Stan Strembicki

Professor Emeritus of Art

“Unlike a lot of the researchers, I’ve been here for a while. I first went to Tyson in 1982. A lot of people don’t know this, but the entire Graduate Program at the School of Art was located at Tyson. The Art School was out there until ’84, then they moved back to main campus. I was invited to one of the warehouses for a bronze pour and I really fell in love with the place. I thought it was really unique.

You can still see, if you go down the main road off to one side, these odd concrete things up in the trees. Those are remnants of sculptures that were actually made and installed out at Tyson. Over the years I started bringing classes out there doing landscape work, and other kinds of projects in the field. At some point about 25 years ago, I had the opportunity to rent one of the warehouse buildings and I’ve been out there ever since.

I’ve got a long history not only of going out to Tyson, but having a research studio out there, as well. For me it is a unique place because the Art School is at the far end of the Danforth Campus. We don’t get a lot of interaction with the rest of the campus, in particular sciences. There just isn’t a lot of possibility for those connections and crossovers.

Tyson’s a really unique place because normally (when there isn’t a pandemic) there’s a lot of mixing and people are talking. Last year I was contacted by one of the researchers doing a project on invasive plants. They were having lighting problems with a device that shoots a grid of images over a plot of land. We spent about half an hour and I brought an old shower curtain to rig up as a shade to diffuse the light. I love that kind of interaction and potential for working with these people whose research is pretty remarkable.

They’re all world-class researchers and I’m a professor in the Art School making art. It’s a curious kind of cross-pollination that happens. Sadly sometimes in higher education there can be a tendency to build silos. I’ve never seen a lot of evidence of that happening at Tyson which is what makes it such a terrific place.”

Stan has generously shared his photography expertise with the Tyson comunity and our undergraduate fellows during colloquium sessions. See some of his work here.