Alderman Structural Art

Alderman painted 14 structure paintings 5'x5' in acrylics on canvas in 1970-71, exhibited in the Carpenter Center lobby and covering the 4th floor hall wall. Editor John Bethel selected #5 for the cover of Harvard Magazine, December 1972 (then called the Bulletin) with line drawings in the cover article. Seven paintings decorated the Radcliffe Currier House dining room, halls and alcoves.

Alderman's Synergetic Silkscreens are visual mathematics where each structure embodies and defines one of the 27 possible symmetry structures. 

As patterns in two dimensions with inherent rotation roto-centers, and translation and mirror lines, their titles are numbers of a the that describes and defines space structures within symmetry group syntax or classifications.

RISD Show -- Alderman Silk Screens were exhibited as a Retrospective at the RISD Synergetics Symposium in the Nature Lab in 2016, signifying the Loeb Design Science Collection. Originally hand printed for Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard. Exhibited at VES 1983-2003, International Symmetry Congress, 1987 among other venues.

Alderman composed them as signs, symbols, conceptual puzzles, eye games for the Design Science Studio, practical art, illustrations, answers to rhetorical questions, a geometric hall of mirrors in flatland, for reference during lectures in the course, Synergetics, the Structure of Ordered Space in two and three dimensions, taught by crystallographer and design scientist Arthur Loeb, Buckminster Fuller's friend and collaborator. Loeb invited Alderman to create the silkscreen collection as an exhibition commission with a grant for materials, white Strathmore rag, inks and screens from a Harvard Dean. Beside or beyond the commission plan, artist and The Phonebook Corp. added all the color grounds to explore variations. 

Alderman composed forty as a stage set for David Mamet and Shel Silverstein at Shady Hill School, 1991. She cropped and framed small pairs as ornaments for a decorator show house. Others appeared at the original Sharon Arts Center gallery, Peterborough NH.

Twenty four appeared at Radcliffe, when Currier House co-deans framed 24 for an exhibit in 1990. Six appeared at the International Symmetry Congress in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 1985. After their first exhibit in Harvard Yard at the national Design Science 3 conference in 1983, a full set and more were displayed at Corbusier's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts on the second floor curved wall over the sidewalk on Quincey Street next to the old Fogg Museum, 1983-2003. The portfolio was funded in part by the Harvard College Dean's Office and The Phonebook Corp. in Harvard Square. 

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