Wrong House Project

Each Spring Semester, the School of Visual Arts rewards its Junior year Honors program students with a trip to a foreign destination. In 2017, the program had the pleasure of accompanying the students to Lisbon, Portugal. In Lisbon, we were fortunate enough to be introduced to the acclaimed Portuguese philosopher and fiction writer Gonçalo M. Tavares. In his writing studio, Tavares engaged us in a project he was working on, a treatise on the “wrong house.” He asked the group to quickly make drawings of what we imagined the “wrong house” to be, something that he was doing with his students at the university where he teaches. These drawings would be analyzed, commented on, and used in his research for a new book. A lively conversation ensued, and our meeting with Gonçalo was one of the highlights of our trip. The positive reaction of the students indicated that the scope of this project made it one that could easily be expanded to our larger student body in New York. Tavares agreed; we created a form for the drawings to be made on, and a small sample of the work we received is reproduced in the exhibition catalog. This exhibition, numbering over 300 pieces, is a collection, to date, of “wrong house” drawings by students, faculty, and friends of the School of Visual Arts.

There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, February 13th, from 6 to 8 pm. The Wrong House Project has been coordinated by VCS faculty member Peter Hristoff, with the assistance of Joey Gonnella (VCS Class of 2021), writer Kátia Bandeira de Mello-Gerlach and the support of department chair Tom Huhn (Art History, Honors and Visual & Critical Studies) and Arte Institute.