Viera Levitt
With her photographic exploration of Brutalism, Viera Levitt continues to reveal the hidden beauty of this architectural style often derided as gray, crude, soulless and austere. Following her 2012 solo show at the Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Viera presented these buildings with their stark geometric sculptural forms and heroic monumentality in her 2013 solo show titled “Brutally Sweet” in Project Space of AS220 in Providence, in a three person's show at Chazan Gallery at Wheeler (Providence, RI) in 2015 and other group shows including the virtual 2020 Members’ Exhibition organized by New Bedford Art Museum / Artworks or exhibition Reimagine City Hall dedicated to 50th anniversary of the Boston City Hall in 2019.
Viera's 'subjects', located in both New England as well as in her native Slovakia, share not only architectural similarities, but a utopian impulse as well. She continues to capture these 1960s and 1970s buildings and presents new images from this ongoing series. Additionally, Viera has also created a site-specific project interacting with UMass Dartmouth brutalist architecture and student community by writing the quotes by/about the architect directly on its walls with a white chalk, titled Reading Paul Rudolph. The project was designed to encourage both the campus community and visitors to understand the original intentions behind the design of the buildings—with their intricate surfaces and concrete 'heroicism' and monumentalism.
Viera is a member of the collaborative initiative UMass BRUT exploring the brutalist architecture at UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth.
Following her RISD Graduate Studies' Artslink Residency and her internship in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curator and photographer Viera Levitt moved to Rhode Island in 2005 from Slovakia where she was the director of the contemporary art museum, Jan Koniarek Gallery. After 3 years as the Director of the CCRI Knight Campus Art Gallery, she has, since September 2012, worked as the Gallery Director for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her show at CCRI about its brutalist megastructure, “We Talk About Architecture, Architecture Talks Back” won the 2011 New England Art Award in the Concept/Theme show curator category and inspired her to photograph similar objects through the Rhode Island Council for the Arts Project Grant. Her photographs of Boston City Hall were published in Nov/Dec 2012 issue of Art New England and today, she continues her research of Brutalism also through her work as the Director of UMass Dartmouth's two galleries, whose campus was designed by the Brutalist architecture legend, Paul Rudolph. Viera has exhibited at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Hoxie Gallery in Westerly, AS220 in Providence, Myopic Books in Wakefield, the Knight Campus Art Gallery at CCRI, Chazan Gallery at Wheeler and at the New Bedford Art Museum as well as in Slovakia. From 1996 to the present, she has curated or co-curated more than eighty exhibitions in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and in the USA and has lectured about contemporary art in Bratislava, Brno, Berlin, Rotterdam, Hiroshima, New Delhi, Caracas, Nairobi, and in New England.
