BUILDING ON DANA
a year of learning from John Portman’s Dana Fine Arts Building (1965)
#BuildingOnDana
The Building On Dana project activates a year of interdisciplinary focus on architect John Portman’s Charles A. Dana Fine Arts Building (1965), designed for art and theatre. The work begins in fall 2024 with curricular strategies and display practices that engage the building’s architecture. Dalton Gallery-the literal and metaphorical center through which students pass to reach all classrooms-will act as a workspace and design lab for creative and critical explorations. The preliminary work will culminate in a spring exhibition documenting the history of the building and envisioning the future for Agnes Scott’s new Department of Creative Arts.
The project seizes opportunities to restore and re-envision aspects of the architect’s plans and the building’s original functions. We will reestablish the public reading room on the first floor (including Portman’s signature blue highlight wall!), refurbish the original Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chairs, benches, and table and also recultivate the courtyards and garden with native plants and regenerative practices. We will be updating parts of the building, while respecting its heritage and preserving its legacy, to achieve an accessible, inclusive, sustainable environment that meets today’s standards.
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About
Building on Dana is a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of John Portman’s Dana Fine Arts Building (1965), documenting and understanding its history, assessing its current functions for the new Department of Creative Arts, and planning its future as a more inclusive and sustainable environment. We are looking backward and forward at once: bringing together archival materials and images, restoring furniture and recultivating gardens, and incorporating and proposing accessible design – past and future
Using the Dana Fine Arts Building as a classroom site in fall 2024, we are gathering communities of students, teachers, and neighbors to share knowledge, skills, insights, and efforts to confront existential challenges and promote climate resilience through design, sustainability, accessibility, equity, and social justice. We will propose and adopt plans that are better for all of us and for our planet, recognizing the histories and developing a new way forward, more inclusive inside and outside.
Curriculum
Katherine Smith
VPS 395 Topics in Visual Practices: Building on Dana
This course will consider the past, present, and future of the Dana Fine Arts Building, including its various historical contexts: its position on the Agnes Scott campus, in the development of Decatur, in postwar urban planning in Atlanta, in postmodern architectural discourses (in spatial and symbolic dimensions) in the United States. We will look closely at the history of the building, its uses and transformations, with eyes on changes necessary to ensure greater accessibility and new technologies to best support interdisciplinarity in the Creative Arts. Students in the course will become part of a collaborative team to design and produce the exhibition about the building to open in spring 2025.
We envision a wide range of topics related to the project. Students with interests in the numerous definitions and effects of the spaces we occupy will benefit from this course, including but not limited to art, architectural history, art history, American studies, communication, digital media, history, library science and archival studies, museum studies, philosophy, physiology, psychology, public health, sociology.
We will work closely with students in Three-Dimensional Thinking and Critical Disability Studies, and we will together use the Dalton Gallery as a classroom/workshop/design lab to develop materials–historical, visual, programmatic–for the exhibition.
Nell Ruby
VPS 343 Three-Dimensional Thinking
This course practices three-dimensional art with a focus on mass, space, and light. Emphasis is on exploration of materials and conceptual development. Projects may include sculptural, environmental, time-based, sound-based, and kinetic works.
In fall 2024 his course will consider the ways that we understand and represent architecture in 3-D forms, in our building and in our neighborhood, in collaboration with students in VPS 395. Students will study details of the building and create maquettes to be included in the spring exhibition. They will also work on the plans for increased accessibility in collaboration with students in WGSS 324.
Lauran Whitworth
WS 324 Critical Disability Studies
This course surveys key concepts, themes, methods, and debates in the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies. It is attentive to the ways that disability intersects with other categories of identity, such as gender, sexuality, and race. Possible topics include: histories of disability rights activism, theoretical approaches to disability, queerness and disability, bioethics, media representations of disability, and disability and art.
One aspect of the exhibition is the planning for future implementation of ADA standards into an historical building. This course is relevant to those plans, which will be part of the exhibition, as well as a complementary exhibition (also spring 2025) by Anna Carnes, which will show art related to accessibility, ability, accommodation.
Updates
Blog post
Exhibition
Our exhibition Patterns in Space: Building on Dana in the Dalton Gallery (February 7-May 19) will present the work of those in the fall courses, with intersecting ideas from architecture, design, preservation, sustainability, and accessibility, to invite additional opportunities for collaboration and exchange toward more capacious definitions of inclusion.
The exhibition will have three parts. Two will address the history and future of the building–its architectural and socio-historical contexts and its planned alterations and additions–and a third, in the galleries, and courtyards, will display works by contemporary artists who address ability, accessibility, and accommodation.
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Garden
We will reconsider and recultivate the spaces in and around Dana with more sustainable and regenerative landcare: the entrance courtyards, including the lower sculpture area, and the secret garden at the back of the building off the gallery.
We are already removing invasives; we will be replacing them with native species and pollinator plants. We are committing to restoring and maintaining these spaces without synthetic herbicides and with organic solutions, making them more sustainable and healthful decisions for the future. We hope to encourage the college to adopt these practices across campus.
We are incorporating and involving multiple communities in Atlanta, working in collaboration with and with guidance from the Center for Sustainability, Bullock Science Center for Women, the City of Decatur, BeeCatur, Wylde Center, Oxford College Organic Farm, and Rewild Your Campus, among others.
Give
If you wish to support our work through a monetary donation, please follow this link and choose other and designate “Friends of Art/Building on Dana.”
This link goes to the Agnes Scott Giving Site: https://give.agnesscott.edu/?_gl=1*3asgsv*_%0A_gcl_au*MjA%0A2NjcxMTY3NS4xNzE4MDQ4MzQ0
Volunteer
Our project seeks to build community within and beyond our campus. There are multiple ways for students, staff, faculty and community members, in Decatur and beyond, to get involved. Please follow this link and tell us more about your interests in and availability for collaborations.
