Tara Geer

Top Image: Tara Geer, “Trying to Fly”, 2013, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 47 x 55.25 Inches

Bottom Image: Tara Geer, “Fluent in Darkness”, Date Unknown, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 30 x 40 Inches

Tara Geer was born in Boston, and received from Columbia University both her BA – a double major in Art and Art History, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa – and her MFA, receiving a teaching fellowship as well as the Louis Sudler Prize for excellence in the arts and the Joan Sovern Prize from Columbia’s School of the Arts.

Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia and in Art and Art Education at Teachers College. Geer also trains teachers and staff in “Visual Thinking Strategies” at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.

From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing – externally informed but internally impelled. Her drawings are often large and kinetic charcoal universes, neither bodies nor landscapes but microcosmic resolutions of form and psyche. Sometimes they are exploding webs of cells and scaffolding, thumbprints and scrawl, while other times they are more figurative, familiar, discrete.

Calendar: December 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: December 30

Scrawls on the Wall

On December 30th in 1809, the city of Boston passed a law which made the wearing of masks at balls illegal.

The anit-masquerade opinion was already established in England before masked balls spread overseas to the colonies. Opponents in eighteenth-century England crusaded against gatherings that were tarnishing the country’s morals. The epistolary novelist Samuel Richardson, author of the 1740 “Virtue Rewarded”, asserted that public masquerades presented frightening possibilities of disguise, role-playing and sexual freedom for women.

As masquerade balls became popular in the colonies, several cities began to ban masks. In 1808, a year before Boston’s law, Philadelphia made masquerades and masked balls illegal. The city supported the law by asserting dances were common meeting places for those interested in sex commerce, and masked balls created a sense of anonymity for those participants.

In 1848, Boston extended its masked ball law by adding the following section:

“Any person who shall get up and set on foot, or cause to be published, or otherwise aid in getting up and promoting any masked ball, or other public assembly, at which the company wears masks, or other disguises, and to which admission is obtained upon payment of money, or the delivery of any valuable thing, or by any ticket or voucher obtained for money, or any valuable thing, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars; and for repetition of the offense, by imprisonment in the common jail or house of correction, not exceeding one year.”

On the first of April in 1963, Boston’s anti-masquerade law was repealed. It should be noted that Boston, with its Puritan roots, had a history that emphasized proper behavior and refraining from frivolity. In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which contained Boston, enacted a law called “Penalty for Keeping Christmas”. The idea was that such festivals, superstitiously kept in other countries, were a great dishonor of God and offense of others. People who were found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, feasting, or any other way, had to pay five shillings for every offense, about fifty dollars today. This law was in effect for twenty-two years.

Ray and Maria Stata Center

Ray and Maria Stata Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston

The Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences is built on the site of MIT’s legendary Building 20, a “temporary” timber-framed building constructed during World War II that served as a breeding ground for many great MIT-originated ideas. Designed by renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, the Stata Center is meant to carry on Building 20’s innovative and serendipitous spirit, and to foster interaction and collaboration across many disciplines.

The building is home to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Its striking design—featuring tilting towers, many-angled walls, and whimsical shapes—challenges much of the conventional wisdom of laboratory and campus building.

When the building opened in 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Robert Campbell wrote in the Boston Globe that the building is “a work of architecture that embodies serious thinking about how people live and work, and at the same time shouts the joy of invention.”