War and Peace at Burling Gallery
The War and Peace Project, an exhibition on view Sept. 12 – Dec. 7 in Burling Gallery, is sponsored by Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery as part of the Center for the Humanities theme “A Century of War: 1914 and Beyond.”
The project is a collaborative work created on all 750 pages of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Laura “Lola” Baltzell ’83 began the project in 2008 by making a collage from each page of a 1970s Soviet edition of the novel she’d picked up when she was a Russian studies student in Leningrad. Later, she expanded the project to include a small group of friends, dubbed “Team Tolstoy.” The team consisted of six Grinnell College graduates, and nine artists total:
- Lucy Arrington
- Laura "Lola" Baltzell ’83
- Christiane Carney Johnson ’83
- Otto Mayr ‘82
- Lucy Zahner Montgomery ’83
- Emma Rhodes
- Elizabeth Jorganson Sherman ’83
- Lynn Waskelis ’83
- Adrienne Wetmore
To Luc Moisan ’17, who spent hours of his summer break mapping and mounting all the pages, it was a valuable learning experience to see the show finally come together. “When they arrived in small plastic bags in individual postcard-size, I had no idea how they would unfold as a vast mass of artwork. Working on the installation of the project, I got to grasp the intricacy of each individual page. It also piqued my interest in Tolstoy’s literary work.”
According to Lesley Wright, director of Faulconer Gallery, The War and Peace Project is a work of art built on a work of literature. It is literally text based, as well as interdisciplinary and provides creative inspiration to students, faculty and staff as they think about texts, art and collaboration in their library work. In this sense, Burling Gallery provides an ideal space for this exhibition because viewers will encounter the project in Burling in a different way than if they were in a space reserved only for art.
Burling Gallery, located in the lower level of Burling Library, is accessible when Burling Library is open.