Canopy 1994
Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Canopy was a work for voices and light that featured thirty separate sound sources suspended in the trees of Harvard Yard. Speaking in different languages, including English, Italian, Haitian Creole, Polish and Russian, the voices told stories about place, including passages from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and personal memories, poems and folk tales brought to the installation by the readers.
The work occurred each evening between dusk and darkness during two weeks in May and was illuminated by lights concealed high overhead in the trees.
Canopy marked the culmination of an unprecedented six-month Harvard University Public Art Residency, which was awarded to David Ward in 1994 to demonstrate the importance of contemporary visual art within a research university. The work was later recorded in a publication with a preface by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums, a poem by Seamus Heaney and texts by Parveen Adams and Ivan Gaskell.
The residency was co-ordinated by Ivan Gaskell, at that time the Margaret S Winthrop Curator at the Fogg Art Museum, who in 2014 contributed an article to The Brooklyn Rail, to mark the 20th anniversary of Canopy. In it, he describes Air Waves 1994, the further ‘fugitive’ artwork which David Ward contrived for the opening evening of Canopy.
