Leveled: The Beginning

It all started with a small idea.  How can we make artists and their viewers have a closer relationship where the experience of art is the main focus? 

One thing led to another and the exhibition Leveled: An Interactive Experiment in Art was born.  To start the process I selected 15 local installation based artists and asked them to propose interactive installations that had some reference to the word green.  These proposals were to be created around the concept that museum guests will be able to shift, change and physically alter the artworks in our galleries during part of the exhibition’s run.  After tons of phone calls and explaining the exhibition over and over and over I found myself waiting in anticipation for the proposals to start coming in.  This was nerve wracking.  I filled this time by thinking and dreaming, about what they might be like.  Would artists even submit?  After all the waiting and worrying I found I had nothing to fret about at all.  We received an amazing group of submissions and I send my thanks to each artist that entered a proposal; they were all wonderful and it made deciding the final line up very hard.  In the end Doris Bittar, Wes Bruce, Ingram Ober and Marisol Rendon became the Leveled artists.

So months later, here I sit in my sky blue administration office typing to you as the prep crew and registrar are busy packing up the artworks that have been housed in our museum during the past 5 months… so that we can get ready for Leveled and what it will bring.

Leveled: An Interactive Experiment in Art

Leveled Curator,

Tara Smith

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum