, through these photos.

Hardesty:

There's this great photo right here. There's this image of these boys. I think we're looking at four boys, although it almost looks like three, but there's a fourth boy just in shadow. They're standing in a doorway, and they're just full of laughter. You know, there's something just cracking these boys up, and they're having a good giggle. But what I love in this image is there's this amazing moment, when you're looking, you realize that the boys have shared their shoes with one another. That one boy, that he's wearing the shoe of his friend, and you know, maybe his friend has the other left foot of his shoe. Just little charming details. 

Clark:

I love that detail. And they do look like and you're having such a great time. And they have improvised toys out of wood. I used to do that myself and my, my piece of wood that was a sword that slayed every dragon in the woods. That's a wonderful photo. 

Yeah, looking at things like this, you know, this photo and some of these other pieces, you know, we've looked at, what's the sense that people can take away once they leave the gallery? What have they gained from looking at these pieces?

Hardesty:

That just cuts right to the crux of what the museum is all about. It's a big question. You know, of course, our goal is to provide access to new ideas, and allow us to grow and enrich ourselves. I think art can go a long way, especially as we consider globalization and that there's a real premium put on mediums that can kind of create an empathetic response across cultures. We spoke to that earlier. So that's certainly what I hope this experience is about. But we're also talking about wellbeing, right? And happiness. And I think too often health is defined too simply, you know. Often we define health by, let's say, the absence of sickness or illness. I think a more holistic definition of health, of course, is that physical wellbeing but it's also mental wellbeing. And then social wellbeing. How is society doing? What's the health of society? I like to think that creative expression and art and museums have a large role to play within that kind of societal wellbeing.

[music]

Clark:

Thanks for listening to Viewscapes. Our music was by WSU Regents Professor Greg Yasinitsky.

To read more about happiness through art and all our stories, visit magazine.wsu.edu